by Rinker Buck
Inside, at the dining-room table, Joe and Judy were marveling at the bounty of mail, gifts, and expressions of grief reaching them from all over the country, even the world. Friends they had lost touch with years ago and people who had simply read about Shane in their local papers were sending cards, gift certificates for flowers, long letters, and even CD tapes with patriotic or religious music. The alumni from Shane’s high school class back in Mississippi sent a gift certificate good for a seventy-five-dollar purchase at the local nursery, and there were already inquiries from prominent graduates of The Citadel about establishing a scholarship fund in Shane’s honor.
Judy was particularly impressed because she felt that a lot of the people who were reaching out to the Childers family now were more emotional about Shane’s death than they were. This was interesting and, in a flash of insight, she felt that she understood what was happening. She and Joe were here, in a house full of memories of Shane, confronting grief everywhere they stepped, fielding phone calls all day, which forced them to emotionally resolve, if only for the moment. But the other marine mothers out there who were writing, or just strangers who cared, had no markers of Shane around, nothing real to confront. They were grieving into a void, abstracting Shane as the first killed in Iraq and imagining what his family must be going through, with nothing tangible or immediate to relieve those feelings. So they all sent letters and gifts. She and Joe appreciated that, but their overloaded mailbox meant something else. There was just an abstracted need out there for people to grieve the losses of a new war, and Shane’s death provided focus for that urge.
By the end of the weekend, tired after so much attention and media interviews, Judy would often say that she was “tired of sharing Shane.” But for now the surplus of mail made her appreciate how far off Wyoming and its funeral drama for Shane must seem to people who were reading about the Childerses in Wisconsin or Georgia.
“Oh! Joe, look at this,” Judy said. “Here’s one from Beetle Bailey of Gulfport. Didn’t you used to talk about a Beetle Bailey from Gulfport?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think I remember him.”
Then they were interrupted by the delivery woman from the florist in Powell, who by now had made so many runs to the house that Judy was starting to think of her as an old friend. After the flower delivery, Judy stepped over to the phone. A producer in New York from ABC’s 20/20 needed help with some information about Shane. They were cobbling together a segment for that night’s broadcast about soldiers killed in Iraq and would be using footage shot by a local television station of the Childerses.
As soon as the line was free another call came in, this one for Joe. After he had mumbled into the phone in the kitchen for a while, Joe returned to the living room, wiping tears from his eyes.
“It’s just all these memories people think they are helping us with,” Joe said, “but it just gets me all worked up again. That was some old boy from West Virginia. He says that we were blacksmithing friends and he was over at our place the day Shane was born.”
To get away from the phone, and all the letters, Joe pulled on his USS Tortuga cap and stepped outside to the front of the house. He wanted to run a new line and straighten out the electrical connection for the lights illuminating the flag at half-mast. If a lot of visitors congregated on the front patio, which they were likely to do, he didn’t want anyone tripping on an electrical cord.
He felt better as soon as he got out there. Monkeying around in his shop, finding just the right tools and U-shaped nails to get the job done, was vaguely satisfying. He was rushed again with the feeling he’d had as a teenager back in West Virginia, running down the hollow with his father and some wooden boxes of tools to help the neighbors or members of their church prepare their little farm for a big funeral.
When he stepped back to survey his finished work, Joe pushed up his ball cap and took in the panorama of prairie and mountains stretching off toward Cody. The sun had dropped a bit and now the winter cumulus were pink underneath from the shallow angle of light. In the breeze, the trailing edge of the flag for Shane snapped like a whip.
Oh, Wyoming. It was a small comfort, but Joe was grateful that he was enduring the loss of Shane in the Bighorn country, on his own dream ranch, with so much beautiful scenery and his browsing steers and horses all around. The openness and familiarity of the land seemed to touch and protect him. And the new gravel on the driveway looked good, crisply lined at the edges and gunmetal gray, like a frigate with fresh paint. The house seemed ready for guests.
