When fiction gets in the way of fact, print the fiction…..
Getting caught in fiction when dealing with a story like Pat Tilman would be not so hard. For too long, it has been so easy to print in the past.
Tillman gets a pass from lots of places because he died defending the country. In life (he dodges a felony jail sentence in high school, and was an above average complainer in the Army even though he was given MULTIPLE chances to leave that were not extended to other soldiers around him), and death (think the moving tributes at Arizona Cardinals and Arizona State Sun Devil’s games, and medals that weren’t exactly earned) Pat Tillman always came out on top. A long haired Superman if you will, leaving a quasi-lucrative career in the NFL to join the snake-eaters in fields afar. Through the lenses of time and some real investigating, we see a different Pat Tilman emerge in the pages of this book. And this is to Krakauer’s credit.
Krakauer’s books are typically provocative and usually solicit hard line responses from his subjects. This one is different. In the case of Chris McCandless his sister respected Krakauer in his telling, but still felt the need to expand and expound in here own book. Anatoli Boukreev felt the need to refute almost completely INTO THIN AIR. In this case, I am not sure there is a hard need to draw the hard line for the simple fact that so little of the real story has been told so publicly. We got the RAH RAH, Red, White, and Blue version of Tillman that was barely the surface of who he was, and that is why this book needs to be in the realm of bookdom. In the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED Bush era, it was easy to look at the choices Pat Tillman made as everything including noble. Foibles and blemishes were unacceptable on this golden boy of the post 9/11 world.
At the end of the day, there is a blurring of the truth and a clearing of the tale. We learn things about our heroes we never wanted to know, and we discover qualities in those we thought irredeemable. This is in a lot of ways the story that needed to be told all along
Comments
Post a Comment