But it’s the ideological arrogance that allows her to write ignorant of the life Tillman lived. I’ve read a lot about him here, because his family lives here, he went to high school here, lots of his friends have spoken and written about him. He was an admirable person, one who had a strong sense of himself and a concern for others. The fact that when he realized his own unit was shooting at him he yelled, “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman” shows his ironic understanding of the celebrity status he walked away from.

Anyone who cannot distinguish al-Qaeda from Iraqi nationalists clearly needs more graduate schooling. In the end, heroism lies not in the form of death, but in the life lived. Tillman deserves recognition for the life he lived, even if he was unlucky enough to end up in a unit with inexperienced, but rabid Rangers.

Joanna, at your prompting, I took a look at the Post story. Grim stuff, and sad, but not entirely unexpected: I had a couple opportunities to train with the Rangers, and the fratricide picture the story paints is — well, if you know a Ranger, you know their inclination to pour bullets on any problem. Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down is well worth a read: it’s a disturbing picture of what the Rangers actually do, and Penguin made him sanitize massive portions of it, because of worries that the story wouldn’t sell, even as terrible as it was. Some estimates suggest that the Rangers killed three times the number of civilians described by Bowden.

You might have heard about the nasty little op-ed UMass grad student Rene Gonzales posted, arguing that Pat Tillman deserved to die. That’s the class hypocrisy that sickens me here at UMass; the fact that a graduate student in a position of economic privilege (yes, Gonzales owns a house) can sneer at someone who gives up a massive salary to join the Army as an enlisted man. It’s not the only reason for me to be disgusted by Gonzales, but — well, it’s a reason. And the sad thing is that the privileged perspective is so common here: many people, like Gonzales, feel happily free to condescendingly attack any political perspective they do not share as somehow stupid, rather than as something with which they disagree.

And Chris, I gotta say: for density of twenty-five-cent-words per comment, you win, pardner.

One thing my own military training inured in me was a deep fear of the combination of enthusiasm and inexperience (the cluelessly gung ho guys were always a danger to themselves and others).

I’d love to see the rest of the piece.