by Rinker Buck
In 1993 Shane was selected for poster-boy duty in the marines, the highly coveted Marine Security Guard course at Quantico in Virginia, which would make him eligible for work at embassies abroad. The training represented a lot more than just an opportunity to enjoy exotic travel and the comfortable routines of embassy life. Marine security guards don’t just man the gatehouse at the embassy entrance. They escort embassy wives and visiting VIPs to parties and conferences, help coordinate intelligence, and must be able to work with a wide variety of embassy officials—economic and political attachés, protocol and passport employees—in ways that go way beyond the skills of a rifle platoon grunt. The experience would nurture a number of latent qualities in Shane and lead to considerable change.
When he was done with the course at Quantico, Shane was assigned to the American consulate in Geneva and given an eight-hundred-dollar allowance for civilian clothes, which he would need for his evening security work at social functions. But he had never bought civilian dress clothes before and translated his need for help in an interesting way. The Childerses’ old navy friends from Gulfport, Paul and Becky Moore, were stationed at Quantico then. Paul Moore was a naval officer who had spent his career in the chaplain corps, and the Moores were a sophisticated, college-educated couple, worldly and always well-dressed. Shane called Becky, explained his problem, and she took him out one Saturday afternoon to the Potomac Mills Shopping Mall.
Boy, was that an enjoyable afternoon for Becky. The hunkiest marine at Quantico, twenty-one years old, had eight hundred dollars to blow on new clothes, and she was the one who got to dress the Ken doll. Becky knew the naval officer’s life and even a lot about embassy functions, and she gave Shane advice that she considered useful for the future. Okay, buy one really nice suit for formal occasions, but for the rest of the time just have one high-quality blue blazer, gray wool slacks, and shoes that are right. Keep it elegant, simple, be the effortlessly tasteful man. The most noticeable feature finishing off the look—shirts and ties—can always be changed and refurbished as you go along. Don’t be afraid to ask the sales staff to help you pick out the shirts and ties.
Shane was delightfully obsessive-compulsive about it, the way he always learned something new. Get the basics down, move on to the shirts, shoes, and belts—whoa, new concept, thanks, Becky—match a tie to your skin tone. He was completely self-assured about admitting what he didn’t know and was grateful for all Becky’s fashion tips.
“Shane was so cute that day,” Becky said. “I kept coming up and telling him what looked good, and it was wonderful being with a boy who responded so enthusiastically. He would be well dressed from then on. I just knew that.”
For the next three years, Shane lived a life straight out of a glossy Marine Corps brochure. He pulled down plum assignments in Geneva, Paris, and Nairobi, at first putting in a lot of uniformed duty at the guard post but then coming to the attention of his superiors as the ideal nonuniformed security presence at glittering parties and high-end economic conferences. The work was steady but not particularly demanding, and Shane had plenty of free weekend time. In Switzerland, simply because the lakes were there and it looked like such an interesting thing to do, he took sailing lessons. He kayaked, joined a bike-touring club, and began to climb the Alps. Within a month of reaching Nairobi in 1994, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, and after that he went on safari almost every weekend. He was well-liked by the State Department regulars he was now circulating with and becoming something of a legend for blowing in on Sunday nights with great stories about his latest mountain-climbing or camping junket.
In Nairobi Shane stood out for two other reasons which became important elements of his personal lore. In the U.S. Marine barracks, which wasn’t a barracks at all but instead a spacious house with wide lawns in the middle of an upper-class Nairobi suburb, Shane was assigned a comfortable room. But he pushed the bed aside and used it as a storage rack for his bike equipment and mountain-climbing gear, preferring to sleep on the floor. “I don’t want to get soft just because this is a cushy assignment,” Shane told friends. “Marines sleep on the floor.” He continued this practice for the rest of his marine career, often sleeping on the hard cement of apartment balconies or bedroom floors with thin industrial carpets.