THE WEST VIRGINIA COUSINS
The steady arrival of old friends and family members had a calming influence on the Childerses, particularly Joe, who soon fell into comfortable routine. As more and more people appeared, he would harness Amigo and April, hitch them up to his hay wagon, and then take each visitor in turn for a run out to feed the cattle and enjoy a private chat. By now his son Sam and son-in-law Richard Brown were at the ranch, then his old Seabee pal Robert Reagan and Shane’s former marine buddy Bill Hendry. They were all military men and Joe considered it a luxury just to be with them, chatting in a familiar argot, catching up on their news, jawing away about his cattle or how he had rerouted this particular irrigation trench so that the field got better coverage. It was good to get away from the house and its sadness, the bustle and the ringing phone.
Joe was particularly glad to see Reagan, his old Vietnam War buddy. Reagan and Joe had been close friends since 1967, worked on a number of Seabee projects together, and stayed in touch over the years, even after Reagan retired from the navy and settled in London for a life of working at the American embassy and trout-fishing on weekends. He is tall and rangy with a mottled complexion, a smoker, and has an irrepressible sarcasm gene. Reagan believed that the bond he and Joe had formed in Vietnam was as strong as “blood kin,” and indeed joined the boisterous dynamics of the Childerses as someone who was nearly a member of the family. “Joe is my little brother and I’m his big brother, and that’s that,” Reagan liked to say. “Of course, that sometimes means that Judy and I fight like cats and dogs.” Reagan had also stayed in close touch with Shane. When Shane was traveling through London on his way to various marine assignments or studying overseas, he stayed with Reagan and his wife, arriving at their apartment with a huge, ninety-pound pack of mountain-climbing gear. Over the years, Reagan felt that he had watched Shane progress from a “typical country kid from the South” into a “very squared-away marine” who had made impressive intellectual growth during his Citadel years.
But Reagan had never seen the Childers spread in Wyoming and now it was a joy for Joe to show him around and discourse on his various possessions—the collection of MacClellan saddles, the one-man plows, the foxtrotter filly. Joe and Robert took long walks up on the Polecat Bench and rode into town together. Robert had a strong reaction to seeing the Powell ranch, because everywhere he turned there were markers of Shane.
“When Shane came through London, he would talk about all these grand plans he had some day of getting a long break from the marines and helping Joe fix up all the farm implements, or make improvements to the house,” Reagan said. “Seeing all these piles of farm equipment around just reminds me a lot of Shane and his dreams.”
Reagan is both direct and psychologically intuitive, a man’s man with a sensitive touch, and Joe seemed more relaxed as soon as he arrived. They went back so far together that Joe could say nearly anything to Robert and be confident that he’d receive an honest reply. Joe, for example, shared with Robert his recurrent thought about “Shane coming diddly-boppin’ down that lane again,” and reproached himself for saying that phrase too often.
“I told Joe that he shouldn’t worry about saying that, or dreaming that Shane would just come diddly-boppin’ down that lane again some day,” Reagan said. “It was a perfectly healthy response, part of his coping with just how much he’d lost here. I could tell that Joe appreciated my attitude. It wasn’t wrong what he was saying to himself at all, and peop
le in that kind of stress need a friend just to say that. ‘Hey, it’s okay, bud. In your shoes I’d be saying the same thing.’”
Shane’s friend from his Persian Gulf days, Bill Hendry, was another welcome sight. When they sat up late at night in Saudi Arabia, or later at Camp Lejeune, Shane would tell Hendry all his favorite stories about his madcap family back in Wyoming. Joe knew that and was anxious to show Hendry the place Shane had described. It was an education for Hendry, a useful filling in. Like so many others he’d always been amazed by Shane Childers, his rare blend of toughness and flexibility, the knack for handling any battlefield or training contingency, the ability to just ride right through personality disorders in others. And the caring for people, the passion for life and a friend’s personal growth. It all had to come from somewhere, and now Hendry was seeing it firsthand—the story-a-minute dad, the buckaroo ranch, the ambient mania of the Childers experience. But it filled Hendry with sadness to be meeting Joe and seeing the ranch without Shane. That was his first reaction. “God, I can’t wait to tell Shane about this.” But he couldn’t, of course.
