Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  After that, no one wanted to take on Shane Childers. It wasn’t that they were worried about trouncing him, because they probably could. They just didn’t want to face the humiliation, that he would prove by shrewdness and restraint that he was tougher.

  Shane’s first leave-taking for the marines was not particularly eventful. Joe and Sam drove him down to the navy recruiting office in Gulfport, and he left on a bus for Parris Island boot camp in South Carolina. It would take a couple of years of everyone growing up a bit, and Shane coming back from his first war, for the departures and arrivals to be marked by evident expressions of love.

  “Shane was ready, and I do mean ready, to get his ass out of Mississippi,” Sam said. “It was apparent to everyone that he needed to get away from all of us, especially Dad.”

  When they got back from Gulfport, Sandra Childers was in the kitchen. Joe looked confused and sad about Shane leaving, but also relieved and optimistic. Most of all he was proud, really proud of Shane, but that was still a hard thing to get out.

  “Dad,” Sandra asked him. “What can they possibly do with Shane at boot camp? He’s already a marine.”

  THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING

  It was now Wednesday, five days after Shane had been killed, and Judy Childers woke that morning with a fleeting but intense sensation. A light snow had fallen in northern Wyoming overnight, and when she looked out her bedroom window, the landscape was expansively white across the prairie and all the way up the Polecat Bench. A pink ribbon of cirrus glowed where the rim met the sky.

  Snow made her feel joyful, expectant. Snow covered all the piles in the Childers yard and Joe would always wake up looking revived, boyish again. He loved harnessing his team and watching them prance in the powder, hitching them to the sleigh, and then jingling off across that big white security blanket of prairie. When he was back inside the house, he would overflow with the Childers gift, red-cheeked from the wind and happy, yap-yap-yap remember the time it snowed in West Virginia and Shane spun down the hill on the Flying Saucer. Yap-yap that snow we saw in the mountains up above Tehran. Memory and snow and the house filling up, the light overcast sky, so moody but soothing. It felt like Christmas. Fleetingly but intensely, that’s what she felt, it was Christmas.

  It felt like Christmas because in the morning when she walked out to the end of the lane the mailbox was full of letters and condolence cards, more than fifty a day now. She and Joe would sit over coffee at the dining-room table reviewing them, like Christmas cards, remembering all the old friends they were hearing from now. Sandy and Richard had arrived from Texas and Judy was looking forward to spending a quiet morning with her daughter, cutting out newspaper articles and photos of Shane and then pasting them into a set of leather-bound albums they had bought. Sam and his wife, Cori, had called from Mitchell, South Dakota. Their minivan had broken down but the car dealer there had rented them a car to make it the rest of the way to Wyoming. Joe’s old Seabee pal, Robert Reagan, their favorite—just such a fun, fun guy, gravelly voiced and sarcastic all the time—had called from London, and he was on his way. The Moores were coming from Texas, the Whittens from California, and all the Childerses were converging from West Virginia. By tonight the rooms upstairs would be filled with grandchildren, two or three bundled up together in the same bed. They would pay for it big in the morning when the small house exploded with activity.

  Oh, and Shane at Christmas, more fun-per-hour than anyone else. Hey, Mom, I’m into telemark skiing this year, let me tell you about that. Drinking Joe under the table at the Christmas party for the Northstate Corp., and coming back in just the right amount of drunk. Buying them TV sets, VCRs, new tires for their cars, yap-yapping away about this girl he met at the mall. So much fun, Shane at Christmas. It was fleeting but intense, just the amount of time it took for her to rise and head for the kitchen and coffee. Then she remembered and sighed deeply. No, this is March. It’s a spring snow. This is not Christmas. Perhaps this morning when Captain Hutchison arrives we’ll finally learn more about the return of Shane’s body.

  Joe and Judy had a good long chat that morning, perhaps their best since they’d heard the awful news. Joe was worried that Judy might be feeling that he’d been crying too much, but he tried to reassure her that he was all cried out for now and even feeling better, exhausted but resigned. In the night, a couple of times, he had heard her wake and gently cry, and she woke up looking tired. But he knew it was best not to push her for now.