There were also signs of an emerging passion for social justice, more typical of a college student than a marine his age, which markedly defined him later. Shane was embarrassed and even mildly angry when he learned that the marines in his barracks paid impoverished Kenyan women fifty cents a load to do their laundry. He refused to participate in a system that he considered nothing more than foreign wage-slavery and did his own laundry for more than a year. Later, when he was promoted to a supervisory job in Kenya and had less time, he sent his laundry out but insisted on paying his Kenyan laundress five dollars every time she did his clothes. It was still a pittance, Shane thought, but actually a very high price according to Kenyan wage standards. Typically, Shane was willing to suffer the consequences of his altruism. The other marines in the barracks were annoyed at him when their laundresses heard about what Shane was paying and insisted on a higher price. But Shane didn’t care and confidently rebuffed the criticism. Exploiting foreign labor to get your laundry done, he felt, did not befit a United States Marine.
Shane’s elan, his athletic appeal—particularly the brooding sense that he had hidden ambitions, that there was something still unrealized about him—was noticed by everyone, but they also laughed about another trait. He was charmingly clueless about women. He’d been that way ever since high school in Mississippi, awkward around girls, too busy with his many interests, and then his marine career, to really understand the effort of dating.
“I just don’t know what happened to Shane in that department anyway,” Joe Childers said. “I mean you’d take one look at that fellow and figure that most women would be pleased as punch just to buy that deal right off the hoof. But, you know, then Shane would buy some girl a corsage, or wax up the car before he took her to the dance. Then she’d dump him.”
Part of the problem was that young Shane was still very much a man’s man. It would take him five or six more years to fully transition to the throb who was “macho sensitive,” which was how virtually every woman who knew him later described Shane. The recessive West Virginia gene, which made him so entertaining around men, made him shy and noninitiating with women. And he was very picky about the opposite sex. They had to be what he called “perfect foxes,” that is trim, with very pretty faces, smart, and nonsmokers. But his values and personal tastes—country music, marine discipline, politics that leaned right—made him come off as a redneck who couldn’t attract those kind of girls. If someone disagreed with his ideas, or maybe just smoked a little pot, control-freakism took over and he chased them away.
Robbin Whitten was married to Shane’s commanding officer in Nairobi, and they became close friends during his security guard years. She had first met him in Paris in 1993, when Shane was briefly assigned to the American embassy there to provide security during a diplomatic conference.
“Oh, Shane Childers, wow, you know?” Whitten said. “He was like the Esquire model, the picture in Vanity Fair, the poster boy that every commander wanted in his unit. Very courteous, very military in bearing, but also very, very charmingly informal, even vulnerable. We called him ‘The Traffic Stopper.’ Believe me, when that marine walked down the Champs Élysées, every girl in Paris noticed. But Shane was completely out to lunch about it. He couldn’t believe that he was adored by women.”
But then it finally happened for him, in Nairobi in 1994, a beautiful and romantic relationship that lasted for more than a year.
Adi Arad was the daughter of an Israeli consulate official who had lived in the expatriate community in Kenya since 1988. She was ranked third in the country in the one-hundred-meter breaststroke and spoke flawless New York English from attending the American School in Nairobi. She was outgoing, sexy, and super-b
right, with soft, olive skin and a wild mane of brown curly hair with blond highlights from the African sun. On Friday nights, with her other expat girlfriends, she regularly attended Movie Night at the suburban U.S. Marine barracks, which were staged after an elaborate picnic on the broad lawns outside the house. The American marines loved to flirt with her, crowding around and telling her who they were, pulling all the usual moves, but Adi was profoundly disinterested in them all. She just wanted to see good American flicks.
The night she met Shane the movie was 8 Seconds, a cowboy film about a bullrider played by Luke Perry.
“Oooooh. Who’s that marine over there? I think I might go for that.”
“Forget it,” one of Adi’s girlfriends told her. “That’s Sergeant Childers. He just got here. He’s completely square and all he does is climb mountains and ride bikes.”
But she was intrigued because of his great looks and mysterious contrasts. When he was at rest and not saying much Childers looked somber and withdrawn. But the minute he spoke and smiled, his eyes sparkled and his demeanor seemed cheerful and fun. What a hunk, and so polite looking. Adi was not bashful and after 8 Seconds was over she walked across the room and asked his name.
