Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  In the evenings, after Joe had finished with his hay wagon and team, he would monkey around in the barn for another hour, enjoying some quality time with his horses and mules. Sam and the other men who were visiting that night—a couple of Shoshone Back Country Horsemen, Bill Hendry and Robert Reagan, a West Virginia Childers or two—would linger in the barnyard, just to be near Joe while leaving him alone to enjoy himself in the barn. The men outside talked and smoked and watched the gorgeous pink and lavender sunsets out over Heart Mountain and Dead Indian Pass.

  Sam was painfully aware, talking with the men outside, how much they all worshipped Shane. There were other reminders of his brother’s long shadow. When Bill Hendry had arrived, Judy had exclaimed, “Oh! You remind me so much of Shane.” Sam didn’t blame his mother for saying that—in fact, he liked her for it. She was very good at making people feel welcomed by the family. Still, it did hurt. His mother didn’t exclaim the same thing to him.

  Several times, out in the barnyard with the men, Sam had openly expressed his confusion about his role in the family now. Shane was gone and Sam couldn’t get past the feeling that he somehow had an obligation to immediately fill the void.

  “How is a younger brother in my situation supposed to react?” Sam repeatedly asked. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  Robert Reagan felt that Sam was asking this question too early. Shane had been an important presence in all their lives and the pain of losing him was immense. But Sam was really the only one who measured himself against Shane, because he had to. They were brothers. It would just take a long time for Sam to adjust to a life suddenly missing the competition.

  Outside in the barnyard, Reagan and Sam enjoyed a smoke together and talked about it.

  “Stop trying to figure your ass out on this deal right away,” Reagan told him. “Give it time, Sam.”

  “Yeah, but, Robert, what am I supposed to do? I should be helping Dad more.”

  “You are helping your father, kid,” Reagan said. “You fed the cattle with him today. That’s all he needs. Just time, you know, just spend some time together. You can figure your ass out on this deal later.”

  “Fine, Robert. We fed the cattle together. But there must be more I should be doing. How is a younger brother in my situation supposed to react?”

  Sam was stalled there and Robert was frustrated by it, but he wasn’t giving up.

  “All right, kid,” Robert said. “Whenever I’ve got a friend with a problem like this there’s always a simple solution, and let me tell you. It works every time.”

  “Okay. What’s that?”

  “Listen to your Uncle Robert, all right? He’s a washed up old navy Seabee, but the guy just happens to be totally fucking brilliant. All right?”

  Sam was laughing now, relaxing. He and Shane had always thought that it was thoroughly typical of their father to have a head-case like Robert for his best friend. Robert always nailed you with his sense of humor. His sarcasm was therapeutic.

  “Okay, Robert,” Sam said. “I’m listening.”

  “That’s the program, listen to your Uncle Robert,” Reagan said. “All you’ve got to do for the moment is chill your ass and feed the cattle with Joe. Spend time with him, bullshit him a little. Go down to the hardware store. Things will just develop from there.”

  “All right, Robert. I’m chilling.”

  “Chill your ass, kid. Uncle Robert says you’re doing just fine so long as you chill your ass. Don’t try and wrap your head around a problem before you can figure it out. Right?”

  “I’m chilling.”

  “Chill, kid. Chill the ass.”

  As the sky grew dark, the pastel sunset was reflected in their cigarette smoke. The purple fringe along the Beartooths returned as the sun fell. From the barn they heard horses whinnying and kicking their stalls as Joe distributed oats, and then they heard the murmuring of Joe in there, talking to his animals. The men in the barnyard smiled and exchanged knowing glances. Joe’s conversation with his horses and mules in the barn was a soothing night sound, belonging to the prairie as much as the distant lowing of cattle.

