Code Of Honor

At children's camps that the Cardinals staged, the biggest gang of kids was always packed tight around him, and no one could quite say why.

His grandfather, Chief Petty Officer Henry Tillman, and his two uncles were sitting ducks at Pearl Harbor when the sky began raining death. Henry's destroyer went down, the first of several ships to sink below his feet during the war. Uncles Jim and Roy Tillman, stationed at the Army base on the harbor's edge, survived the war as well, but Roy took a bullet in the chest and lost a finger and a half. Great Uncle John, on Pat's mother's side, was said to have been the last man to have parachuted from a plane before it was hit, killing everyone still on board behind him. But none of them would talk about any of this. Grandpa Henry claimed he was asleep, that he remembered nothing of the attack. The other relatives caught amnesia too and clammed up. All Pat could do was imagine everything.

"We're worthless.... We're actors," he muttered as he watched events on a locker room TV the morning after 9/11. What did people expect Pat to say a half year later when he decided, at age 25, that he couldn't do what every other pro athlete did—keep playing ball and leave it to others to do what had to be done? Talk about it?

Relatives tried to persuade the Tillman boys to change their minds. Their father—Pat Sr., a lawyer and former college wrestler at San Jose State who had told his sons long ago that he regretted not having followed the family footpath into service-knew that dissuasion would be futile. One day Pat pulled a chair around the desk of then Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis and said, "Mac, we've gotta talk," walking away later that day and leaving Mac to do all the talking to the media.

Pat married his high school sweetheart, Marie Ugenti, that spring of 2002 and honeymooned in Bora Bora. When he returned to Phoenix, he got in a car and drove away from the city where his face had been on television screens for eight years of college and pro ball, and headed to Denver so he could enlist incognito with his brother. Then came the tight haircut, the months of boot camp and Rangers training school, where only 35% of the candidates made the grade, where the average day lasted 19.6 hours and men grew so stressed and fatigued that they tried to insert coins into trees to place telephone calls home.

The Tillman brothers made the Rangers. Pat's reward was a pay cut from the $1.2 million a year the Cardinals would have paid him to $17,316. "I can't stop smiling," his old college coach, Bruce Snyder, told The Miami Herald at the time, "and I'm not really sure why."

Pat called home from the Baghdad airport last summer during a 3�-month Rangers road trip. He began the conversation with his father by reading a list of things about which they I couldn't speak, leaving virtually nothing about which they could.

Pat returned to the States but kept his distance and his silence as the world offered movie and book deals and awards for courage, the covers of magazines and Wheaties boxes. "I'm not prostituting myself," he said. The offers only went higher.

He couldn't do it. He couldn't possibly hold himself above his Ranger mates, bouncing in this truck through the mountains of Afghanistan last Thursday night, three weeks after he and his brother had been summoned back to the Middle East. He eyed their faces. Many of them, already here for weeks, wore beards and the long scarves that the locals did, so that from a distance they might pass for Afghani tribesmen. But their wraparound sunglasses gave them away, and half the people in Spera could probably have drawn a map in the dust and stabbed a finger at the general area where Pat's outfit rode through the fading light.

A tribesman rode with them, a Taliban sympathizer. He was a plant who had offered to take the Rangers to a hidden enemy arms dump. Instead he was leading them into a trap. That's what Taliban sources would report later, after the air ripped just outside of Spera at half past seven and everything went to hell.