“Shane,” he said.
“Oh, come off it. That’s too good a line. Shane. Are you a cowboy, too?”
“Well, no. But I mean yes, in a way. The full name is Therrel Shane, actually. I didn’t just make it up for tonight.”
Oh boy. The southern accent, which she loved right away, and the Robert Duvall voice. Hunky, courteous, probably a little bit vulnerable, self-effacing around women. Adi, girl, this is going to be one fun pile of work.
“He was textbook marine,” Adi said years later. “So textbook, so marine, and so unbelievably square that it was completely attractive. I couldn’t wait to roll up my sleeves and start loosening this guy up.”
But it was work at first. Technically, Shane was not allowed to date Adi because she was only eighteen and marine regulations forbid dating “natives” that young, even if Adi was obviously sophisticated way beyond her years. Shane was a real stickler for the rules and resisted her for a while, even though they talked for hours now after movie night. She found him fascinating, this unique blend of working-class hero and brainy intellectual trying to break out. He was in Kenya now, so he was reading every book he could find on British colonial Africa, which he loved to share with her and discuss. It was a classic brainfuck that was going well.
Everyone in the barracks was laughing about it—Shane was following the rules and wouldn’t date Adi. Finally a commanding officer got wind of this and pulled Shane aside.
“Childers, you miserable bonehead. Frig the rules, man. That girl can easily pass for twenty, so get a life. You’re good to go on this one.”
They immediately “clicked,” as Adi put it, as soon as they started dating, and they did all of Nairobi and Kenya together. She gave him tapes of the latest European rock bands and he introduced her to Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks. She loved going to the Carnivore nightclub with him because it was fun showing him how easy it was to break the law in Kenya and buy her drinks. Lighten up, Shane. They spent long, dreamy weekends at her parents’ house and went on photo-safaris at the bush resorts. At the pool, when he stripped down to his trunks to swim, the body was unbelievable. All those years of calisthenics and weight-lifting had produced a physique that belonged in the magazine spreads about Muscle Beach.
They were together almost every day. On weeknights Shane would occasionally take her to meetings of his mountaineering club. The group mostly consisted of middle-aged European and British expats, very serious about climbing, and they sat around all night in dens decorated with paintings of giraffes and Mount Kilimanjaro, watching slide shows and talking about snakebite kits.
“Hey, Shane, mind if I ask you about the meeting back there?” Adi said one night while he was driving her home.
“No, no,” he said. “Anything wrong?”
“Shane,” Adi said. “You climb the mountain, right? Then you walk back down. Is there really anything more to it than that? I mean, all those guys back there. They were talking about compasses.”
Shane threw his head back and howled, and oh did she love him that night. He could really laugh his ass off about himself. He had self-knowledge, so much of it, and such good self-mocking humor.
“Adi, sorry, sorry.” Shane laughed. “Christ, I’m such an idiot. But look, they’re not really that bad, right?”
“Shane, they’re total losers. I’m never climbing a mountain with those guys.”
“Okay! Okay! I’m an idiot. Want to go for a drink?”
Still, she couldn’t completely liberate Shane from the marine mentality, or his West Virginia roots. Adi’s family was very Israeli, which is to say Euro-hip, globally cool, not at all square or clueless. The Arads adored Shane, expressed out loud that they were adopting him as a son, and trusted him completely with their daughter. When the Arads went to bed for the night, Adi and Shane in turn headed for her room, pushing the two small beds in there together so it was more comfortable to sleep together. In the morning, when he woke to change for his run, Shane would start fussing around the room, hurriedly cleaning up and insisting that they separate the beds back to the original floor plan.
“Adi! C’mon, get up. Let’s get these beds squared away,” Shane would say. “Your mother might come in here and be shocked if she finds the beds are together.”
“Shane, go for your run,” Adi would say, refusing to wake up. “If my mother comes in here, she’ll be shocked if the beds are apart.”