  Shane was a year and a half older than Sam, two grades ahead of him in school, and they were very different in their outlook and personality as they grew up together in Mississippi. Shane was popular and social, strong in sports, clean cut and square. Sam’s idea of a good day was fishing along the Little Biloxi alone. He wore baggy blue jeans and left his shirts untucked, and drank beer with his friends out in the barn. As boys, their sibling rivalry played itself out in the usual ways. If they were home alone while Judy and Joe were out visiting the neighbors, and Shane told Sam to put the napkins or dinner plates away, Sam just ignored him and then they fought—once, Shane even gave him a black eye. Joe’s attempts at disciplining his two sons for fighting were mostly unsuccessful, and it was often difficult for Judy to impose order when Joe was away on his long Seabee trips. But really the problem for Sam was the one that any younger brother would have had. Shane was successful at almost everything, enormously self-confident, and both verbally and physically arduous. Sam felt that he could never win an argument with Shane because it was just so hard to get in a single word of reply.

  “Here’s the thing about me and Shane, though,” Sam later said. “Even though I resented him for dominating everything, including conversation, at the same time I usually thought that he was right. It just would have been a lot easier if maybe he allowed me to say something once in a while? Shane was the only socialite in the family, other than Dad. He had no problem talking with anybody. He loved taking from people what he could learn. I just wasn’t like that at all.”

  Shane’s departure for the marines in 1990 had solved many of his problems, particularly the need to get away from rural Mississippi and his family. But Sam’s entry into the service in 1992 was at least partly defined by his need to differentiate himself from his unavoidable older brother. Sam deliberately chose the navy, he said, so that he wouldn’t have “to fill Shane’s shoes.” He spent the next eight and a half years as a damage control specialist on navy ships and bases, mostly stationed in San Diego when he wasn’t on a cruise. On and off in the mid-1990s, Shane was based at either Camp Pendleton or the Miramar Air Station nearby, but his relationship with Sam became a tragicomedy of missed connections. Shane missed Sam’s wedding to Cori in 1996 because he was home on leave in Wyoming, but managed to rush over to the hospital in 1997 to hold Sam’s first child, Aksel, in his arms. Incredibly, even though they sailed on the same Western Pacific cruise in 1996—a contingent of Expeditionary Force Marines is usually a part of the defense package on those cruises—Shane and Sam never met. They were on different ships and didn’t connect at the ports of call between San Diego and the Persian Gulf, where Shane got off to briefly serve with a marine reconnaissance unit patrolling the border between Kuwait and Iraq, his second tour of duty in the Arabian sands.

  Cori Childers was aware of the need to reconcile her husband and Shane, and would often make social efforts to get them together in San Diego. But these attempts were generally a disaster, typical of the missed connections between the two brothers. Shane’s madass schedule and exhausting pace took a heavy toll on the relationship.

  “If it wasn’t so sad I guess you can say it was funny,” Cori said. “But it was classic Shane. At four o’clock, when he was already supposed to be at our apartment near the base, Shane would call and tell me that he was on the way. All he had to do before he got there, you know, was get his surfboard waxed, check out new pickup trucks, and stop at the mountain bike store. Then, when he finally rolled in two hours late, it took us forever to pick out videos and buy pizza, because Shane always had to dominate, he had to control what we would buy. Then, when we got back to the house, Shane was so exhausted that he would collapse on the couch or on the floor before the video even got started. That’s my most common memory of Shane—watching him snore on the couch in the middle of a video. Obviously, he and Sam never got much of a ch
ance to talk.”

  Shane had another trait that bothered Cori and Sam. Shane always insisted on paying for everything when they were together. This was typical of Shane’s overboard generosity, which showed itself in many other ways. Shane’s sports addiction cycled quickly through new pursuits every year—rock and ice climbing, kayaking, surfing, mountain-biking, and Roller-Blading. By the time he was ready for a new interest, his equipment from the old sport was still almost new, so he just gave it away to family and friends—kayaks, rappelling gear, skis, brand-new biking helmets or the piles of T-shirts he had accumulated in a single year as a competitor in marathons or triathlon meets. There was just an incredible haul of great loot to be had from knowing Shane, and he often supplied friends who came along on his junkets with free airline tickets or motel rooms. Jessi and Jonna dubbed him “First National Shane.”