  “I would just really like to be alone a little bit, you know?” Joe said. “People come, I get to talking about Shane, and then I cry when I’m all cranked up.”

  “Joe, it’s the stories,” Judy said. “Maybe just cut back a little on the stories?”

  “Yeah. I need to do that,” Joe said. “Spend some time alone and not tell so many stories.”

  The new snow reminded him that he’d promised to get the team and pull the sleigh off the lawn, so that they wouldn’t have that particular memory of Shane out front all during the funeral. John Van Valin was supposed to come over and help him by holding the gates, but John didn’t show. Then a visitor who knew horses arrived, and Joe recruited him for the chore. They went out to the barn, and Joe introduced the stranger to his horses and mules, they harnessed the cream Belgians, and then pranced them through the yard and hitched up.

  At the first gate, Joe jumped off the sleigh and nodded his head toward the lead horse, Amigo.

  “Say, that Amigo horse there is going to shy at this gate, okay? Don’t fight him too much. Just swing wide to the right, let him shy, and then just harness that energy by pulling him back through the left. Good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  Amigo shied gently but wide as soon as Joe opened the gate, but the visitor was competent enough to sail the sleigh through, with a few inches to spare on the left post. Then Joe hopped back on the sleigh and took the reins, which was a pleasure for someone else to see. He is a more than competent horseman and talks to his animals, doesn’t yell, with very little rapping on the rump with the lines. His grip on the reins is firm but gentle and the horses feel guided but not contained.

  The harness jingled smartly in the crisp air as they bobbed the sleigh across the prairie.

  The Childers branch of the Smithsonian Institution’s Antique Farm Machinery and Tool Dump takes up most of an acre. There are about forty rusting artifacts in all, plus a great deal of used irrigation pipe and attachments. There’s actually a spot where the sleigh is usually parked—it’s just in between an old McCormick thresher and a potato-washing sluice—and Joe expertly side-slipped Amigo and April right in.

  “Well, good, that job’s done, then,” Joe said, unhitching. “Jeez, this is hard, though. I just keep expecting old Shane to come diddly-boppin’ down the lane any minute now. Gotta stop doing that.”

  Joe drove the team back to the barn on foot. The Belgians still wanted to go and were acting up, prancing and farting and pulling all these goof-off shies to the left and the right, but Joe was enjoying it. He made an extra loop with the reins around each hand, leaned back hard, and just let the team sled him across the slippery prairie by his rubber boots. The wind was on his back now and he looked handsome and fun, a tough, muscular smithy, dragged by his horses across the snow as his red navy ball cap was etched against the white of the Polecat Bench.

  Shane Childers’ timing about entering the marines was fortuitous. He entered boot camp at Parris Island on July 17, 1990, two weeks before Saddam Hussein stunned the world by invading Kuwait. As President George H. W. Bush rallied an international coalition and began a rapid buildup of forces in the Persian Gulf, everyone in the marines was now on a fast track. After boot camp and basic Marine Combat Training at Camp Lejeune in South Carolina, Shane was assigned to a light armored vehicle driver’s course at Camp Pendleton near San Diego. The marines, like the other branches of the military, had been caught flat-footed by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and the pressure was intense to quickly transiti
on from peacetime to a wartime footing. At Pendleton, the size of Shane’s light armored class was doubled, and the eight-week curriculum was crammed into four weeks. Shane quickly mastered the handling and systems of the eight-wheel drive, semiamphibious vehicles, and was considered good enough to be recommended for extra training. He learned map reading, reconnaissance, and communications, so that he could either be assigned to a regular combat unit or one of the smaller recon groups that worked ahead and probed enemy lines.

  Shane didn’t particularly stand out at first, but there was a good reason for that. All the recruits just out of boot camp and basic were pretty much the same—gung-ho, especially now that a war was on, incredibly physically fit, and as hard-working as their officers asked. But there was one attribute that a few marines close to him noticed, a quality more personal than professional for the time being. Fellow recruit Bill Hendry first met Shane at Camp Lejeune in 1990 and would later serve with him in Saudi Arabia during the Operation Desert Storm deployment against Saddam Hussein.