With Reagan and Hendry, Joe was able to talk about another thing—what had happened to Shane in Iraq. He wasn’t morbid about this, and the subject didn’t make him cry. As a military man and a father, he was fascinated by Shane’s fate, and with Reagan and Hendry they worked out all the angles. How had Shane, so capable and smart—brave, but never a yahoo about personal safety—gone down like this? They knew that a complete battlefield report would not be available for months, but certain details were already obvious. Shane was shot early in the morning after the platoon he was leading had taken a critical, first objective of the war, Pumping Station Number 2 at Rumaila. The marines were determined to secure these fields, just north of the border with Kuwait, to prevent Saddam’s forces from torching them before they retreated. Shane’s unit had received very high marks during training at the Twentynine Palms desert warfare grounds in California in the fall of 2002, which was why they were chosen to be among the first assault groups to charge over the berm into Iraq.
Shane’s unit had taken the objective, with no other men killed, which meant that he had been successful, efficient. That made Joe proud, but it also meant that Shane’s death must have occurred during the early-morning mop-up phase. A sniper maybe? A breakout by Iraqis not yet captured? Friendly fire? They just didn’t know yet but it seemed such a waste. Shane had gotten there and made it, he’d obviously led his men well. But how do you go from being first victor in a war to first killed? It was still such a mystery.
Marine platoon leaders operate under two prevailing but essentially contradictory doctrines. Officers lead from the front to set an example for their men, but this can make them an especially visible target during combat. Platoon leaders often travel with radiomen as well, which also makes them stand out. However, marine doctrine also encourages platoon leaders, nearing an objective, to establish a protected place that allows them to see all the action and fields of fire while leading their men from a safe command point. Platoon leaders receive intensive training and run through every conceivable scenario during live-fire exercises. They are taught to improvise constantly on both points, but in actual combat it’s a confusing, deadly juggle between the two principles.
Talking with Joe about what might have happened to Shane, Reagan favored the first doctrine.
“In London, the minute I read Shane Childers’ name on the casualty list in the Stars and Stripes, I wasn’t at all surprised that he’d been killed,” Reagan said. “If you spent five minutes with this kid you instantly knew he would be right out front and not accepting risks for his men that he wouldn’t assume himself. He would have been so obviously the guy in charge that the Iraqis just took one look and decided to take him out.”
But Hendry wasn’t so sure about this and tended to favor the more cautious doctrine. Shane was unquestionably fearless—he just didn’t know fear the way other people experienced it—but he was also very analytical and results oriented. He disdained false notions of bravery, or crazy risk takers. If you were recklessly brave and got shot, now you weren’t leading your men.
“There was a shrewdness about him, a caginess, all that southern boy who had been in the woods a lot,” Hendry said. “When we were in training together, you could almost hear the wheels turning in Shane’s head. When we got back at night, he would say, ‘Okay, here’s what they said to do. Here’s how you can improvise. But here’s what is smart.’ Shane would have been like that in Iraq. He wouldn’t have been rattled because Shane wasn’t rattled, period, but he’d also been in combat before. Whatever killed him was something freakish, unexpected.”
But they couldn’t really say for sure now. Perhaps the autopsy record, and later the battlefield report, which Hutchison promised he would eventually obtain for Joe, would solve the mystery. But it was profitable for Joe to speak about this with Robert and Bill. It took his mind off things that he’d done with Shane, the recollections that made him cry, the constant reprise of memory that had become exhausting.
So jingling out across the prairie behind the Belgians, with their legs dangling over the front of the wagon, they all did the big Wyo-Iraq mind-wander together, trying to figure out what happened with Shane. But they enjoyed themselves too, throwing bales of hay to the cattle, joking, laughing, pointing out antelope or mule deer chasing up toward the Bench. The early spring weather was variable at the end of the week, with overcast skies a good deal of the time, then sunny and bright with broken clouds for a few hours, with the wind shifting southeast to north. But it was always brisk, so they were chilled to the bone when they got back to the house. Robert wanted to smoke outside, so Joe made coffee and then carried two steaming cups out to join his friend.