  But it was grating on Sam. When he volunteered to pay for something, the answer from his older brother was always the same. No. I’ll pay. The behavior wasn’t deliberately clueless on Shane’s part. It just wouldn’t occur to him that perhaps his younger brother would receive an ego boost from occasionally picking up the check himself.

  In other ways, even as he progressed in the navy, Sam just couldn’t get away from Shane. The San Diego naval yards occupy a position on the Pacific seaboard almost geographically opposite Charleston and The Citadel, two thousand miles away on the Atlantic coast.

  “In the late nineties, when Shane was at The Citadel, I had come along enough in the navy to be teaching a firefighting course in San Diego,” Sam said. “Every summer a bunch of midshipmen from the various academies would come out and get my training, and some of them would be MECEP guys from The Citadel. As soon as they heard my name they would say ‘Wow, you’re the brother of Staff Sergeant Childers? He’s really hard core.’ I mean, Shane was practically famous back there already. They all knew of him as this amazing marine.”

  For all of their frustrations dealing with him, however, Sam and Cori did enjoy one particularly fun aspect of knowing Shane, the constant speculation about his girlfriend woes and love life. By now there was a kind of global gossip chain made up of marine wives on the bases where Shane had served, and friends and family, informally called “The Shane Childers Fan Club.” Jessi and Jonna Walker, of course, were close enough to Shane to get the back story on most of his relationships, but with everyone else Shane’s reticence about sharing details of his romantic life added to his mystique. They knew, vaguely, about the exotic Israeli girlfriend from his Africa days. He’d been involved with a beautiful French college student while in Geneva. There were several false starts in Charleston, intimations of summer flings while he was studying in France and Vermont, and then the very public whirlwind romance and sudden breakup with Leo Kelly. Women found it impossible to be around him without asking themselves why this supremely attractive and engaging marine wasn’t already taken.

  Sam and Cori never expected Shane to marry. He was too goal-oriented and was always flying off somewhere for a mountain-climbing trip or a new marine assignment, a moving target that couldn’t establish a relationship and make it stick. In early September 2001, when he flew from Washington to San Diego to take over his new platoon at Camp Pendleton, Shane was excited because he’d met a California girl on the plane and talked with her for several hours. They dated briefly on the west coast, but it turned out that the woman disagreed with Shane about politics, and she couldn’t keep up physically with his insanely busy days. Shane was upset about it at the time, perhaps still feeling the residual sting of the Leo Kelly rejection. His schedule and need for dominance, in effect, made him incredibly picky about women, because there were so few candidates out there who could keep up.

  “Shane was what I would call macho-sensitive, and women really like that a lot,” Cori said. “They were instantly attracted because he really made you feel that he cared only about you. But then they got to know him. The day revolved around Shane, period. He wouldn’t have been sympathetic to what someone else wanted to do. Like Shane, hello? Maybe if you let her tell you what to do sometimes she would find that attractive?”

  Jonna Walker didn’t agree with the family sense that Shane might be incompatible with marriage. He was probably more flexible than they all thought and knew he still had some maturing left to do. In one of his last e-mails to her, Shane included this goal in a list of things he planned to do after Iraq: “Ask a few dozen girls out on dates.”

  “Shane knew that he had neglected the relationship side of his life and now it was time to make that happen,” Jonna said. “There were signs that he was changing. I think he would have come back from Iraq, probably affected a lot by the experience, and analyzed what he was doing with women and realized that it had to do with his enormous need for control. Well, if that was the problem, Shane being Shane, he would have fixed it. He would study the problem and fix it. It’s just so sad because I know he would have listened to us and changed. He would have made this amazing husband and father.”

