The big news to come out of Meet The Press this week has been author Jon Krakauer's assertion that General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was implicated in the cover-up about the death of Pat Tillman, the football-star-turned-Army Ranger who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, ostensibly in an enemy attack but later revealed to have been killed by friendly fire. The Tillman story is tragic enough without the added layer of deception: The Bush Administration knew he'd been killed by friendly fire, yet lionized him as a hero falling to the enemy in a PR blitz. The subsequent discovery of that cover-up was a terrible black eye for the last administration — and, it seems, continues to have echoes in this one. (more...)

This excerpt is from the prologue of WHERE MEN WIN GLORY: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer, provided on the book's Amazon page. ******** Ever since Homo sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a noble cause. But death by so- called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn’t conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war’s heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It’s an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most “just” and “honorable” of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the exalted Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century b.c., “In war, truth is the first casualty.” (more...)