Worth Fighting For

An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America

Rory Fanning

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781608463916
• eBook ISBN: 9781608464371
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

"Rory Fanning's odyssey is more than a walk across America. It is a gripping story of one young man's intellectual journey from eager soldier to skeptical radical, a look at not only the physical immenseness of the country, its small towns, and highways, but into the enormity of its past, the hidden sins and unredeemed failings of the United States. The reader is there along with Rory, walking every step, as challenging and rewarding experience for us as it was for him."—Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times

Just days after the US military covered up the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman, Rory Fanning—who served in the same unit as Tillman—left the Army Rangers as a conscientious objector. Disquieted by his tours in Afghanistan, Fanning sets out to honor Tillman's legacy by crossing the United States on foot. The generous, colorful people he meets and the history he discovers help him learn to live again.

Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008–09, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. He is a housing activist living in Chicago, Illinois. Rory works for Haymarket Books and this is his first book.

Part 1

Virginia

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA | Mile 0

Population 437,994 | Est. 1906

For exile hath more terror in his look, much more than death: do not say “banishment.”

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

A cab pulled to the curb of the terminal. I hopped in and said, “Take me to the ocean.”

“The ocean is a big place. Where specifically?” the driver replied.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m on a budget, so take the fastest route.”

He shrugged and started driving. I rolled down the window to let the late-summer wind erase my uneasy thoughts.

Mike Gooding, a reporter from Norfolk’s ABC affiliate, met me a few feet from the water on Virginia Beach to ask me about my walk and the Pat Tillman Foundation. The foundation thought my plan was interesting and worth supporting, but I sensed an apprehension in their endorsement. They were and are rightly protective of Pat Tillman’s name. I could understand why they didn’t want people co-opting Pat’s life for self-interested reasons, as so many others have done.

Gooding asked why I was walking across the country. I felt like a ventriloquist was forcing me to respond. “I want to raise $3.6 million for the Pat Tillman Foundation—the contract Pat Tillman, the former NFL star turned down to join the military. . . . This country needs more people to make decisions like Pat’s . . .” I stumbled.

A more thorough answer would have gone something like this:

Four years before, I had been in purgatory with the US
military—the Second Army Ranger Battalion. After two deployments to Afghanistan, I had become one of the first Rangers, if not the first Ranger, to formally reject my unit’s orders to Iraq and Afghanistan. I was a conscientious objector. For six months, while they figured out what to do with me, I painted curbs yellow, scrubbed grills, baked cake, cut grass, washed dishes, and absorbed the ridicule of my chain of command. I did my best to numb myself and saw the world as if looking out of binoculars through the wrong end—everything felt small and distant.

Occasionally I’d see a demeaning smirk or hear “Pussy!” in the chow hall as I served my former comrades. Sometimes I became lost in their ideas of what it meant to be a man: I would drop my eyes and they’d feel stronger. At quieter moments, I lay in the dark on a sheetless mattress with an old sweatshirt as my pillow and wondered which of them could do what I was doing.

Rejecting the mission of a Ranger was like rejecting your brother. Rangers stick together. They do not question authority. Those who do are outcasts. In the Rangers’ world, there are two types of men: Rangers and civilians. Rangers are courageous, honorable, strong, and determined. Civilians are cowardly, undisciplined, and weak. I now fell into the civilian category. This made it hard to trust my decision.

I hopped on a plane for Chicago and went AWOL after six months of punishment detail to force a hand on my case—and to see a woman I’d been talking to. I returned after five days and a heated phone conversation with the sergeant major. “Get your motherfucking ass back here—now!” he screamed. Forcing a confident tone, I said, from a busy street corner in Chicago, “You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. If I come back it’s because I want to, not because of anything you say.” No one spoke to the sergeant major that way.

When I returned to the battalion on the morning of April 21, I was immediately arrested. Getting arrested for wanting to quit your job felt like a joke—a joke that scared the shit out of me. I walked into my squad’s common area, where on many nights we participated in after-action reports and talked about how best to engage the enemy. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The walls were cinder-block. Green military bags and equipment were crammed into corners. The arresting sergeant was my squad leader. He stood before me along with a few other sergeants, all of them dressed in full fatigues. They read me my military rights: “You have a right to an attorney . . . anything you say can be used against you. . . . You are now confined to the room until further notice.” Then they left me alone for about six hours. A Groucho Marx quote ran through my head: “Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” I expected the worst.

The sun set and the room became dark. A young sergeant eventually came back. “What the hell are you sitting in the dark for?” He flipped on the fluorescent lights. He was told to tell me that I could go back to my room but couldn’t leave the building. I would soon be sent to jail or the “big army” shortly.

The “big army” is a term used for any infantry military assignment outside of the Special Forces—of which the Rangers are part. If you were a member of the big army you were more expendable because you had less training and could be readily replaced. You were what the Rangers would call a “bullet stopper.” To the high-ranking brass, soldiers are no different than Humvees, infrared goggles, or any other piece of expensive military equipment—but the more training you receive, the more money you’re worth, and no one wants to be accountable for the loss of an expensive piece of equipment.

So the big army seemed like a death sentence—but in some ways death felt comparable to jail.

They said my true story would leave me forever banished from the good graces of future employers. They said I’d be banished in a country I had once adored. They said I’d be shunned by my family and friends.

The next morning, I was called to a formation. “Pat Tillman was killed last night in an enemy ambush in southwest Afghanistan,” said the sergeant in charge of the “rear detachment”—those who were injured, on their way out of the military, or in trouble. “He died a hero, doing what he was trained to do.” My stomach dropped and tears welled in my eyes. Pat was larger than life. It made no sense. A dark cloud settled over the battalion. I sat in my room, staring out the window, wanting to talk to others about the terrible and surreal news. I was ostracized, so I couldn’t.

