Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  SHANE COMES HOME

  Rinker Buck

  This book is respectfully dedicated to the exceptional marine depicted in its pages, First Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers. All of us have a Shane or two in our lives, but I doubt that the world will ever again see another quite like this one.

  SEMPER FIDELIS, SHANE CHILDERS

  THE MARINES’ HYMN

  From the halls of Montezuma

  To the shores of Tripoli,

  We fight our country’s battles

  In the air, on land, and sea.

  First to fight for right and freedom,

  And to keep our honor clean,

  We are proud to claim the title

  Of United States Marines.

  Our flag’s unfurl’d to every breeze

  From dawn to setting sun;

  We have fought in every clime and place

  Where we could take a gun.

  In the snow of far-off northern lands

  And in sunny tropic scenes,

  You will find us always on the job—

  The United States Marines.

  Here’s health to you and to our Corps

  Which we are proud to serve;

  In many a strife we’ve fought for life

  And never lost our nerve.

  If the Army and the Navy

  Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,

  They will find the streets are guarded

  By United States Marines.

  CONTENTS

  A Call in the Morning

  A Rumor in Town

  Next of Kin

  Home Alone

  Know How to Be

  Good to Go

  The Russians Are Coming

  The Citadel Years

  The West Virginia Cousins

  A Soldier Comes Home

  The Sands of Rumaila

  Shane’s Last Sky

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Rinker Buck

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A CALL IN THE MORNING

  At 4:30 in the morning on Friday, March 21, 2003, while Americans on the East Coast were waking up to the first news reports about the invasion of Iraq, the commander of a small United States Marine Corps reserve detachment in Billings, Montana, was awakened by an urgent phone call. Later, Captain Kevin Hutchison would recall that he had slept poorly the night before, and not simply because his house was under renovation and he’d spent the night on a spare combat mattress on the hardwood sill of his bedroom bay window. He was also depressed. No marine enjoys being left behind while his fellow officers are fighting overseas, and Hutchison had spent Thursday night watching Nightline and CNN, fitfully dozing off to the images of military convoys massing at the border of Iraq. As the cameras panned south, the long formations of tanks, Humvees, and light armored vehicles thinning off into the sands reminded him of his own humiliating distance from the war. But now the vast terrain between the deserts of Iraq and the Montana high country were about to be joined.

  Hutchison was an unusual marine. A suave, worldly Californian—bookish and sensitive, almost to a fault—he had nevertheless succeeded brilliantly in the man’s-man world of the marine officer corps. At thirty-three, he was one of the marine’s most highly rated and youngest captains. Qualified with “expert” rankings in underwater demolition, parachute jumping, reconnaissance, and mountain and river warfare, Hutchison had led rifle platoons in Okinawa and Greece and, because of his fluency in Spanish, drawn several plum assignments in Latin America during the late 1990s. In Peru, where he had spent eighteen months training counter-drug police, he had acquired a stunning Peruvian girlfriend and spent long romantic weekends with her camping out in an elevated, Tarzan-style “jungle-hut” that he had built from driftwood along the broad, sandy banks of a river outside Lima. Blond, rail-thin, as charmingly earnest as he was tough, Hutchison epitomized the sort of glamorous image promoted by those catchy marine recruitment spots—“The Few. The Proud”—broadcast during the halftimes of weekend NFL games.

  Over the past year, however, Hutchison’s dream existence as a globe-trotting marine had come to a dispiriting end. As part of a routine noncombat rotation used to season young officers, he had been assigned to lead the small training battalion in Billings that handled all marine affairs across a broad expanse of the west, a five-state area running from the Dakotas to Idaho. Now his days were filled with the humdrum details of running a military command in backwater Montana—whipping out-of-shape weekend warrior reservists through training exercises, fielding requests to provide marine details for Memorial Day parades or the openings of new car lots, providing color guards and gun salutes for the funerals of Greatest Generation World War II marines who, with lugubrious regularity, were dying off as the new century progressed.

  Indeed, by late March that year, Hutchison’s mood had reached a typically conflicted state. He had just returned from a seven-week Winter Mountain Leaders Course at a marine camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe, California. The grueling regimen of forced marches on cross-country skis, winter camping in the peaks, and precision night reconnaissance had left Hutchison feeling strangely refreshed, even euphoric about his marine career. But when he returned to his office inside a modern, low-rise armory on the outskirts of Billings, a mountain of paperwork and personnel hassles had accumulated on his desk. It was grim, getting back to staff work.

  Then there was Iraq, of course. Hutchison had his own views about the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes against perceived enemies like Saddam Hussein, but he was too discreet an officer to express many reservations to his fellow marines. The disquiet he felt was more personal than that. Most of his closet friends in the marines had been deployed to Iraq, and now they were massed along the berms of northern Kuwait in their speedy, light armored vehicles, waiting to head north through the sands for Nasiriya, Najaf, and Baghdad. For Hutchison, being left behind in Billings didn’t raise issues of machismo or bravery—he had always disliked the false manhood bravado affected by many marines, just as he distrusted the ritualized patriotism of politicians who invoked the flag while placing soldiers in harm’s way. He was tormented, instead, by an intellectual riddle, typical for the highly educated and motivated warrior class of officers attracted to the all-volunteer American military after the draft was abolished in 1973.

