Remember His Name

She wanted no one outside her circle to know about that grief. Because then she, too, would be using something pure as a tool. Just imagine a mother alone in a house typing Where is my son? into a Google box and pressing the search button. That's what Mary Tillman did one night.

Here's what's�amazing: If you type "Where is my son?" into a Google box and press the search button, you actually get answers--22,700 of them! They're not real answers to Mary Tillman's question, of course, no more than any of the myths we reach for when we're lost or scared, but we grab for them anyway because they make us feel better, for a while.

So much do we need them that we'll even take the guy who came right out and said that the myths are a load of crap and hoist him on our shoulders to make another myth. The President did it, materializing on the massive video screen at an Arizona Cardinals game in a taped homage to Pat and the global war on terror seven weeks before he was up for reelection in 2004. The Defense Department, with the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal breaking a week after Pat's death, did it as well.

Even Russ, who cherished Pat for standing on his own without the myths, would discover how hard it is not to reach for one when life ambushed him again. It's what we do to get by, because none of us wants to drink ourselves into oblivion, the way Russ began doing after he'd lost his role model. None of us wants to lie in bed all night without sleeping, as he did, then doze off at last, only to awaken, crying out, wet with sweat. None of us wants to feel like a victim, lose all appetite for life, and then start screaming at the woman we love, the way Russ started doing to Tammy.

Under threat of court-martial, he'd reported to Fort Lewis after two days on the lam, lost a rank and swabbed toilets for weeks, but none of that mattered to him. He just couldn't trust anymore. He lost 30 pounds. He stopped writing in his notebook. But it wasn't only in his pen that words got stuck. He was shocked, now and then, to find himself stammering, his brain misplacing words. He wanted to punch a wall when a sergeant major told the platoon, "You guys need to get over the whole Tillman thing and get on with your life. I'm tired of hearing about it. Get over it." But far worse was Kevin's frigid silence, his assumption that Russ had been part of a deception.

Kevin entered sniper school at Fort Bragg, learned the solitary man's killing art, and was asked if he wanted to deploy again to Iraq. Even in the swirl of all his anger and sorrow, he still felt bound in a pact with his brother to see this commitment through. His mother and uncle flew to North Carolina and begged him not to go, and when he learned he'd be sent over with men involved in Pat's death, that, finally, was just too much. He went to a commander and took a pass.

One day at Fort Lewis, Kevin's and Russ's eyes finally met. They talked it out, and Kevin told Russ he understood. Russ later told Kevin and his mother everything he saw the day Pat died. But something inside Russ remained broken. He left the Army in February 2005, 10 months after Pat's death.

Eight months later, Maverick Patrick Baer entered the world. He was born with his heart facing backward, and three other life-threatening cardiac defects. It would be nice to say that Mav's birth is what turned his dad's life around, but this isn't fairy-tale time. One night, unable to contain his hurt and rage, Russ began throwing things and shouting again at Tammy. "You don't understand!" he howled.

"I'll call the police if you don't stop," she cried. "I don't feel safe with you. I think you need help."

"I don't care anymore," he said.