LAST CALL: Volunteers
Beston, Paul
LAST CALL PAUL BESTON Volunteers r HE WOMAN ON THE PHONE WAS FROM CNN. Pat Tillman had been killed in Afghanistan, she said, would I be willing to do a telephone interview? I was sitting in...
...I was sitting in a minivan with several members of my family, stuck in a crowded parking lot on Parris Island...
...He didn't follow football, and he only knew about Tillman through me...
...My younger brother had just become a Private First Class in the Marines at age 32...
...The woman hung up and I stood in the sun-baked parking lot watching new Marines disappear into family convoys...
...But long before the end, it was clear that the Marines wouldn't be able to break him...
...They were open wide, not in alarm, but in a seeming challenge to the world: I'm ready for you...
...Shortly after I hung up with CNN my phone rang again...
...Stop gabbing on the phone, I want to get the hell off this island...
...near the end, calm and assured...
...Two hundred ninety-two Marines graduated, and when the Senior Drill Instructors, one by one, dismissed their platoons, the spectators stormed down en masse as at the end of a high school football game...
...I hadn't heard the news about Tillman...
...Happy probably wasn't the right word...
...Paul Beston's "The NFL's Lonely Hero" ran on Spectator...
...My mind flashed to the few images I'd seen of him—his long hair waving under an Arizona Cardinals helmet...
...He wanted to get to the bottom of himself and climb back out...
...He sat beside me now in his "charlies": khaki short-sleeve shirt, green pants, garrison hat...
...org last December 4. 11...
...Hey Paul...
...I crawled out of the minivan in a daze...
...midway through, defiant and philosophical...
...Earlier that Friday morning, we had all squinted to make out his form on the parade deck from our spot in the bleachers...
...The dissolution of order was shocking in its swiftness...
...But I grabbed him in a bear hug and told him, "You did it, you did it...
...Thirteen weeks on the island had made him even leaner than before and baked his skin like an Indian's...
...There was that, too...
...I walked back to the minivan and was almost upon it when the sliding door opened and the new Marine stuck out his head...
...And we talked about Pat Tillman as we drove off Parris Island, a military family now...
...He joined the Marines not solely out of patriotism but for challenge and trial...
...Even before he left for Parris Island my brother sometimes called 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 the workaday world "civilian life...
...resolved would be more accurate...
...I wrote him about twice a week at boot camp...
...Only later would I find out how hard they tried...
...This time it was an Atlanta radio station...
...And then his official Army Ranger photo with the distinctive beret turned down on one side...
...LAST CALL PAUL BESTON Volunteers r HE WOMAN ON THE PHONE WAS FROM CNN...
...So Tillman was gone...
...Sure thing," I said, getting in beside him...
...video clips from ESPN...
...He looked as bold as the man who had worn the football uniform, but his eyes seemed more steady, as if all the gusto with which he approached life had finally found its proper channel, its true mission...
...On his sleeves was a lone chevron indicating his rank and on his lapel was a marksmanship medal...
...In his Marine photo my brother's eyes suggested a similar transformation...
...He looked happy...
...They didn't need personal information on Tillman, just commentary...
...And then there was America and its enemies, some people who really needed to be exterminated...
...In the early going they were bleak and lonely...
...But it turned out CNN wanted someone with more personal knowledge of him and his family...
...It was by any standards a proud portrait, with just a hint of a new fierceness lurking behind those eyes...
...what a great soul he was...
...The traffic was finally starting to move...
...and thrust out his hand...
...We agreed to do the phone interview when I got back to my hotel in Beaufort...
...I thought of the two of them as kindred spirits, men with great hungers that had little to do with material things...
...And then at last he flashed that smile we'd all been waiting to see...
...His letters to me were almost as frequent, though much shorter...
...He had seen me approaching and said "Nice suit...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