  He had spent the last nine years, the best of his life, becoming one of the most highly trained military officers of his generation. But he had always been insatiably curious about one thing. Did all this preparation and sacrifice—the constant moves and reassignments, year after year of physical conditioning, the parachute jumps, underwater dives, mountain rescues in the snow, the endless training classes—really amount to anything? In the real-time exhaustion and confusion of war, could he lead men under fire? The question had nagged him for years, and returned as an unresolved agony as the long buildup for Iraq had begun the summer before. By then, he had grown to love the American west, especially his weekend training forays across the mountains and high rolling plains of Montana and Wyoming, but, still, he felt trapped in Billings. Through the fiat of assignment, the only war he would probably have a chance to fight in, his first real opportunity to prove himself and answer the riddle, had passed him by.

  That despairing thought still troubled him, early that Friday morning, as Hutchison fitfully endured his half-sleep on the sill of his bedroom bay window.

  But now in the gray vagueness of dawn, the ringing phone was calling him to other service. Outside the lawns were silvery with frost, and tiny orbs of pink and cobalt light, thrown down as the sun rose against the rimrock plateaus surrounding Billings, danced in the sky. The air
was still and cold—the kind of glorious western morning that Hutchison normally enjoyed. Shaking off his incomplete sleep, he stepped across the newly refinished hardwood floors of his bedroom and picked up the phone. He immediately recognized the voice of his gruff but personable second-in-command, First Sergeant Barry Morgan.

  “Sir. Sorry to wake you so early, but…”

  “That’s all right Barry. It must be important. What’s up?”

  “Sir, shit. Shit, shit, shit. We’ve got a CACO. There’s a young marine from Powell, Wyoming, who’s been killed in Iraq already. Sir, all we know is that he was a platoon leader from First Battalion. He took it in the gut while taking a pumping station in the Rumaila oil field. Second Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers.”

  “Ah, fuck, Barry. Fuck.”

  “Fuck is right, sir. It’s a CACO from Iraq and we’ve got it.”

  Hutchison tensed in his chest and his arms, swirled by contradictory emotions. CACO is a military acronym for Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, and Hutchison was familiar with the elaborate procedures for notifying the parents of a deceased marine, and knew that the Marine Corps was meticulous to the point of obsession about proper military burials and caring for families of their own. The previous summer, he and Morgan had handled the case of a young marine recruit from Deer Lodge, Montana, who had died during swimming training at a marine base in Corpus Christi, Texas. The experience of dealing with a grieving, single mother had been emotionally draining, and a CACO case also tended to overwhelm the meager resources of a small command like Billings. Seven months after they had buried the young marine who died in Texas, they were still filling out paperwork and hassling with the Casualty Assistance Branch at Marine Corps headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.

  Hutchison was overcome by another feeling. A skeptical intellectual who enjoyed spoofing everything, including the bureaucratic foibles and platitudes of the Marine Corps, he could nevertheless turn instantly somber and impassioned—corny, even—when it came to duty, honor, service for a fellow marine and his family. These values meant everything to him. Welling up, almost as if he could cry, Hutchison blurted out the first thing that came to mind, even though it meant exposing his emotions to the infinitely more grounded and realistic First Sergeant Morgan.

  “Oh Christ, Barry. Why couldn’t this have been me? I could have been over there and taken this bullet. I wanted to be over there. I don’t want to tell this guy’s parents. Why couldn’t it have been me?”

  “Sir, I know. I know. It should have been me. But godammit, it wasn’t and now we’ve got a CACO on our hands and we’ve got to do it. And, sir, there’s another thing.”

  “What’s that?” Hutchison said.

  “Sir, Quantico is already all over us on this thing,” Morgan said. “Second Lieutenant Childers will be identified as the first killed in action in Iraq. The press is already calling. We’ve got to do a next-of-kin notification fast, and we’ve got to do it right. We can’t fuck up. Can’t.”

  What his sergeant said shook Hutchison into action. But first he was momentarily distracted by a queer brain meld, a play of light against his memories of the night before. Glancing outside, Hutchison could see that the light thrown down by the rimrock plateaus had grown to slender pastel ribbons, pale blues and reds bleached onto a wispy cirrus sky. A light mist was rising from the condensing frost on the lawns. The watercolor sky and the ghostly tendrils of mist carried him back to his fitful thoughts of the night before, then back to the present. Iraq. Desert sky. Montana high country. The first CACO of the war, way out here. What were the chances of that?

  But the changing light had also forced him through to a hard thought, as strong as a spiritual agenda.

  Fuck it, captain. Get a grip. You’ll never lead men in combat. You’ll never know. But you will know if you get this right. There’s a family down in Powell. Waiting. Your command will be watching. They’ll see how you react.

