Where Men Win Glory

Nothing more about balance today, though I have the third part of that little series blocked out in my head. Instead I want to comment on a book I just picked up: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer. It's about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who enlisted in 2001 and was killed in Afghanistan. The army orchestrated a cover-up when they learned he had been killed by friendly fire and lied to his family and the nation about it. Coming on the heels of the whole Jessica Lynch thing, it just indicates the degree to which the people in power cared more about their image than the people under their command.

This is hard to read. It's just indicative of the culture of criminality that pervaded Washington during the Bush years. The government was an open sewer. It's tempting to simply blame Bush; and he was a venal, stupid coward, but the rot ran much deeper. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Ashcroft, Feith, Wilkinson, and all of their enablers and sycophants; we'll never get a full account of their criminal actions, and they'll more than likely never be punished for them. History will judge them but I'm a bit too impatient for that. All I can do is throw up my hands in frustration and be glad the adults are back in the White House.

Anyways, it's a great book on several levels. On one, it's a biography of a recent American hero-- and one whose life has been shrouded in layers of propaganda and falsehood, making it hard to separate truth from fiction. On another level, it's an indictment of the desperate, shameful manipulation of the truth by the DoD-- another story that has been shoved under the rug. Finally, it's yet another look in at the ongoing war in Afghanistan, about how critical failures by the chain of command lead to unnecessary and tragic deaths among the soldiers who bear the burden of risk.

It's hard to read precisely because it depicts a bad situation that could have been avoided. Pat Tillman's family-- and the families of all the war dead of the past decade-- are paying for the negligence, opportunism, cowardice, stupidity, corruption, apathy and recklessness of the Bush administration.