“Oh my God, don’t say that, please. I mean, she doesn’t know, right? You’re joking me.”
“Shane…Shane?”
“What?”
“Take your run. Please?”
And the Shane Childers obsessive-compulsive technique for making new friends, falling in love. He was becoming a Jew now. Shane went to a book store in downtown Nairobi and bought every volume he could find about Judaism and studied them all. He sat up with Adi’s parents until past midnight, discussing Jewish history, Zionism, and the founding of Israel. Of course, he became particularly adept at Jewish military history, all the way from the Maccabees to Yoni at Entebbe.
“Shane was fascinated by my Jewishness and just couldn’t get enough of it,” Adi said. “He had to know everything about everything, of course, but now it was everything about Jews. That’s not an exaggeration. It was totally adorable and pathetic. By the time we broke up, he knew more about Judaism than I did.”
They were first lovers and thought it would last forever. But in 1995 Adi, after much anguish, decided that she should return to Israel and perform her national military service. Shane was great about that, putting his self-interest aside to discuss it with her. Adi, what’s good about this for you, what might be bad for us. He was lovingly supportive and wanted her to do what she believed in. After she left in October that year, Shane wrote her long, morose letters from Nairobi—life at the embassy, the expat scene in Africa, was boring without her.
In February 1996 Shane made a ten-day trip to Israel to be with her and tour the Jerusalem historic sites, but the trip was a disaster. Because of her language skills, Adi was based with an Israeli Army intelligence unit up on the Lebanese border, acting as a liaison with the multinational forces enforcing United Nations border agreements. The day Shane visited her base up north, it was shelled by guerilla forces from Lebanon and Shane had to leave as soon as he reached the gate. Then when she got back to Tel Aviv to be with him, the shelling started again and she was ordered back to base. Shane spent his time visiting the Mediterranean beaches and touring the ruins with Adi’s mother. They were at an impasse, and they bravely faced it. Adi was serving in the Israeli Army and would certainly want to date a few more men before she decided on a commitment. Shane was a U.S. Marine and would be perpetually on the move. It just wasn’t working.
Over the years, they corresponded sporadical
ly and talked on the phone late at night. They even reunited once in New York. But their hearts were broken now and they could never reclaim what they’d had once in distant, dreamy Kenya. Kissing that first time outside the nightclub in Nairobi. Hiking back into the bush and photographing wildlife, then reclining by the resort pool as the sun fell over Kilimanjaro. The memories remained the most potent of their lives and, five years later, when he described Adi to close friends, Shane’s eyes would still well up with tears. But they could never quite get it back and Shane and Adi never “clicked” again.
But the Arad family connection proved provocative for Shane, and he used it in the usual way. Back in Nairobi, he sat up long into the night discussing his life and his dreams about the future with Adi’s mother, Micheal. Shane and Micheal became quite close—he called her his second mother—and Adi thought that she could sense what was going on, when she heard about their talks by letter or phone. It was the old available-mom syndrome. He was in Nairobi now, lovesick and pondering his future, and Micheal was a patient, solid enabler.
And Micheal could see what was going on. Shane was super-bright, completely adorable as a personality, burning with ambition. He was perfectionist and tended to default toward control-freakism when he wasn’t sure of his way. At twenty-four, he still had some personal and family baggage to resolve. Intellectual growth would round out a lot of these edges and give him something new to achieve. It was with Micheal that Shane started pondering the idea of finally getting with the program and realizing his potential. It was time to consider college.
Everyone else could see it as well. It had been a quick climb in the marines for a boy from Harrison Central High School in Gulfport, Mississippi. But now Shane was edgy, impatient, almost manic about his future. Classically driven, he needed a new challenge just to enjoy life. And now he was opening up a little and saying something new to his friends in the marines and diplomatic corps, a clear result of having tasted embassy life. It nagged at him, socially, that no one in his immediate family had a college degree. He knew that he wouldn’t rise further in the marines—not to mention in life—until he acquired a college degree.
