9/11, Band of Brothers and Pat Tillman

The History Channel ran a mini-marathon of Band of Brothers episodes yesterday. Band of Brothers is the HBO original programming based upon Stephen Ambrose's book of the same name. The book and the show always make me think of former NFL player Pat Tillman who quit the NFL to volunteer for the US Army Rangers.

Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan this past April.

Band of Brothers makes me think of Pat Tillman because the show and the book document what E Company, 506th regiment of the 101st Airborne went though fighting in World War II. This group was basically the precursor of the modern Army Rangers. In WWII, Airborne were the best of the best - they were the special forces of the day. They were also all volunteers.

This last point is often overlooked but the "battered bastards of Bastonge" and the liberators of Hitler's Eagles Nest all volunteered for Airborne duty. So too did Pat Tillman.

Pat Tillman didn't talk about why he joined up with the Rangers. He never offered a public explanation of why he would walk away from his $3 million a year job. Sure it had to do with 9/11 but other than that Tillman offered no explanation. Probably the reason I associate Band of Brothers with Pat Tillman so much is because of these passages from the book (pages 110-111):

"...I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It's not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected."

When his [Private Webster's] mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this attitude (and her worries about his younger brother, who had just joined the paratroopers), Webster was blunt in his reply: "Would you refer for someone else's son to die in the mud? You want us to win the war, but you apparently don't want to have your sons involved in the actual bloodshed. That's a strangely contradictory attitude."

"Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy. Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroops. If the country all had your attitude, nobody would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of country would that be?"

The Private Webster discussed above is Private David Kenyon Webster who left his cushy stateside life as a Harvard student to join the Airborne because in his words "somebody has to get in and kill the enemy."

Now obviously I don't know what Pat Tillman was thinking or what his reasons for joining the Rangers were but I have come to associate Pat Tillman with Band of Brothers mainly for those above passages. After 9/11 - someone had to get in and kill the enemy and Pat Tillman decided to take that job just as Pvt. Webster had 60 years earlier.

This brings me to another point - who is it that has decided that things are going badly in Iraq? Is it the men and women who have signed up to "get in and kill the enemy"? Or is it stateside pundits who would have an Army of Quartermasters?

I ask this because it seems to me that those papers and news outlets that noted the 1,000th death in Iraq as some sort of Rubicon are also the very same newspapers and news outlets that forecast much greater casualty rates prior to the war. When I read about things going "badly" in Iraq I notice that the article never includes quotes from any soldiers actually doing the fighting.

Band of Brothers is celebrated because it shows how WWII actually was. It's primary sources are the oral histories of the men of Easy Company along with their correspondence from the war. Are we going to have to wait 60 years for the next Stephen Ambrose to come along and tell us in the words of those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan what things were really like?

Today through the Internet and the efforts of people like Lt. Smash and Chief Wiggles and others - we get a glimpse into the way things really are and what they describe never seems to jive with what the main stream media tries to tell us about the war.

The main stream media seems to have a "strangley contradictory attitude" toward the War on Terror and quite frankly I grow weary of it. But I never grow weary of hearing from the men and women who volunteered to "get in and kill the enemy".

On the day after the third anniversary of 9/11 - I thank God that our country produces such men as David Webster and Pat Tillman.