Tag: nfl

Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky, and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars, and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (and principled) person, his death in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, during his second tour of duty, was spun by the Bush II administration into a recruiting tool. In the appalling exploitation of his corpse, Tillman was said to have died while protecting his comrades from a Taliban ambush; the bullets that felled him, however, came from his own platoon.