  “Shane was very reserved at first, and he wouldn’t clown around and talk about people behind their back like everyone else,” Hendry said. “He was very selective about who he would confide in. Sure, if we all went out some night after our courses were over, Shane could be a party animal with the rest of us, but not a lot. If there was a book to read that would put him ahead in the course, something he could do with his equipment, he preferred that. There was a sense, even then, at eighteen, that this was a guy who would take the opportunities offered by the marines and stretch it very far. Self-improvement and personal growth just interested him a hell of a lot more than running around and being a normal grunt.”

  Along with Hendry, Shane was assigned to a five-hundred-man rear replacement unit that would supply new men as marines up front were injured or got sick. The unit arrived in Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm in February 1991, just ten days before the ground war commenced. Everyone bitched because they were in a replacement unit, not an active fighting force, and they all could miss the action if the war was short. The disappointment was even more severe after they were all ordered to unload ships at the Saudi docks. They were stevedores now, not marines, and it was insufferably hot under the sun. But then Shane received the first of many lucky breaks.

  A few days after the war started, he was ordered forward as a light armored driver and ended up seeing limited action as the remnants of Saddam’s Republican Guard were chased north out of Kuwait. Shane would later say very little about his experiences in Kuwait, professing a veteran’s modesty about his war exploits, but there was a good reason for that. He was assigned forward at a time when Operation Desert Storm had only about a week more to go, and there were massive transportation snarls in northern Kuwait as U.S. Air Force and Navy planes pounded retreating Republican Guard armored units that were trapped along the main highway to Basra in southern Iraq. Shane saw a lot of scorched tanks and decaying bodies on the shoulder of the highway north, and his unit was briefly assigned to provide perimeter security for Kuwaiti oil fields that had been torched by the Iraqis and were then repaired by American oil-service companies. The truth was that most of the heavy fighting was over by the time Shane got to Kuwait.

  Still, the rest of the replacement unit grunts back in Saudi Arabia were jealous as hell.

  “I don’t think anyone in the marines said, ‘Hey, get me Childers,’” Hendry said. “They went down the list, got to C, and there was Shane, good to go. But getting up into Kuwait just contributed to his legend. Shane was lucky and then made the most of it. That’s who he was.”

  Desert Storm was a big personal milestone for Shane, even if he was reticent about it. “Shane felt real proud and lucky about Desert Storm,” Joe said. “He didn’t want to be in the marines unless they used him for something real.” It was part of Shane’s mystique now. Eight months after he enlisted, he had served in a war and now had a theater combat medal to prove it. He was a veteran at the age of eighteen.

  While Shane was readying himself and then fighting in Kuwait, major changes that would have a profound effect on his relationship with his family were underway back in Mississippi. After twenty-one years in the service, Joe was finally ready to sign up for his pension and leave the Seabees. He was sick of working triple jobs, sick of Mississippi, tired of all the overseas junkets for the navy that interrupted his plans. And now he was really thinking big, not just a marginalized “dream farm” along the Little Biloxi, but a real horseman’s place, this time a dream ranch. After a scouting trip west, Joe and Judy settled on northern Wyoming, and they closed on their house in Mississippi in early December 1990. They would find a place in the Bighorns once they got out there, and departed for Wyoming ten days before Christmas that year.

  It was an epic transcontinental crossing, the real Childers experience. “Oh, please, do not get me started on that trip,” Sam Childers later said. “Compared to us, the Beverly Hillbillies are just for show.” The lead vehicle of the Childers family caravan was Joe’s 250-Diesel Ford pickup, towing a sixteen-foot flatbed trailer overloaded with farm machinery. Sam drove the middle pickup, a 1981 Toyota, also pulling a flatbed, this one bearing a hay wagon that had been temporarily converted into a shipping container for the tools, blacksmithing equipment, harness, and tack. Judy and Sandra brought up the rear in their 1983 Buick Regal, burdened down in the rear with luggage.

