Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  “Recon, hunh? Marine recon. It says here that you guys are Company B, Reconnaissance Batallion.”

  “That’s right, Joe,” Hutchison said.

  “Well good,” Joe said. “Recon. I heard from the major down in Texas that you boys got lost trying to locate my ranch.”

  “It’s not an easy place to find, Joe,” Morgan said.

  “All right, all right,” Joe said. “How ’bout you guys showing up at eleven on Monday? That’ll give marine recon plenty of daylight to find me.”

  Hutchison and Morgan were still laughing about it in their government Suburban as they followed the Childerses’ taillights down the long, winding access road that descended the rimrock plateau.

  “God, I love these people already,” Hutchison said. “I just love them.”

  “Fine, sir, fine,” Morgan said. “I love them too. But this Joe Childers is sure one piece of work.”

  At a discreet distance, so that the Childerses wouldn’t consider them too intrusive, they followed the taillights of the Fairmont through downtown and didn’t peal off until Joe and Judy made the turnoff for the interstate.

  The drive that night down through the black, moody Pryors was difficult, especially for Joe. It had never bothered him much that he presented such a divided personality to the world. Sure, he was manly enough and always had a dozen projects going on at once—the farm machinery repairs, laying new irrigation pipe, shoeing a nasty mule or Percheron that nobody else wanted to touch—but he was always quite open, too, about his emotions, how he was by far the more demonstrative and vulnerable partner in his marriage with Judy. He was sometimes emotionally needy, but he’d always felt that he could control that by expressing himself, reaching out to someone, telling another one of his favorite stories about himself. But this was different now—Joe felt that he had no control whatsoever. The slightest thing, the smallest reminder, set off palpitations of regret and then convulsions of tears for Shane, which arrived in waves that seemed determined by an unseen force.

  When Shane was home for Christmas, he was excited about his pending skiing trip to Oregon with friends, which would be his last stretch of free time away from the marines before he was deployed to Iraq. One day, Shane decided to drive an hour north to the Red Lodge Mountain Ski Area in southern Montana to make some practice runs before he left for Oregon. Shane was elated when Joe decided to go along too.

  They ended up sharing a wonderful day together—the best of his visit, they both thought. All the way up through the snowy badlands, before they turned in for Red Lodge at the Belfry cutoff, Shane and Joe jawed away in the pickup. They talked about Shane’s plans after the war, or how his younger brother Sam was doing back in Illinois, Joe’s various schemes for improving his ranch and catching up on the home repairs Judy was bugging him about. Shane was excited because he had arranged beforehand to rent telemark skis that day, and would be practicing the knee-bending turns required to use them, in preparation for his ski trip after Christmas. When they reached the ski area and Shane clomped off in his ski boots for the chairlifts, Joe stayed behind in the lodge. He chatted up all the waitresses in the cafeteria, discussed horses with another nonskier whom he met, and struck up a conversation with a group of ski instructors and learned all about what they did. Joe liked the atmosphere around the ski lodge—everyone seemed so buoyant and relaxed, devoted simply to having fun. This was one thing that Joe just loved about being with Shane. In so many ways, his world wasn’t Joe’s world any longer, but Joe always felt that he’d learned something new, met such interesting people, when he tagged along and peeped into Shane’s life.

  At nightfall, Shane returned to the lodge, cheery and red-faced from his runs, looking handsome and tall in his nylon jumpsuit and boots. He was energized from spending the afternoon on the slopes, excited about how quickly he had picked up making telemark turns. Joe could always tell when Shane had enjoyed a particularly good day and was bursting with manic joy about one of his interests. Every other word became “freaking.” All the way home in the pickup, he evangelized Joe about skiing, yapping away about all the freaking expensive equipment you need, this freaking mountain and its freaking powder in freaking Colorado, the girls on their freaking snowboards, and Dad-you-know-I-really-mean-it-even-you-could-take-it-up, freaking skiing.