  “All right, first sergeant,” Hutchison said. “I’m leaving for the office right away, and you should too. I want the entire staff in for this. Wake them all up.”

  Hutchison crisply instructed Morgan to break out all their CACO manuals, and the Marine CACO training video, which the entire command would watch. Any important work that they had that day should be rerouted to the junior sergeants, and he wanted Morgan to dig up everything he could on Lieutenant Childers and his family. If the small Billings battalion didn’t have all the paperwork they needed to apply for benefits and assistance for the family, he should have it faxed from Marine Corps headquarters at Quantico. Hutchison wanted a government vehicle gassed, cash, maps, phone numbers, and anything else they needed for the drive to Powell.

  “Where the hell is Powell anyway, Barry?”

  “Fuck if I know, sir. But I will by the time you reach the office.”

  “I want to be on the road by seven thirty,” Hutchison said.

  “Done,” Morgan said.

  Hutchison quickly showered and shaved and dressed in his usual street clothes of crisp blue jeans and a polo shirt—at smaller commands like Billings, marines changed into their uniforms at the office—and decided to skip his morning ritual of brewing gourmet coffee so that he could race into the office. When he stepped outside, however, his car wouldn’t start. On a captain’s salary, with a major home renovation underway, the only vehicle Hutchison could afford was an eight-hundred-dollar battered Toyota diesel pickup, which earned him a lot of ribbing around the Billings command when the other marines learned that Hutchison called his wheels “Sugar.” But now, cranking the starter over and over again in the cold morning air, coaxing and cursing so much that his breath froze the inside of the windshield, he couldn’t get Sugar going.

  “Ah, fuck, Sugar. C’mon. Not today. I’ve got a CACO.”

  Hutchison gave Sugar a ten-minute rest and stepped back inside to brew coffee after all. When he walked back outside, the diesel fired on his first try.

  “Okay, bitch. Sorry, sorry,” Hutchison said, patting the steering wheel. “Now, just get me to the armory.”

  And so, jittery about the day he faced, his mind racing with the multitude of tasks to be performed before he left for Powell, Hutchison slipped out of his driveway and headed north along the quiet residential streets of the university district in Billings. As he merged into the light morning traffic downtown, no one watching him pass could have guessed the importance or drama of his mission that day, the awful news that he carried for a family down over the snowy rim of the Bighorns. He was just another driver in a faded pickup with Montana plates, spewing a sooty contrail of diesel exhaust as he stopped for the lights. At the interstate, Hutchison turned right and climbed the ramp. Then the freshly assigned CACO, the first of America’s new war, disappeared toward work under a red Montana sky.

  Hutchison was momentarily relieved when he reached the ground-floor suite of offices of the Marine Corps Company B, Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion at the armory in suburban Billings. A dozen enlisted men were scurrying around in response to the orders that First Sergeant Morgan had issued when he reached the armory fifteen minutes earlier. A young private was chasing between the fax machine and the copier, assembling in neat piles the enormous load of paperwork—forms for death benefits, forms for cancellation of bank accounts, forms for confirmation of awards, more than thirty in all—required to process a CACO case. The battalion mechanic was outside, washing and gassing one of the unit’s Chevy Suburbans. Another private sat staring intently at his computer and manning the phones, compiling into a loose-leaf notebook MapQuest directions to Powell, lists of phone numbers, and a log of calls that had already arrived from the Casualty Assistance branch in Virginia. No one was saying very much and the usual Friday morning banter and the throwing around of full bags of doughnuts had been abandoned. Morgan had obviously taken command of all the details and whipped the unit into shape. This would free Hutchison to concentrate on the two matters he knew would be most important all day—reporting “up” to Marine
Corps headquarters in Virginia, and steeling himself emotionally to confront the Childers family down in Wyoming.

  Information, too, would be vital. From his earlier CACO work, Hutchison was aware that families were often desperate for precise information—how their son had died, whether he’d suffered or lingered long in a field hospital—that served as a kind of shock relief in the hours after they learned of the death. But he knew he would be able to provide the Childers family with very little detail about how their son had died, beyond the routine information that he’d been shot while leading his platoon at the Rumaila oil field. An autopsy would not be performed until Childers’s body reached the joint-services mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, which could probably take over a week. A full battlefield report, which wouldn’t even be written until Childers’ unit finished its long march north to Baghdad, or perhaps even until they returned to the United States, was probably months away.

  But Hutchison knew that he could probably comfort the family with other knowledge. He wanted to arrive at the house with as complete a picture of Lieutenant Childers as he could obtain, appearing before the family not as a stranger, an anonymous bearer of devastating news, but instead as a marine officer who was considerate enough to have familiarized himself with their son’s record and accomplishments in the service. Marines are fortunate in this respect. Detailed, computerized profiles of every marine in service—their Basic Individual Record and Basic Training Record—are available to officers on a marine personnel website. Childers’ records had already been printed up by the time Hutchison arrived at the armory. After verifying all their other forms against a CACO manual checklist, Hutchison and Morgan sat at a table together and read up on Childers.