Late Pat Tillman's mother writes 'Boots on the Ground by Dusk.'

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- If Mary Tillman had her way, this conversation would not be taking place.

After her son, Pat -- who after 9/11 famously gave up an NFL career to join the Army Rangers -- was killed by friendly fire four years ago in Afghanistan, Tillman spearheaded a family fight to unearth the details of his death.

But while the matriarch was blunt and uncompromising with military and political officials through two congressional investigations, she avoided the news media. Even when "60 Minutes" came calling, Tillman's insistence that cooperation be limited to providing documents ultimately made CBS producers vanish.

Now, she's talking. She has written a book, "Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman" (Modern Times, $25.95). But this is no Barbara Walters gab-fest.

"I don't talk about our family; they're all very private," says Tillman, 52, referring to her surviving sons, Richard and Kevin (who was on the same fateful mission with his older brother).

She is sitting at a rough-hewn kitchen table in the house where she and ex-husband Patrick raised their three boys. But for a purring cat, the place is silent.

Half the prose is dedicated to the toddler, teen and young adult who ultimately captured the nation's fascination when he swapped football pads for a bulletproof vest. The rest is dedicated to plumbing the convoluted depths of the information flow from Pentagon officials after Tillman died at age 27 on April 22, 2004, in an arid Afghan canyon. Military officials initially said Tillman was killed by insurgent fire. They only later revealed that he had in fact been shot by his fellow soldiers.

The first subject gets the author to smile, if briefly. Although she says she is a "fundamentally happy person," she also is haunted. "I wrote the book to let people know the Pat I knew.

"He was a complicated man. He had a light side and a gray side, and I wanted to go beyond the solider and football player."

Coming as she does from a long line of soldiers, she says she could have accepted Pat's death by friendly fire as a consequence of war. But the manner in which word of his death unfolded -- a high-profile public memorial painted Tillman as a war hero who died in a hail of enemy bullets -- makes her seethe.

"The American public needs to be aware of what's going on, and they can't take their politicians or figures of authority at face value," she says, her voice rising. She looks away for a moment. The modest home in a country suburb is filled with family photos as well as the flag presented at Pat's service. "I never thought we or Pat would be disrespected in this way."

Tillman then disappears into an adjoining room. She returns stooped at the waist, pushing a large plastic tub filled with binders stuffed with documents.

She points at the tub.

"Pat was all about integrity," she says. "There is absolutely no integrity in any of this."
In her book, Tillman distills this epic assembly of paper into a few key points. One, to those on the scene, it was clear mere moments after Tillman's death that the cause was friendly fire. Two, there were unexplained efforts to confuse the circumstances of death from the outset, as exemplified by one curious document that indicates Tillman received CPR -- this despite much of his head being blown away as a result of three bullets to the skull.

"The more we found out, the more we felt this was gross, gross negligence," she says. "These soldiers (with Pat) were not in a fog of war but in a lust to fight. None of us have ever been in these soldiers' shoes, being fired upon in a canyon. But they didn't do their jobs, and there should be ramifications.

"Instead, they all went on, business as usual. If we're really killing our own soldiers so much that it's not a big deal, maybe it's time to wrap the whole thing up."

Would that Mary Tillman could do the same. Though she says the book is "as much as I can say on the subject and is my gift to Pat," it's clear it cannot exorcise the unfathomable loss of a child.

"Pat is gone and he's not coming back," she says, fingers knitted together. "But he was here, and we were fortunate he was." More on the story.