The fight of a lifetime

HE CARRIED a simple message on his backpack:

Rory Fanning, who served in the Second Army Ranger Battalion with Pat Tillman, is walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific to raise money for the Pat Tillman Foundation. Visit walkforpat.org for information on how you can help.

In his book Worth Fighting For, Fanning describes his 2008-09 walk across the country to raise funds for the Pat Tillman Foundation, which provides scholarships for veterans and their spouses, and was founded by the family and friends of the NFL player who enlisted in the Army after the September 11 attacks, was deployed to Iraq, and was later killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan.

The importance of Tillman's story was best explained up by his brother Kevin, who served alongside Pat in the Army Rangers, when he testified before Congress in 2007 exposing the U.S. government's cynical attempts to use Pat's death to prop up the "war on terror." Worth Fighting For provides this excerpt from Kevin's testimony:

In the days leading up to Pat's memorial service, media accounts based on information provided by the Army and the White House were wreathed in a patriotic glow and became more dramatic in tone. A terrible tragedy that might have further undermined support for the war in Iraq was transformed into an inspirational message that served instead to support the nation's foreign policy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To further exploit Pat's death, he was awarded the Silver Star for valor...It's a bit disingenuous to think that the administration did not know about what was going on, something so politically sensitive.

The author of Worth Fighting For met Pat and Kevin Tillman while he was in the Rangers, and it was the political conversations he had with them that helped give him the confidence to become a conscientious objector while serving in one of the U.S. Army's most elite regiments. From there, he begins his transformation from someone who signed up for the military because he believed he was defending his country to a fierce opponent of U.S. wars.

RORY'S STORY is fascinating in and of itself, but in Worth Fighting For, he makes the star of the book not himself, but the people and places he encounters on the road.

His walk from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific starts in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and continues on through several Southern states and small rural towns--Weldon, North Carolina; Trenton, Georgia; Biscoe, Arkansas. This is a fitting route, since it's working-class and poor people, many who live in rural America, who make up the bulk of recruits to the U.S. armed forces.

According to a 2007 Associated Press analysis, "nearly three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average."

The reader is struck by just how many people in the towns he travels through have been touched by U.S. Army--people who have served or whose family members have served. Almost to a letter, the people who meet Rory on the road treat him with generosity (and often curiosity). The author's good-natured humor shines through with many of the interactions he has with local residents, but he never makes them the butt of a joke. Rather, he approaches everyone he comes across with a genuine interest and respect.

As he travels westward, Rory also provides a selection of mini-histories of the political events that make some of the places and people well worth reading up on--the case of the Scottsboro Boys, Ida B. Wells' campaign against lynching, Martin Luther King and the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis in 1968, the anti-imperialist politics of Mark Twain, the Little Rock Nine, the San Patricio Brigade, the 1986 March for Nuclear Disarmament and others.

IT'S PROBABLY the most-told lie in America: If you just try hard enough, anyone can do anything they set their mind to. But a second great lie stands right beside the first: Human beings never change.

It's a puzzle: How can two such contradictory "truths"--1) the only thing standing between poverty and success is trying hard enough, and 2) human beings have a basic inflexible "nature" that determines who they are and what they are capable of--be furthered by preachers and politicians alike?

As Rory Fanning is transformed through his experiences, he sets the record straight on this point:

The walk wasn't changing the world like I hoped, but I was changing. At one time, I thought there was such a thing as human nature--which was "fallen," like the Bible said, or selfish, in secular terms. I saw too much change in myself to believe in a fixed idea of human nature...There is no hope in a fixed idea of human nature. Besides, whose human nature are we talking about? Pat Tillman's? Ronald Reagan's? The people who let me stay in their homes within 24 hours of meeting me?

More than anything, Worth Fighting For is about human beings' capacity for change--the way that Pat Tillman's story changes the people who hear it, the way that those people and their experiences transform the author as he gets closer to the Pacific, the ways that this book will impact the people who read it.

I tried very hard to have this review finished before the holiday, so that I could suggest that people buy it for friends and family members. Whether they know who Pat Tillman is or not, it is a perfect book for anyone who is beginning to take a hard look at the role of the U.S. military or who is simply open to hearing another point of view.

While I didn't write this in time to make the book a holiday stocking stuffer, it's not too late to get a copy of Worth Fighting For. And if you have the opportunity to hear Rory speak--or would like to invite him to appear in your city--don't miss the chance.