“The man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out, undeterred, to meet what is to come.”
A couple millennia and some change ago, a general named Pericles said those words. During a public funeral for war dead, he implored his fellow citizens to remember the ideals and virtues of Athens. I've been revisiting Pericles a lot lately. His speeches feel vital to understanding 2018 America. And every time I come to those lines above, I think of Corporal Pat Tillman.
Tillman, the professional football star turned enlisted Army Ranger — but also so much more — died in rural Afghanistan in 2004. He was killed in perhaps the most notorious fratricide in American military history, made all the more so by the Army's initial claims that “devastating enemy fire” ended his life. Was it bureaucratic incompetence or a conscious act of government deception? There's evidence for both. But neither possibility changes the fact that a fascinating human being's life was snuffed out in a deeply stupid and violent way.
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