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Sports Illustrated's Gary Smith delivers a lengthy and impressive eulogy to Pat Tillman, as well as a disheartening account of his death: "Remember His Name."

From details of his love of literature, curious mind, alternately humble and reckless character and acerbic rejection of the casus belli for Iraq, the piece reveals Tillman as a remarkably complex man.

Everybody who thought he'd enlisted purely out of patriotism, they missed reality by a half mile. Sure, he loved America and felt compelled to fight for it after more than 2,600 people at the World Trade Center were turned to dust. But his decision sprang from soil so much richer than that. The foisting of all the dirty work onto people less fortunate than an NFL safety clawed at his ethics. He had uncles and grandfathers on both sides who'd fought in World War II and the Korean War, one who'd taken a bullet in his chest, another who'd lost a finger and one who'd been the last to leap out of a plane shot from the sky. On a level deeper than almost any other American, he'd reaped the reward of those sacrifices: the chance his country afforded him to be himself, all of himself.

He yearned to have a voice one day that would carry, possibly in politics, and he was far from the sort of man who could send others into a fire that he had skirted. His relentless curiosity, his determination to live his life as if it were a book that would hold its reader to the last word, pushed him into the flames as well. The history of man is war, he told a family member, so how, without sampling it, could he ever know man or himself completely?

Some people, only a few, decide early in their lives that the world will remember their names. Some people -- fewer still -- understand that the cleanest and most powerful way to do that is by never asking the world to remember their names, by letting their lives do that. "Let people find things out about you," Pat told B.J. Alford, his roommate and teammate at Arizona State. "Don't tell them."
...
Something else he figured out early: Fear was what stood between a man and an extraordinary life, and the surest way through it was to stare it down over and over, until that gaze became habit.

Read the rest. Many of those who've valued Tillman's sacrifice most will be surprised at and even disagree with some of his opinions and traits, but I'll be damned if they won't come away more impressed and mournful than ever. He was a classic American.

Posted by Bill at September 21, 2006 12:44 AM | TrackBack (1)

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