  Now Joe and Judy were on a lonely highway, passing the sign for the Red Lodge Mountain Ski Area just above the Belfry cutoff. God, this is so hard, Joe thought, blinking his eyelids to adjust for the moisture so he could remain focused on the road. We drove through here together, just three months ago. There’s still snow beside the road.

  It would be worse when he got home, Joe knew. There were reminders of Shane everywhere—the patches on the roof where he’d replaced shingles on his visit home last summer, the foundation trench dug over Thanksgiving, all the cartons of Meals Ready to Eat stashed out in the barn. Joe was worried about his reaction to that and mentioned this to Judy.

  Judy knew that impatience never worked with Joe. She just had to let him vent and then make suggestions that wouldn’t work. But, she told him, maybe anticipating a reaction just made it worse when you actually had one. Why not concentrate instead on all of the practical things they had to do—reserve motel rooms for family and friends, plan the funeral, ask the marines for help getting all Shane’s things back from Camp Pendleton in California. In that sense, the long drive through the badlands between Belfry and Powell was a telescoped version of their marriage. While Joe got dreamy and emotional, working through his pain by telling a story, Judy knuckled down and faced the details.

  There was one last moment, a touching scene that Joe and Judy knew they would never forget, after they had negotiated the back roads of Powell and approached their ranch from the north. When John Van Valin came over to feed the horses that day, he had run an electrical cord out from Joe’s shop, rigged a spotlight on a patio chair, and then trained it on the flagpole in front of the Childers house. Normally their place couldn’t be seen from the road at night. But now, as they cleared the rise on Road 12, a soft beam of light illuminated the clapboard front of the house and, alone against the black prairie was an American flag at half-mast for Shane.

  Joe just felt at peace about that, gently sad and pleased at once. They were home and the flag was lit for Shane.

  “That was nice of John,” Joe said to Judy, turning in for the drive. “It’s typical of him to think of something like that.”

  At the last bend in the driveway the car’s headlights swiveled southeast and reflected brightly off the splashboard of Joe’s sleigh, still parked on the corner of the lawn where Shane had left it at Christmas. Oh Lord, Shane. Shane, what happened over there? You were so happy that day when you came in with the horses.

  So he was crying again, but it didn’t matter now because he was home and no one was around to see him. In the morning, he would have to figure out what to do with the sleigh. Maybe they’d be lucky this week and have one last snow so that he could hitch up the team and drive the sleigh out back. This week, as the house began to fill up with family and friends, no one else would notice or care about an extra sleigh hanging around the Childers front yard. But to Joe it was just too painful a reminder of Shane.

  HOME ALONE

  The full day of travel that Joe and Judy spent returning to Wyoming on Saturday turned out to be a blessing in disguise, inadvertent relief from the deluge of national media. Through the Pentagon press office, the Marine Corps Casualty Assistance Branch in Quantico had finally released Shane’s name at 9 P.M. on Friday and by noon the next day the parking lot of the big Blairs supermarket up on Route 14A in Powell, the first commercial stop on the road in from Cody, was jammed with film trucks and newspaper reporters. The supermarket’s overwhelmed checkout-lane staff, appalled at the intrusion upon a grieving family’s privacy, quickly huddled among themselves and refused to provide directions to the Childers ranch.

  But because they were either on a plane or changing flights throug
h Denver all day, Joe and Judy were mercifully unaware of the intense first-day rush of media interest until they arrived home Saturday night. In the kitchen, Judy found so many messages from the press on their phone machine that the tape had run out, and a camera crew from ABC’s Good Morning America had left an interview request on a Post-it note attached to the front door.

