Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  Christ, photo albums. First Sergeant Morgan saw the problem clearly.

  “Okay, it probably wasn’t Kevin’s fault—he’s just a super-conscientious marine,” Morgan said later. “It’s the military, the officer system. They take a guy with a normal upbringing, two good parents, and a nice town somewhere, and what do they do to make him an officer? Send him to college. He gets sensitive, you know? It’s a total waste of energy. Christ, we went so overboard with sensitive on the Childers CACO it isn’t even funny.”

  On Friday another small wrinkle came up. Joe Childers was planning on wearing his old Seabee dress uniform to the funeral, but he didn’t have a pair of regulation navy enlisted chief petty officer’s trousers that fit him anymore. Joe also needed the regulation belt. Because this was a CACO case, the uniform supplier, the Navy Exchange, was willing to ship by FedEx overnight. But the CACO manuals didn’t say that government funds were authorized for this expense. The pants and belt would cost forty-eight dollars, plus shipping, but no one in the Billings command felt like calling Joe Childers and asking for the money.

  “Sir, what should we do about the chief petty officer’s pants for Joe?” Morgan asked Hutchison.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Barry,” Hutchison said distractedly, looking up from his desk in the middle of a dozen other CACO details. “Can you handle that one? Do you mind?”

  Hell, no. Morgan didn’t mind. At that moment he realized the problem that he had with this super-sensitive, Pomona-educated California surfer boy captain of his. Fucking Hutch. Morgan liked the guy too much.

  “Done, sir,” Morgan said. “I’m on it.”

  Meanwhile, down on the Childers ranch, Joe and Judy were receiving visitors and graciously accepting the anonymous gifts and outpouring of support from the town of Powell. In the morning, cars drove in—they were women from the American Legion auxillary, or Judy’s friends from Avon—bearing containers of casseroles, country-fried chicken, and baked goods, even cartons of soda and coffee. Joe received a delegation from his employer, Northstate Corp., and stood out on the front patio with the men, talking for half an hour beside the flag that was hanging at half-mast. Joe was subdued, but cheerful, almost his old self—telling stories, joking—because he was all cried out for now. He could see the anguish on the faces of his visitors, the awkwardness about what to say, and felt an obligation to entertain. The men, many of them, wrapped their big arms around his shoulders and hugged him sideways, pushed their ball caps up and then were insistent about one point.

  “But, Joe, there must be something we can do for you. How can we help?”

  “Oh, I’m all right, really,” Joe said. “It’s hard to concentrate on much at the moment. We’re fine for now. The marines are taking really good care of us.”

  It was interesting, though, how people translated that. The Northstate men asked the Childerses what they could do. Joe suggested that they order some gravel for the driveway. A couple of hours after the Northstate group left, two ten-wheeler gravel trucks showed up at the Childerses place, started dumping and smoothing, and by midafternoon the driveway looked brand new. There was only one bathroom in the house, and the Childerses were expecting a lot of company. Northstate also sent over a truck bearing two Porta-Johns and had them installed behind the toolshed.

  Shane Childers arrived at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in the fall of 1998. For the first time since he was a teenager, he was liberated from the tedium of intensive military training, deployments, and the perpetual scrutiny of professional and personal review. Charleston and The Citadel were an ideal mix for him, pure Shane in a lot of ways, and it’s hard to imagine him flowering as he did in any of the other schools where he’d been accepted. Now he was a mid-twenties cadet at one of the nation’s most prestigious military colleges, revered in legend, Civil War histories, and novels, most notably Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline. The Citadel appeased Shane’s military side, his need to channel his ferocious energy in a disciplined, martial environment. As he settled into an off-campus apartment on Smith Street near Charleston’s gracious historic district, Shane also was exultant about discovering civilian life, rounding out as a person. In letters to friends he excitedly described the city’s night life and his evening and weekend excursions now—pub-crawling at the touristy bars, listening to contemporary folk musicians at the coffeehouses, discovering antiquarian bookstores. He shopped for furniture and rugs at antique stores, taught himself to cook nouvelle cuisine, and filled his apartment walls and every flat surface with books, hundreds of books.

  While The Citadel years would eventually change him, at first Shane was as manic and driven as ever. The word universally used to describe him was intense. On weekends he competed in triathlon events in Florida and the Carolinas, junketed off to Georgia or Virginia to hike the Appalachian Trail, or made the long drive back to Salt Rock to goof off and kayak with his favorite West Virginia cousins, Jessi and Jonna Walker. Friends continued to be amazed by the pace he could maintain. Every morning he rose at five to run and then put in twelve miles on his bike, and then he attended classes, dealt with his Marine ROTC unit, and studied all night. At midnight he was still going strong, The Citadel Energizer Bunny, yap-yapping away on the phone with friends about his girlfriend problems, his history term paper, or goading someone he loved to pay attention to their goals and explore personal growth.

  The Shane Childers legend would grow immensely while he was at The Citadel, but more than anything else it derived from his passionate sense of justice. Within weeks of arriving at the campus that fall, one incident in particular established Shane as an unforgettable force who would leave his mark in ways that challenged The Citadel’s rich but inflexible traditions.

