By now everyone knows about Pat Tillman.

I don’t know anything about football, but supposedly he was a good player. I’ll take everyone’s word for it.

He WAS a Ranger. He humped his butt through one of the tougher courses of the military, and took those skills to war.

He is my hero.

He and a lot of other men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What he did stands on it’s merits, and need nothing else to glorify it. Same as the moms and dads, same as the 18 year olds away from mom and dad for the first time, same as the thousands of others there also doing that most difficult of jobs. They’re all my heroes.

When I was 18, there was nothing going on which roused me to enlist, and I never did. I look back on my lack of service with some disdain; had I a life to live again, that is perhaps all I would change. It makes me respect the men and women who have all the more. If I didn’t have a wife and child now who relied on me, and if I wasn’t a beat up old guy too fat to enlist, I would have signed up on 9/12.

What I do, what pitiful thing I can contribute, is my unfailing pride in those who serve, my unwavering support for their actions, my constant prayer for their safe return.

What Pat Tillman did was die in a noble cause, die trying to fight back a menace whch the world has dramatically underestimated. I owe him, and all those soldiers living and dead, my allegiance.

I will not die with the debt unpaid. Don’t you either.