  Joe woke Sunday morning feeling tired and physically exhausted after a sleepless night, engulfed by sadness that he was facing another day without Shane. But he knew that he’d feel overwhelmed if he sat around all day in the house answering phone calls, brooding about his son, so he spent most of Sunday deliberately distracting himself with chores around the ranch. Talking to himself, occasionally blurring up and leaning against his workbench for support when he ran into another reminder of Shane, he moseyed around in the barn with his horses and mules, and then cleaned out and plugged in an extra refrigerator so there would be enough soda and cold drinks for the large numbers of family and friends expected to arrive during the week. Then, driving out the rutted lane along the perimeter of his property, he loaded his Toyota pickup with hay and fed his cattle. The brisk Wyoming wind burned his cheeks and, after a week of inactivity in Texas, Joe’s muscles ached from heaving the heavy bales. But he felt sheltered and even momentarily buoyant out among the browsing steers and his piles of farm machinery, with the open views north and south to the mountains. Losing himself among the familiar confines of his own land seemed the only comfort left for him now.

  Joe would later realize that his search for privacy that day taught him a few useful lessons about the national media. Reporters kept calling all day Sunday, and he and Judy eventually decided that, if they wanted to get anything done, they could pick up the phone only when they happened to be passing by in the kitchen. Joe ended up liking the reporters he spoke with—they all seemed unfailingly polite and expressed sincere condolences about Shane—but most of them just wanted a quick hit on their assigned story that day. If Joe and Judy simply ignored them for lack of time, or passed them onto someone else, most of the news outlets had no problem meeting their deadline needs and moving on.

  By the end of the day, Joe had already heard from Shane’s younger brother Sam, in La Salle, Illinois. Sam had heard from his parents about Shane’s death late Friday night, and by 6 A.M. the next morning the phone was already ringing constantly as reporters called for interviews. So many television crews had called him—or just showed up at his house—that he literally had a traffic jam of satellite transmission trucks outside his door. Sam had always felt overshadowed by Shane and asserted himself less readily, especially around strangers, but now he had surprised even himself. Sam insisted that the television networks set up just one camera and group of lights in his living room, shooting all of their footage off the same equipment. It was very heady stuff at first, a shock course in media attention—at one point Sam was scheduled for a live interview with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw on Saturday morning, but this was later rescheduled to Sunday with another correspondent.

  Meanwhile, down in Texas, Richard Brown faced the same onslaught of press calls. Although crazed by the details of preparing to deploy with his unit, Richard managed to find time to speak with reporters from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Good Morning America. Richard was particularly impressed with the way that the major network anchors, from distant studios in Washington and New York, could pick up on nuances of the family’s story and go well beyond the obvious element of Shane being the first killed in Iraq. He found the experience curiously satisfying, even therapeutic, a welcome relief from the awful pressure of trying to decide whether or not to travel back to Wyoming with Sandra. It was almost as if the reporters’ questions affirmed his own instincts about what was important in his personal story and were helping him work out what to do.

  Joe was annoyed by one seemingly unimportant but highly visible aspect of the media coverage over the weekend. As soon as Shane’s identity was released by the Pentagon, the wire services and the television stations ran to the only source for a picture that they could reach overnight—an old yearbook from Harrison Central High School in Gulfport, Mississippi, dating back to the late 1980s. That was the first image of Shane that winged its way across the country as a digital photo file, appearing in countless newspapers and cable news reports. There wasn’t anything really that wrong with the picture, but Shane’s hair was long and his cheeks and chin were still boyish and unformed, not at all the image of the chiseled and determined marine officer he would become. Joe didn’t really blame the media for the use of that dated photograph, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what riled him so about it. But he couldn’t chase away the annoyance. Why couldn’t they have waited for the family or the marines to provide a formal portrait of Shane with a proper haircut, all his medals on his chest, the tunic of his dress blues riding up to a crisp line around his neck? It seemed like such a trivial detail. Shane was dead, Joe’s world had stopped, and now he was obsessing about a dated high school photograph that the press could hardly have avoided anyway. How could he get all tangled up inside about something like that?