  They had their first breakdown a few miles out of Horn Lake, Mississippi, when the fuel injectors on the diesel crapped out, which for some reason took three days to repair. In Arkansas, during a bad rainstorm, Sam rear-ended a car in the Toyota pickup, so the front end of that had to be completely rebuilt. Joe’s trailer lights failed in Saint Joseph, Missouri, and the tires blew in Lincoln, Nebraska. When Joe and Sam temporarily abandoned one vehicle, in order to save another, they got stranded in snowstorms and the family ended up being separated a lot. It was a train wreck, a Donner Party farce, all the way from the Little Biloxi to the North Platte.

  “Yeah, I guess you could kind of maybe say that we set a record, I would admit that,” Joe said. “Thirteen days and five major breakdowns between Mississippi and Wyoming. We pulled into Casper two days after Christmas.”

  But nothing stopped the Childerses. After staying in motels and renting in a trailer park for three weeks, Joe and Judy found their 124-acre dream spread in Powell, moved in, and began making basic repairs. A week later, Joe and Sandy returned to Mississippi to trailer his horses and donkeys to Wyoming. Then he bought some more mules, met the Van Valins and the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen, built a big barn behind the house, and started working at sugar-beet processing plants and local ranches to supplement his navy pension. He loved owning a place with irrigation rights, big open fields to hay, and waking up in the morning to see his own small herd of beef cattle browsing on the high plains.

  Shane made his first visit to the new spread in Powell in July 1991, just after he came back on leave following Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait. For Joe and Judy, it was wonderful having him home, safe from the war, and seeing how enthusiastically he responded to their life now. The move west had significance way beyond geography, acreage, or the beautiful vistas the family now enjoyed. The residual tensions of Shane’s adolescent conflict with his father, the confusion introduced by Joe’s navy schedule, and the tough Gulfport schools, were fading. That was all a memory now, framed by the phrase “the Mississippi years,” and they’d gained separation from all that. They were living in the Bighorn country of Wyoming now, a place they were really meant for, and Shane had fought in the Persian Gulf War. Mississippi was behind them.

  Shane loved Wyoming, everything about it. As the years passed and he grew in sophistication and experience—he was returning now from Pacific cruises, or Paris, Nairobi, Tel Aviv—each visit to the new home place would be remembered by what Shane did that year, all the manic projects and crazyass fun. During that first visit, Shane repaired Joe’s combine. Later, they laid in new fence lines an
d irrigation pipe, broke horses together and fixed the barns, even did a little bit of shoeing for the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen. When they patched the shed roof, Shane snuck beers up in their nail buckets so that Judy wouldn’t know they were drinking in the middle of the day. The meticulous and varied obsession with physical fitness also thrived out west. Shane chased on his mountain bike five miles or more in the morning, ran ten miles along the rim of the Polecat Bench, then drove into Cody to buy camping or sporting gear, whatever he was into that year. Shane was always returning to Wyoming after some great mountaineering junket—the Alps, Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta in California, which he climbed four times—and the snowy Bighorns reminded him of those peaks.

  But Wyoming wasn’t just about the gorgeous views and Shane’s epic rides. It was the new feelings between them now. The Joe-Shane relationship had survived, prospered, and they were back together—literally—in the saddle. “Freakin’ A, Dad,” Shane would say. “We’re shoeing horses again.” It was thrilling for Joe to watch Shane’s progress and to enjoy such a wonderful son.

  At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Shane signed up for every kind of specialized training he could wrangle out of the marines—survival camp, night navigation training, jump school—during two more years of seasoning as a rifle infantryman. With Bill Hendry and his other marine pals, he did his share of carousing, hitting the strip joints in Jacksonville or careening off for wild weekends in Savannah or Wilmington Beach. But he was also becoming known as an enlisted man with exceptional potential.

  “Shane made sergeant faster than anyone I ever saw in the marines, after about eighteen months,” Hendry said. “It wasn’t simply that he was always one hundred percent effort or spent his free time working on his uniform. If he had a problem with one of his peers—and there’s a lot of that in the marines—he would take the initiative and resolve it. If he had a problem that had to be reported up, he was very direct about going to an officer and working it out. He just became marked as a solutions person, someone who didn’t create or accept problems, but fixed them.”