  Shane’s macho-sensitive ways, and his clear desire to develop parenting skills, emerged in his personality as “Uncle Shane.” He adored children and teenagers, was excellent around them, and frequently arrived for visits at friends’ homes with new sports gear, video games, and a full agenda of afternoon fun that revolved around the kids.

  “Shane was really amazing this way,” said Cori Childers. “He never forgot a child’s birthday or Christmas and was always sending presents and cards. Do you know how unusual that is in a man, remembering birthdays? My sense of Shane was that he was great at wanting to do things with kids but could never imagine taking full responsibility for them as a parent. But, God, did Uncle Shane love spoiling those kids.”

  Robbin Whitten’s three daughters first met Shane in 1994, when he arrived for security guard duty at the American Embassy in Nairobi. They reunited with “Uncle Shane” in the fall of 2002, when he was working up his platoon at the Combined Arms Training Center at Twentynine Palms, California, where the Whittens had settled after Steve Whitten retired from the marines. At night, Robbin and Shane would often sit up late while Robbin sewed up the holes in Shane’s camouflage fatigues, talking about his need to settle down after the coming war and find a wife. But first, Shane always wanted to spend time with the Whitten children.

  “There was a very real sense of priorities with Shane whenever he arrived at our house, no matter how tired he was after a week of training,” Robbin Whitten said. “Shane would basically say, okay, you guys are adults, we can talk later tonight. Let me spend time first with the kids. And he was great with them, even if they were just sitting around the pool. Here was this hugely accomplished and interesting grownup fellow who wanted to hear about their lives, encourage them, find out what they were studying and all about their history projects, what their problems were. Children just melted in his presence because he was so there for them.”

  By then, Sam Childers had retired from the navy, and he and Cori had settled with the children in La Salle, Illinois. Sam found a promising job as a field engineer for a power supply company, and he and Cori bought a nice Victorian house and fixed it up. Life was good. In February 2003, just before Shane deployed for Kuwait and then the Iraq War, Sam’s company scheduled him for advanced training out in southern California. He was excited about it, not simply because he was traveling for his company, doing something that felt like progress in his job. He would also get a chance to visit with Shane. When Sam called out to California, Shane sounded excited about the possibility of getting together, but warned his brother that his unit was on deployment notice and that he could ship at any time. But they scheduled a day, an afternoon together, and they were both looking forward to it.

  When Sam arrived on the west coast and attempted to call Shane from his hotel room, he learned from the Pendleton marines that Shane and his unit had departed by air for Kuwait just two hours before.

  “I guess you could say that this was the relationshi
p, right there,” Sam said. “I was out in California on company business. Shane was shipping off to war. We had a date to meet. But we missed each other again. We didn’t connect.”

  The distance between Billings and Captain Hutchison’s hometown on the Pacific coast just south of Los Angeles, Palos Verdes, is a long way over the mountains and rivers of the American West, nearly a thousand miles. But on Saturday night, when Shane Childers arrived at the United Airlines cargo bay at the Billings airport, Hutchison thought that his mind was playing tricks on him about that. The vast terrain between Montana and the far-off, sunny beaches of L.A. seemed inescapably joined.

  That night was cold and clear in southern Montana, with the residual effects of the high pressure system from the night before turning the sky a hard black with purple auras on the Beartooths. When Hutchison and Morgan arrived at the airport cargo facility in their government Suburban, funeral director Laura Richardson was already there, her long, black hearse parked near a loading ramp.

  Richardson was so self-evidently in charge, so competent at her work, that Hutchison realized that a different moment in his CACO mission had arrived. For now, he wasn’t in charge of the details, he wasn’t really in command, and only later would he realize that the absence of control made an immense difference for him that night. Instead of thinking and leading he was now freed merely to observe and to feel, which was fortunate, he thought. His emotional response to Shane coming home was so intense he wouldn’t have been much good for anything else.