  A few reporters did get through, however, on Sunday and Monday. Correspondents for the New York Times, the Billings Gazette, and the Associated Press called out to the house first and then drove over. Both afternoons were unseasonably warm, and the wind had dropped, so Joe sat out on the ramshackle patio in front of the house, jawing away in his West Virginia drawl. He talked about Shane’s rise in the marines, how prepared he had seemed just before he left for Iraq, and his eyes welled up with tears as he pointed out the sleigh in the yard and described how Shane had hooked up his team over the winter. The reporters all seemed entranced by Joe’s Seabee career and wondered if his status as a Vietnam veteran made him question the rationale for the Iraq War. But Joe was steadfast about that. Despite the loss of his son, he had no reservations about the war and expressed strong support for the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein.

  To illustrate the story, the Times assigned a local freelance photographer, Stephen Smith, who had just moved to Cody after a successful stint with the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Smith is a strong portraitist and, the following month, would win a Pulitzer Prize for photographs he took during the Colorado wildfires the summer before. In the photograph Smith took, Joe stood on the edge of the patio in his denim work shirt and navy ball cap, with the barbecue grill and the flag flying at half-mast etched hard against the Wyoming prairie behind him. The photographer from the Billings Gazette caught Joe in a similar pose. In both photographs Joe stared straight into the lens with a grim but satisfied “so, there” look on his face. Against his chest he held the formal Marine Corps portrait of Shane. In his dress blues, Shane was very military in bearing, and from the way Joe was holding the photo his son appeared to be gazing out over the sleigh and the fields to the southern rim of the Pryors.

  Many strangers who reached out to the Childerses in the days after Shane was killed were impressed with the strength and resolve they displayed in public, a stoicism they ascribed to the unwavering patriotism of a couple who had been steeped in military values for most of their lives. But the Childerses’ equanimity in the face of a crisis did not surprise their closest friends. Their thirty-four-year marriage had been forged during the crucible of Vietnam and afterward survived both economic hardship and some of the most tumultuous events of their times.

  Joe was only eighteen in 1967 when he left his family’s small subsistence farm along the dark, mountainous end of Smith Creek Hollow in Salt Rock, West Virginia. His father, Wilton Childers, made a more or less reliable living working factory jobs in nearby Huntington, but could never escape the lure of planting cash crops and fattening cattle on his rocky acres climbing both sides of the hollow. The extended Childers family in the area were devout Southern Baptists, teetotalers and stubbornly resistant about leaving the West Virginia hill country, values and traditions that Joe would mostly leave behind. Bu
t he did inherit from his father both a penchant for grand story-telling and the lovable impracticality of part-time farming. More than thirty years after his son had left the hollow and made a name for himself at military postings around the world, Wilton Childers still loved to tell a favorite story about Joe. When he was just nine or ten, Joe had secretly saved his school lunch money to buy a goat, had it freshened, and then sold the milk to buy more goats. He soon enjoyed a thriving business derived from his small herd. Rising early to perform his own chores before work, Wilton could hear his son down in the barn, whistling amid the clatter of buckets and goats bleating. Then he watched from a window while Joe left the yard pulling a wagon, disappearing into the mists down the hollow to make his milk rounds.

  Lovely and remote as they were, however, the West Virginia hollows could not escape the impact of the distant conflict in Vietnam. Like most West Virginia boys who displayed no interest in college, Joe knew by the time he finished high school that he faced a stark decision: either enlist in the branch of military service of his choice, or face being drafted by the army for the front lines of Vietnam. Joe would later describe his decision as less a matter of avoiding combat than the first of many romantic choices he would make about how he wanted to lead his life. Around his father’s farm, he had always loved big, ambitious building projects—jacking up a whole barn from the sills to restore a foundation, laying new bridge timbers across the creeks to improve the roads—and by the time he was a teenager he was already a talented mechanic. While other boys fell for the lore of armored tanks or fighting ships, Joe loved the idea of traveling the world with the navy Seabees, the engineering battalions that built bridges, docks, and airport hangars for large military operations and bases. He was delighted, eight months after high school, when he was accepted for navy boot camp and then assigned to a steel-building unit of the Seabees.