  Hazing was still a big part of Citadel life then. It was ritualized abuse that enforced a traditional rite of passage during which incoming freshman cadets were introduced to “discipline” and “humility” by mostly out-of-control upperclassmen. Less than half The Citadel’s graduates actually go on to military service—the college is also a reliable feeder system for the South’s banks, insurance companies, and law schools—but hazing kept alive a caste structure that guaranteed that Citadel graduates would some day become tough, unbreakable company men. All fall the green lawns of The Citadel’s stately quadrangle echoed with the shouts of senior cadets running the newbies through push-up drills, uniform inspections, and verbal taunting. The late-night antics in the barracks-style dormitories were a lot worse.

  Shane Childers, a MECEP marine and a Gulf War veteran—not to mention simply how he carried himself in general—was supremely immune from this treatment, of course. No one dared asked him to do push-ups on the grass.

  But one day he was crossing the campus and saw a large group of upperclassmen standing around and watching an eager bully at his work, humiliating a freshman with verbal abuse and comments about his uniform, not letting up and clearly enjoying the laughter of his senior peers. The young cadet was showing signs of stress, but still the seniors wouldn’t let up. Shane’s sense of justice surfaced—there must have been residual frustration left over from boot camp eight years ago, or marine life in general, where abuse of the weak is so common. Or maybe it was just Shane’s innate impatience with morons.

  Shane didn’t snap or overplay his hand. He simply walked over to the bullying cadet, stepped up on his toes a bit to stare him down face-to-face, and said one thing, calmly, “That’s not a soldier.”

  That’s all he said. “That’s not a soldier.”

  Then Shane just stood there facing the senior down eyeball to eyeball, seeing if he would react.

  The senior cadet was too astounded to say anything, and was clearly intimidated by Shane. After a long, pregnant silence, he turned on his heels and left, and the crowd around him quickly dispersed. Shane remained on the quadrangle grass for a few minutes, quietly introducing himself to his fellow member of the freshman class, chatting and making sure that he was all right.

  News of
the Childers stare-down spread quickly around the campus, and was particularly admired by faculty members, most of whom detested the hazing system for its impact on campus morale and student attention spans. What Shane had done was a dramatic violation of protocol, a direct affront to tradition. This simply wasn’t done at The Citadel—freshmen didn’t confront seniors like that and interrupt hazing. Now this new man on campus, an uber-marine named Shane Childers, had done exactly that and made an important statement about a practice that he didn’t like. Hazing didn’t change, of course. But everyone was talking about it and Shane was now known as someone completely different at The Citadel, and certainly not to be trifled with. “It’s fun being the black sheep,” he later wrote about his Citadel experiences in a letter to Adi Arad, but it was much more than that. Shane’s unique mix of sensitivity and strength made him a standout on The Citadel campus, and the event was still spoken about years later.

  “Shane was always doing things like this and he stood out at The Citadel right away,” said Guy Toubiana, a native of France who is a member of the school’s language faculty and became one of Shane’s closest friends. “If the cadets were acting up in class, he would stare them down and say ‘Show more respect,’ and they did. It wasn’t simply his sense of justice and the code of military discipline. And he certainly wasn’t big or scary. But you could see the strength in his eyes.”

  Academically, Shane performed poorly at first and clearly showed signs of a student unprepared for college and intimidated by the workload. In both French and English, his sentence structure was poor and in one spring-semester French course, his test grades kited between the low forties and high sixties, until with a final push he managed to pull off an eighty-four on the final exam and just barely pass the course. He obsessed about subjects rather than truly understanding them, often taking out more than a dozen library books just to complete a five-page paper. Scholastic humility—just a willingness to settle down, listen, and learn—did not come easily to him, especially in military history courses where he believed that he already knew the material. He considered those professors arrogant “know-it-alls” and conducted semester-long battles with Ph.D. historians over such topics as the U.S. Air Force’s strategic bombing campaign against Japan in World War II or Napoleon’s defeat in Russia. The one complaint about him to reach administrators at The Citadel was revelatory. Shane Childers owed so much in fines for overdue books at libraries all over town that three of them were threatening to shred his borrower’s card.

  But Shane was engagingly persistent. With professors that he trusted, he was constantly asking for help and extra work, appearing in their offices without appointments and chatting with them until he demanded that they correct his papers before he turned them in. Wisely deciding against majoring in history—he detested the department, a feeling that apparently was mutual—he settled instead on French, concluding that language skills would be of inestimable use for him as a marine officer. Later, he thought, a degree in languages might help him develop a second career as a State Department official, or he could always take advantage of generous military support for officers pursuing graduate degrees and get his masters and doctorate in French. Serving some day as a diplomat at one of the embassies where he was once just a marine guard, or teaching at a college, were active fantasies he discussed a lot with friends.

  Besides, the routines of the language department—French-language banquets once or twice a semester, monthly roundtables at a French restaurant downtown, summer study programs abroad—were very appealing to Shane, and he thrived in the environment. By the fall of his second year he was pulling down straight As and after that never left the dean’s list. He became legendary in the department for cramming in every extra-credit opportunity he could find around the world, and spent his summers on academic and mountain-climbing junkets to France, French Equatorial Africa, and Middlebury College in Vermont.