The two Seabee pals sat out in the toolshed on white Rubbermaid patio chairs, with the wide double doors open to the prairie and the views southwest. Robert smoked while they both drank coffee and talked. They caught up on each other’s lives and told amusing stories about Shane. Out toward Cody and Yellowstone National Park, the sky was moody, inclement. One of Joe’s donkeys brayed from the corral. It was good, really good, for Robert to be there. Robert was a strong friend who made Joe feel like he could get through this.
Shane’s Charleston years and the valuable hiatus from military life that they provided had another important chapter, the deepening of his connection with Jessi and Jonna Walker, his cousins from Salt Rock. The Walker sisters had grown up on West Virginia and southern Ohio farms so isolated they had to walk almost a mile to the school bus and rarely saw other children. Their father worked long hours as a railroad foreman and left behind detailed lists of chores for the Walker children to perform during the planting and harvesting seasons—the backbreaking work of bean picking and stripping tobacco, mostly. Their mother, Natalie, is Joe’s sister, and like all the cousins in the extended Childers clan, Shane spent a lot of time at their place in “Walker Holler” when he was visiting Salt Rock in the summer.
Even when he was just twelve or fourteen, Shane stood out as different. When there was farming to be done at the Walker place, all the other cousins had the sense to scatter or not show up in the first place, but Shane loved the field work. He made it fun, laughing and teasing Jessi and Jonna as he devised contests or imaginary adventures to take the drudgery out of staking bean poles or hanging tobacco to cure. “We considered Shane a brother, not a cousin,” Jonna said. “While we picked beans, we shared secrets or discussed our frustrations about other members of the family.” The summer he was sixteen and spent three months in Salt Rock, and then later when he returned as a marine, the Walker sisters had a favorite exercise they performed with Shane. While they sat on his shoulders, he did push-ups.
During the big family picnics at the Wilton Childers homestead at the end of Smith Creek Hollow, Shane, Jessi, and Jonna often wandered off together and climbed the steep hill behind their grandfather’s farmhouse. It’s a lovely incline with a natural cobble
of rocks, velveteen expanses of green moss, and a grove of beeches that climbs halfway to the summit. To the side, the cobble opens into upland meadows where, as a teenager and as a marine, Shane wandered with his cousins and chatted, goofed off, and discussed his dreams. Their favorite hangout was at the edge of the beech grove below, a small clearing and a single hundred-year-old beech on an escarpment overlooking the farm and the hollow. Jessi and Jonna have always called that beech the “Shane Tree.” On the uphill side of the tree there is still a prominent marker, carved with a penknife when the future marine was fourteen:
SHANE CHILDERS
8/8/86
The Walkers and Joe and Judy Childers were different from the rest of the extended family in one other critical respect. They were not Missionary Baptists, and in Joe and Judy’s case, not churched at all. This was rarely spoken about openly, but was of great concern to the rest of the family. Membership in the small, conservative denomination and adopting its values—Sunday church, strict moral values, teetotaling, and a belief in the importance of being “saved”—was a Childers family requirement, and indeed many family members were either full or part-time pastors. The Missionary Baptist and United Baptist congregations along the Childers hollow in Salt Rock were so small and schismatic that there were “upper” and “lower” Smith Creek Baptist churches. Shane’s disinterest in what religion had to offer showed early. At the big Childers family dinners at his grandparents’ or uncles and aunts’, when Jessi and Jonna glanced around during the long grace, they would always make eye contact with Shane. He was smiling, suppressing a laugh, joining them in not taking the religious devotion seriously.
But as a teenager, and right up through his Citadel years, Shane displayed an admirable flexibility about the family religion. On his visits to West Virginia, he attended the small white churches on Sunday to show respect for his family and to please his grandparents, and he greatly enjoyed church for socializing. It was a chance to catch up with family members and old Salt Rock friends he might have missed during his morning runs over the mountains. He was unchurched himself and found evangelical Christianity narrow and intellectually lifeless, and he was annoyed by the persistent efforts of aunts and ordained uncles to convert him. Platitudes of any kind, personal smugness, had never appealed to him, and he didn’t like the prejudice against gays, Catholics, and Jews that were a submerged but very real agenda of the church. Jessi and Jonna were the same way. They all called the old-time Baptist churchgoers of the West Virginia hollows “hypocrite Holy Rollers.”