Six days later, on my birthday, my discharge papers were signed. It would have happened three days sooner, but I pushed back against the chain of command’s attempt to issue a dishonorable discharge. There are three discharge statuses in the military: honorable, general, and dishonorable. I told the commanding officer, “I’ll stay and fight a dishonorable discharge. I’ve already spoken to the Inspector General’s office. They know protocol was not followed in the handling of my case.” They gave in after only a little harassment. It was clear they just wanted to get rid of me. There would be no big army, no jail, no punishment, no big discussion—save the humiliation I would endure the rest of my life for abandoning my Ranger buddies, at least according to the parting comments of my company commander from West Point. They made me sign a paper saying that the Ranger Battalion had followed protocol in the handling of my case.

But I didn’t say any of that to Mike Gooding. I didn’t know yet why I had to walk—not really.

I left the ocean at 2:30 in the afternoon. It didn’t feel like I had permission to be doing what I was doing—who from, I don’t know. The bank? The military? My family? The expansive view from the plane was etched in my brain—I was on an Earth-sized hamster wheel. Highway 4, leading west away from the ocean, cut through a dense pine forest. It was with a detached energy that I took those first steps, the weight of my pack dragging on me. I was not in my body, or so it seemed.

The only thing I can remember thinking about while walking that day was my girlfriend Kate. We had been living together. I was sure she would leave me. Who would stick with someone who said he had to walk across the country before getting married? My walk would take only a little less time than my first tour to Afghanistan: nine months. I pretended it wouldn’t take that long. The Google Maps walking directions said three months.

It took me a few years to tell Kate about my time in the military. Despite that, when the military came up, she had a graceful touch. She always knew when to change the topic or ask the next right question.

I asked her how she felt about the walk. She said, “I can wait three months.”

She let me keep my things in the apartment. I told her I would call her every day.

First Landing State Park, Virginia

The first Africans landed in Virginia as indentured servants in 1619. Over the years, thousands of shackled men, women, and children were forced off impossibly cramped ships and onto these shores, destined for a life of violence and misery.

Nat Turner, the preacher, conspirator, and revolutionary, led a slave revolt in late August 1831 in the woods and open fields where I walked. Turner wrote in his autobiography, “When I walked through the fields I saw blood in the leaves and heard the wailing of voices in the winds.”1 He presided over funerals and prayer services, where he conspired with and recruited other slaves for rebellion. On August 13 there was a solar eclipse over Virginia—and Turner saw it as his signal to begin the revolt. The plan was for Turner and fifty other slaves to raid a large arms depot, attack the larger plantations, and escape to the Great Dismal Swamp—now a wildlife refuge—to recruit other slaves and lead more raids. Turner’s band was soon met with resistance. Outnumbered, they retreated to a nearby cave and hid for six weeks. Virginia was crippled with fear as whites agonized over Turner’s next move. Anyone found sympathizing with the revolt, white or Black, was savagely beaten or imprisoned for sedition. Turner was eventually caught on October 30 and hung on November 11, 1831.2

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA | Mile 19

Population 242,803 | Est. 1705

Restless, I woke up at four in the morning and packed quickly. Power-walking over bridges and cutting across parks, I made my way through Norfolk in the early morning darkness. Adrenaline and suppressed doubt filled me while the Atlantic breeze kept me cool. For the first time in my life, I wanted to run away from the ocean. “I’ll know I’m serious after a day or two. I need a thirty- or forty-mile buffer between me and the ocean,” I said to myself.

My interview with Mike Gooding got me noticed. Locals began to honk their horns and wave soon after the sun declared the day. Two sixteen-year-old girls with matching KISS T-shirts saw me and asked for autographs on a box of Royal Cups cigarettes and a recently graded high-school history exam. Soon after, two middle-aged Black women with ankle-length skirts and cups of McDonald’s coffee gave me Bible literature and two dollars. Further down the road, a man named Tim Howard pulled over and prayed with his hand on my shoulder. A policewoman, Jennifer Dozier, and her partner asked what I was doing and, after talking awhile, drove off. They met me again further down the road; Officer Dozier jumped out and ran a prayer card over to me. Her brother Jonathan had been killed nine months earlier in Iraq, she said, and with tears in her eyes asked if I would carry his card to the Pacific. Thinking about Jonathan and my decision to leave the military, I looked up and found myself nineteen miles from the Atlantic.

A FEW MILES OUTSIDE OF CHESAPEAKE, VA | Mile 25

Highway 13 blends in very subtly with Route 58, which, according to state patrolman Craig, “is an interstate.” He asked me, “Where are you going?”

“The A-A-Atlantic,” I said.

“Well, you are going the wrong way,” he said, in his best police voice.

“I mean, I’m walking to the Pacific for the Pat Tillman Foundation.”

He warmed up, but didn’t let me hold my course. He gave me a fifteen-minute explanation of an alternate route which involved retracing two miles of steps, crossing a junkyard, and using “your military skills.”

“I appreciate your help, officer. I’m sorry for walking on the interstate,” I said.

We parted and I backtracked half a mile east, wondering how I would ever walk across the country with such impersonal interruptions. When he was gone, I turned around and crossed to the opposite side of the same interstate. I jogged into the grass by the shoulder and walked west, down a steep embankment into the forest.

The woods were filled with razor-sharp vines and bogs. In less than thirty minutes I’d had enough of the mud and scratching and moved back to the grass. Patrolman Craig was issuing a ticket a hundred yards down the road. His one-way mirrored aviators signaled to me in the sun. I ran back into the woods and hid in a five-foot drainage tunnel, entertaining myself by checking to see if Kate had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Part I
• PART II
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About the Author