  “Shane did extremely well at The Citadel, but not because the material came easily to him,” Toubiana said. “He worked very, very hard. He was one of the very few students I’ve ever had who would come back every time after a test and insist on figuring out why he got a single question wrong. And he was obsessed, truly obsessed, with getting a B.A. in French because he could speak the language fluently. He had to be perfect all the time—that was his personal standard.”

  Shane was unavoidable for another reason. By Citadel tradition, cadets deferred either to the ranking cadet or the academic leader in a class, and Shane usually qualified as both. The student leader received the professor’s first question, helped lead discussions, and even occasionally assisted in the presentation of lectures. There were groans all around when cadets realized that they’d enrolled in a course with Shane.

  “It was basically an attitude of ‘Oh, crap, we’re in this course with Childers,’” said French professor Christopher McRae, who also became a close friend and fan of Shane. “Shane would shine and dominate, no matter what.”

  McRae’s girlfriend, Barbara Blatchley, was the chairman of the psychology department at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and frequently made the weekend commute to Charleston. One Friday in the spring of 2000, McRae asked her to deliver a guest lecture on language and the brain to his French class, an experience that proved memorable because it was Blatchley’s first experience with Shane. Before her lecture began, Shane approached the visiting professor outside the classroom and asked that she include in her presentation as much as she could say about Tourette’s syndrome—he simply wanted to know more about it. After the class was over he approached her again. Shane felt that the students had been lethargic and nonresponsive, asking too few questions when she was done, and he just wanted to apologize to her for the disappointing performance of the class.

  “In seventeen years of teaching, I had never seen a student doing either one of these things, and now here was someone doing both at once,” Blatchley said. “First, this very earnest and obviously intense student wants to set the agenda for the lecture and tell me what I should talk about. Then he apologizes for his class. And all through the class, I noticed, he was clearly the alpha dog in the pack. Before all the other students asked a question, they would glance at him as if they were asking his permission ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ I just had to ask myself. You just couldn’t forget Shane Childers once you had encountered him.”

  And that alpha dog just wouldn’t let go of his sense of justice either. Like many Citadel professors, McRae was often annoyed that the hectic schedules maintained by cadets—early-morning marching drills, military events all day, the distractions of hazing—were exhausting and left too little room for social development and the kind of wishful thinking that should occur during the college years. His biggest problem was cadets falling asleep in class. The student body was drawn mostly from the South and from military families and their social outlook tended to be narrow, typecast. To expose his cadets to broader possibilities, McRae occasionally liked to steer his classes toward open discussions, especially when he was teaching sociolinguistics.

  Shane could always be relied upon to be provocative during such discussions, one reason McRae appreciated having him in his class, and his views were not always as predictable as they seemed. His political mind-set was generally right of center—pro-military, of course, pro-Republican, a Reagan-style thinker on economics, taxes, and the size of government. But he had no patience at all for the social agenda of the conservatives and detested both intolerance and self-righteous religion. One day, the subject in McRae’s class turned to homosexuality and gays, a high-profile issue just then in a military environment like The Citadel. After initially botching an attempt at reform, the Clinton administration’s stance on gays in the military had evolved to the controversial policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

  “Homophobia is a big part of the culture at The Citadel,” McRae said. “But Shane defended gays. He was more adamant about it than persuasive, I would say, but it was a very moving
experience for me. I couldn’t be very effective preaching tolerance, because the cadets would just dismiss me as a typical civilian instructor, probably a closet liberal. But Shane was a marine, studying to become a commissioned officer, with all the political assumptions involved. And here he was at The Citadel, in this pressure-cooker environment where homophobia is rampant. He wasn’t afraid to speak up, defend gays, and denounce prejudice. His basic position was that this is America. Personal freedom counts. Gays have a right to be who they are. He wasn’t going to listen to anyone bash gays, not in his class, not in his country.”

  McRae left the campus that day convinced that Shane Childers was one of the most remarkable and open-minded people he had ever met. It was Shane’s courage to think on his own, the personal growth track, that impressed McRae the most, because he knew a lot about Shane now. He had grown up in Mississippi, in a military family, and spent the last nine years as a marine. But personal freedom and independent thinking mattered more to him than the standard military line on gays. For McRae, Shane had just “saved the reputation of the marines.”

  And it didn’t bother Shane in the least that word quickly circulated around The Citadel about what he said in the class, and that some cadets were labeling him “pro-fag.” Shane was Shane, that was it, and this was the American way. Tolerance, period. Sure, Childers could be a pain in the butt to have in your course. He just wouldn’t stop achieving or shut up in class. But McRae was deeply touched by his performance that day and knew that he would never forget this uber-marine named Shane.

  And no matter what, Shane just couldn’t stop building on that legend. It was his style now, the irrepressible Childers default. Go somewhere exotic, study hard and climb a mountain, confront injustice, save a damsel in distress, then return to campus with the Shane mystique enhanced.