April 23, 2004 - He wore number 40. He was a devastating defender for the Arizona Cardinals. He was worth 1.2 Million Dollars a year to the NFL ball club. He was no dummy and scored a 3.8 grade point as a marketing major while playing college ball. You knew that he was that rare commodity, a real student athlete. You knew he could count and you knew you could count on him. There he was, a multi-million dollar celebrity in his mid twenties, when something else happened to send his life in a different direction. September 11, 2001 hit him like he had been standing in New York when the planes hit. Pat Tillman was a patriot. He walked away from a three year contract and volunteered. He became an Army Ranger.

He is coming home. He was killed on a mission southeast of Kandahar. We don’t know how he died; all they are telling us is that he was killed in action in a fire-fight with the remnants of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. There won’t be any pictures of his homecoming. The Pentagon won’t allow us to see that. All CNN could do was run films of his devastating tackles in his last season as a football hero. His Saturday and Sunday exploits are not really important except those images remind us of what he was willing to sacrifice to serve his country in our forgotten and unfinished war.

We count carefully the dead and wounded in Mr. Bush’s splendid little war in Iraq. We lost count of the casualties in our other little dirty war on the Afghani-Pakistan border. Pat Tillman has joined the ranks of that phantom column of those who fell by the wayside playing the Great Game. Ivan is there in rank with Tommy Atkins and now with Pat. All of them were carried from the field somewhere east of Suez.

The Pentagon won’t show pictures of his homecoming. The President won’t attend his funeral. They don’t want to focus on the cost, the sacrifice of war. Pat Tillman might have played out his career; he might have enjoyed participating in the Bush Tax Cuts; he might have avoided making any sacrifice at all for his country. Many others have and egg on the powerful who send the powerless out to serve and sacrifice. But he could count and he understood what counted. He volunteered; sacrificed his address on Easy Street; and went to serve his country.

It really doesn’t matter how he died. Nor does it matter that he was killed in an Afghani backwater while the flood of attention is running in Iraq. What matters is that he was a patriot and a hero and by his example we are reminded just what that means.