John M. Cropper

For some time now, I’ve been a fan of Jon Krakauer and his adventure writing.

In Into the Wild, he chronicled the mishaps of Christopher McCandless and his fatal foray into the Alaskan wilderness. (That book received more acclaim after Sean Penn made it the subject of his 2007 film of the same title.) In 1997 he became a household name with the success of Into Thin Air, his first person account of the doomed 1996 Everest expedition which claimed the lives of eight climbers and nearly killed Krakauer himself. Even his lesser-known works, like Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of Mormonism alongside a narrative of a religion-influenced murder, and Eiger Dreams, a collection of mountaineering essays, are great and engaging reads.

Indeed, the one common thread connecting most of Krakauer’s writing has been the mingling of man and nature, and the dominance of the latter over the former. It’s this theme that keeps me coming back to him. So I was more than a little disappointed to learn that the topic of his most recent book, Where Men Win Glory, was to be Pat Tillman.

Prior to reading this book, I admit I knew little more about Tillman than the average person, which is: NFL star joins the Army after 9/11, dies by friendly-fire in Afghanistan, covered up and used as a pawn by the Bush Administration to trumpet the ‘Global War on Terror,’ becomes national scandal. But therein lay my reservation: none of that stuff seemed to jive with Krakauer’s interests or his previous writing themes. I see now, though, why I was wrong.

Krakauer the person has some common recurring interests in his writings, like mountaineering, pushing the proverbial envelope and the outdoors in general. Krakauer the writer, though, is first and foremost a journalist. He does remarkably well in crafting a history from interviews, past media coverage and his own personal experience. And the story of Pat Tillman, from his ascendance to the top of the National Football League to his selfless decision to serve in the United States armed forces, is quite the story to tell. Place that story in the quagmire that is the war in Afghanistan, which has long been mired in half-truths and uncertainties, and the broader narrative of Where Men Win Glory becomes full developed and rich in detail.

The Krakauer / Tillman connection goes even further than merely Author / Subject. Tillman was known to be an avid reader of Krakauer, and his parents told the author that a copy of Eiger Dreams was found in his backpack shortly after he was killed.

Krakauer has said many times that this book was the hardest he’s ever written, and twice considered scrapping it entirely. In a Sept. 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Krakauer explained the difficulty and the writing process in general:

Dealing with the Army, trying to make sense of thousands of pages of redacted documents, it was…as you probably know, I canceled the book at one point.  It came out a year late, but it was time really well spent. I needed more time. When I first told my editor that I was canceling it, I’m not your basic neurotic author, I don’t have to have my hand held. I deliver on time, I don’t freak out. But I freaked out! And they told me to calm down and take a deep breath. I didn’t want the pressure, I just wanted to stop. I had this bad feeling that if I didn’t stop, it was going to come out in a form I wasn’t happy with

When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I went to Afghanistan not really knowing. And when I started Under the Banner of Heaven, it started out as something quite different, too. I go with what the material gives me. I don’t try to impose a narrative on it. With Under the Banner of Heaven, I took a lot of s— from people who just wanted a true crime story. I didn’t give them that. And it’s like, that’s fine. I’m sorry that people got the wrong impression, but the reason I don’t write for magazines any more is I love focusing on one thing for years and being able to tell this story as completely as I think it needs to be told, including all of these digressions. I’m sure the book would be more marketable and more popular if it was more straightforward, but that’s not what I do. Heaven, for me, is one focused project — it’s like a weird form of autism. And if it pans out, you get the royalties and you get to write the next one. And if it doesn’t, you don’t. I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs, but on of my favorites was working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. What I loved about it was, you got paid for what you caught.

I’m not quite finished with the book yet (still a hundred or so pages to go, out of 500), but it’s already one of my favorites of Krakauer’s. I’ve come to realize that he is at his best not when the theme aligns with his interests, but when there is a complex and intriguing human story to be told. Pat Tillman, died April 22, 2004, fits that description better than most people, and we are worse off for having lost him.