With mere hours to go now before we let it rest, one man's name, more than any other, seems to me to epitomize the up-and-down, good-and-bad, one-step-forward, one-step-back year that has been 2004.
And it's not George W. Bush or John Kerry or Ronald Reagan or Yasser Arafat or Christopher Reeve or Ray Charles or even Curt Schilling or the late great Curse of the Bambino.
It is Pat Tillman.
Tillman's story is as inspiring as it is tragic: the tale of a young, smart and talented American man who, enraged by the cowardly terrorist attacks of 9/11, completes his fourth season as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals in the National Football League, recording the third most tackles in the entire league in 2001, and then leaves football — and a $1.2 million-a-year salary — behind and joins the United States Army for $300 a month, plus room and board.
As an Army Ranger, Tillman, who graduated summa cum laude in three years from Arizona State, first helps oust Saddam Hussein in the coalition's invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 and then is deployed in December to Afghanistan to help root out Osama bin Laden.
It is here, near the border of Pakistan, hot on the al-Qaida trail, sleeping on the ground near the enemy, that Pat Tillman meets his fate when he is shot to death at the age of 27 while on patrol on April 22, 2004.
But beyond the obvious virtues of selflessness and nonmaterialistic loyalty that point to all that is good and right and, finally, to paying the ultimate price, Pat Tillman's story is also about the bad and the ugly.
The liberation he helped produce in Iraq has resulted in a peace that is presently taking more lives than the lightning-quick war ever did; and in Afghanistan, his death, at first trumpeted as a hero's supreme sacrifice while he was quite literally laying a hand on terrorism, has been exposed as nothing but mere incompetence — ours, not theirs.
Military investigations have since revealed that Tillman's death came as the result of friendly fire. He was shot by one of his own — the wartime equivalent of tackling your own ball carrier.
Worse, this was not revealed until more than a month after the Army categorically and officially announced that Private Tillman was killed by insurgents in a fierce firefight. And that his courage in that battle was deemed sufficiently heroic that he was posthumously promoted in rank to corporal and awarded the Silver Star for uncommon valor in coming to the aid of his comrades.
The life and the death of Pat Tillman is tragically axiomatic of America's war on terrorism. As badly as we want to root out the bad guys and eliminate them for good, way too often, as we negotiate through Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and politically partisan debates and myopic airport security and the Pentagon's version of truth, we wind up attacking something other than the enemy.
As uncomplicated and pure as Pat Tillman's reasons for joining the front lines in the war against terrorism, he still managed, through no fault of his own, to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now the military is left with the ticklish problem of how to take a Silver Star back from a bona fide hero, while Iraq remains unstable and bin Laden remains unfound. It's been that kind of year.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.