Musings on Pat Tillman and fried chicken

I flew into FOB Salerno yesterday (Friday) a place I spent some time in the summer of 2006 to visit a Wisconsin National Guard unit that fueled planes and helicopters and an Army Reserve engineer unit from Milwaukee which was building some of the base’s infrastructure, a job hampered by the fact that many of the solders’ tools and personal effects had been stolen from their shipping containers sent to Afghanistan.

Much of the base is the way I remembered it. Same chow hall, same nice gym, same BX. However, there wasn’t a KFC back then. Near the Green Beans coffee place (the Starbucks of Iraq and Afghanistan) I noticed a large red bus painted with KFC and Col. Sanders’ white-haired, bespectacled, bow-tied visage. I was told the bus came a month ago but hadn’t opened for business yet. The reaction from troops here to KFC was two-fold:

1) Isn’t there enough chicken already served at the dining facility?

2) That’s just what we need, one more colonel on the base.

…

On the flight to Salerno I thought about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who joined the Army Rangers after Sept. 11 and was accidentally killed by fellow soldiers in 2004. I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s recently-published book about Tillman shortly before I left the U.S. to come back to Afghanistan.

The flight yesterday passed over snow-covered mountains near Bagram and then closer to Salerno the mountains turned brown and looked barren with few trees, almost as if a wildfire had swept through a year or two before. The last time I came to Salerno I traveled in a convoy of humvees, a vehicle that’s been replaced by the mine-resistant MRAPs which are equally bumpy to ride in.

Back then I wondered how Tillman could have died by friendly fire until I traveled through the high mountains on barely more than a humvee-wide dirt track, single file. As I looked up at the sheer mountain walls right next to us, I thought it would be very easy to get ambushed here, only a few miles from where Tillman died.

FOB Salerno is mentioned several times in Krakauer’s book. (I can’t think of the book’s exact title as I write this at 6 a.m. Saturday but like his other books such as “Into Thin Air” and “Into the Wild,” it’s excellent.) Tillman left Salerno on the ill-fated mission and his body was brought back here before being flown home to his bereft family and friends.

At times I thought Krakauer was too harsh in his assessment of the military and he’s a sharp critic of the Bush administration, a luxury afforded book authors. But as I listened to the unabridged audio book, no matter readers’ opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think most people would reach the conclusion I did and think what a great loss Pat Tillman’s death meant.

Everyone who picks up the book knows the tragic outcome but Krakauer spends many chapters on Tillman before he pulled on a Ranger uniform - an interesting, charismatic guy who loved to challenge himself, kept an introspective journal, enjoyed a thirst for knowledge and turned down multimillion dollar contracts to play for the NFL league minimum – he never earned more than $500,000 a year – because he felt a loyalty to the Arizona Cardinals (!). I like the fact that he never felt he needed to explain to the public why he ditched the NFL to join the Army.