From Gary Smith's Sport Illustrated Article- complete text

You didn't talk politics over there, not while you were still in the sandbox. But that night, as Pat watched another orange and white flash-bang shudder the distant town, he shook his head and said, "This war is so fucking illegal." Russ, for the first time, realized how wobbly a tightrope Pat was walking between his integrity and his duty. Even later in their 3 1/2-month deployment in Iraq, as it began to appear that they'd been sent on a nukes-and-biochemical-weapons wild-goose chase, Russ never heard Pat go further than, "This is all bullshit." But surely Pat's fame and fierce independence had unsettled higher-ups from the day he enlisted. They had tried to persuade him to be a recruiting poster boy in Washington rather than a Ranger. Surely, one family member was convinced, once the Army got its first glimpse of Pat's psychological profile -- he was the one who stood outside the Cardinals' team prayer circle, the one who couldn't wait to have a mutual friend arrange a meeting with renowned anti-war leftist Noam Chomsky after his discharge -- it never would have allowed him to become a Ranger if it hadn't had to because he was Pat Tillman. Hell, at the Army recruiting office the day he enlisted, before he'd even signed his papers, one of those jalapeño drill sergeants lined up Pat, Kevin and a gaggle of other recruits and started fire-breathing contradictory orders. "Look, you're confusing everybody and being unreasonable," Pat told the astonished sergeant. "You're treating us like ass----s, and we haven't even signed up to be treated like assholes yet." At first it was a curiosity to Pat, then an irritation, when he kept receiving orders to undergo additional psychological evaluations.

Everybody who thought he'd enlisted purely out of patriotism, they missed reality by a half mile. Sure, he loved America and felt compelled to fight for it after more than 2,600 people at the World Trade Center were turned to dust. But his decision sprang from soil so much richer than that. The foisting of all the dirty work onto people less fortunate than an NFL safety clawed at his ethics. He had uncles and grandfathers on both sides who'd fought in World War II and the Korean War, one who'd taken a bullet in his chest, another who'd lost a finger and one who'd been the last to leap out of a plane shot from the sky. On a level deeper than almost any other American, he'd reaped the reward of those sacrifices: the chance his country afforded him to be himself, all of himself.