If there was anything unusual about this, it was that they were brothers, and neither lived in the Denver area. Which was why they were there. If Pat Tillman had enrolled where he lived, in Phoenix, Arizona, or California, where he and his brother Kevin were raised, it would have made national headlines within hours. And publicity was the last thing Pat Tillman ever wanted.
To tens of millions of sports fans across America, Pat Tillman, then 25, was a star, albeit a reluctant one. He was a popular defender for the Arizona Cardinals American football team, the equivalent of a top UK Premier League player. He could earn more than $1m a year. Now he was turning his back on all that to fight alongside nameless grunts in America's "war on terror"? For just $18,000 a year? He knew it would be a media sensation. Tillman had not even told Frank Bauer, his longtime agent, or the Cardinals. But Bauer and some people in the team's management had an inkling that something was up: Tillman was reluctant to sign a new, three-year $3.6m contract.
"I'm thinking about something else," Bauer recalls Tillman telling him. "Just put it on hold, Frank, and worry about your other clients. I'll let you know at the wedding."
On May 4, 2002, Pat married Marie Ugenti, his high-school sweetheart. A few days after they returned from their honeymoon in Bora Bora, he and Kevin, a minor-league baseball player with major-league prospects, drove to Denver to sign their recruiting papers. As he had feared, when the news broke, it was a national sensation. Overnight, Pat Tillman became a national icon, the good-looking, white, well-educated poster boy for the "war on terror", which was still exclusively focused on Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden. Who else, pundits wondered, would turn down fame and fortune to fight in the desolate wastelands of Asia? Not since Elvis Presley was drafted in the late 1950s had such a celebrity joined up to fight.
"Everybody came out of the woodwork, Larry King, Barbara Walters, radio, TV, film producers Ðeverybody wanted to do something on this kid," Bauer recalls. "He wouldn't talk to anybody. That was a young man who felt there were thousands of men and women that enter the forces. 'Why's there such a big deal about me?' he'd say."
So, despite astonishingly lucrative offers — interviews worth $50,000 or more, book deals starting at $250,000, movie deals that could have netted him millions — from the moment he signed his army papers Pat never once spoke publicly of his decision or made a cent from it beyond the pittance he got in his army pay cheque each month.
Some people said it was Kevin Tillman who had first decided to sign up and that Pat didn't want his younger brother, who was, unusually, also his best friend, heading off to war alone. Pat's friend Doug Tammaro says all that he told him was that he was doing it for "personal reasons". The only clue to his motives came from an interview he had given six months earlier, the day after the 9/11 attacks, when he lamented his lack of public service. "My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor," he said, "and a lot of my family has fought in wars and I haven't done a damn thing in terms of laying my life on the line like that."
The first hint that something might have gone wrong came on the night of April 22 this year. On sports internet chat rooms, rumours were spreading that Pat had been killed in Afghanistan. "I didn't sleep that night," says Tammaro. He was frequently in touch with Pat and had exchanged messages with him at the start of April, just prior to his deployment to Afghanistan. Tammaro is on the management team of the Arizona Sun Devils, the college team Tillman joined in 1994. "Usually when those rumours spread, it means it's true. We got up the next morning about 6.30, and people started calling and it was obvious."
Specialist Patrick D Tillman, the army confirmed later that day, had been killed in a firefight in Afghanistan. He was 27. The army account, reported round the clock, said Tillman, who was with Company A of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, died when his combat patrol unit was ambushed by militia forces near the mudbrick village of Spera, about 90 miles south of Kabul and 25 miles southwest of a military base in Khost. The Rangers were part of Operation Mountain Storm, which had been launched in March to search the heavily wooded mountain areas near the Pakistan border, for top Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, including Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
The army reports claimed that around 7.30pm unidentified enemy fighters had fired on Pat's vehicle and small arms fire had been exchanged. Pat was pronounced dead soon after the fighting ceased. He was the 117th US soldier to have died in Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the 70th to die within that country's borders. Two other US soldiers were injured in the attack, said the Pentagon, and one Afghan soldier fighting alongside the Americans also died.
Kevin Tillman had not been with the same unit that day. Media reports, gleaned from army officials, said Pat had died after his patrol was ambushed by 15 enemy fighters and a "sustained firefight" lasting as long as 20 minutes had broken out. Some reports claimed an Afghan tribesman with Pat's platoon, who had offered to take them to a hidden enemy arms dump, was really a Taliban sympathiser who led them into a deadly trap.
Pat's death stunned the US. Thousands of fans, many openly weeping, paid their respects at a makeshift, Princess Diana-style shrine outside the Arizona Cardinals training ground, where his No 40 football shirt was placed in a glass case with two teddy bears and two bouquets. His family's rural Californian home was besieged by mourners and the media. The narrow road winding through his home town had to be blocked off by police. For days, eulogies extolling Pat were carried round the clock by every American media outlet. Leading politicians lined up to pay tribute. Even the White House, which almost never comments on the fate of individual soldiers, made an exception. "Pat Tillman was an inspiration both on and off the field," said a spokesman. "As with all who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror, his family is in the thoughts and prayers of President and Mrs Bush."
