Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory,” folds two epic stories into one volume: it is both a biography of Pat Tillman, the NFL-star turned soldier who was accidentally killed by his own platoon in Afghanistan in 2004, and a history of Afghanistan beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, charting the horrifying Soviet presence there, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the ongoing U.S. war. The Army tried to cover up Tillman’s death and the Bush administration tried to profit from it politically. It is a large, damning book that takes aim at those who would manipulate the truth.

While Tillman’s life is the thread that holds the book together and his story is expertly told, I was most fascinated by the broader context in which it is set. Especially gripping is Krakauer’s telling of the chain of events preceding the September 11 attacks. Take, for example, Krakauer’s description of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: “The bomb had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwati named Ramzi Yousef…Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets.” While anyone who has seen “Charlie Wilson’s War” is familiar with the idea of blowback, it’s still devastating when such connections are made as clearly as they are here.

In the first third of the book, the two threads—Tillman’s story and Afghanistan’s story—sometimes seem too disparate. It makes sense to interweave these two stories chronologically, but Tillman’s life prior to joining the Army pales in comparison to the big picture narrative. A good example of this comes in Chapter 14 when we get an account of Tillman’s football exploits (“… he made thirteen tackles and broke up a pass on the last play of the game…”) followed immediately after a page break by the USS Cole being bombed off the coast of Yemen. Three pages later, we’re back to football. Stories of tackles seem pretty banal next to a nearly sunk warship.

To my mind that is the only weakness of the book. Once Tillman joins the Army and the two threads merge, the chapters move more quickly while still being told in exacting and evocative detail. For example, Krakauer describes the two Black Hawk helicopters arriving after Tillman’s death: “As the Rangers watched the helos approach through their night-vision devices, the tips of the rotor blades appeared to throw off balls of bright green flames—static electricity generated by the rotors cutting through the blowing sand.” There are the stomach-churning details of Tillman’s death, too, and information about the breaches of Army protocol that followed. Tillman’s brain, horrifically, had been blown out of his head. A soldier collected it, put it in a Ziploc, and then put it in an ammunition can. “This ammo can, and the remains it held were never shipped to the United States,” writes Krakauer, “They simply vanished, and have never been accounted for.” Likewise, while Tillman’s body should have been repatriated in its uniform, his uniform was destroyed.

Ultimately, the feeling the book leaves you with is one of waste, manipulation, and unneeded loss, and it is a book that any American who cares how, when and why military force is used should read. Krakauer concludes with an analysis of the seemingly intractable situation in Afghanistan today: it doesn’t look so good. “If staying in Afghanistan is looking more and more like a no-win prospect for the United States,” he writes towards the end, “so, too, does pulling out.”

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