by Rinker Buck
“It’s your fault, Robert. Stop making excuses.”
They went back and forth about it for another few minutes, an entertaining family farce. “Oh, this is beautiful,” Sandra said. “If Mom and Robert weren’t arguing? It just wouldn’t feel normal.” Judy was miffed at Joe for being late and so she blamed Robert, a classic Judy revert. From the kitchen, a few visitors popped open soda cans and watched the verbal exchange, and then the men who needed one last smoke before supper stepped outside. After Judy was done with him, Reagan stepped out to the patio to join them.
“God, don’t you just love a woman who can treat a man like that?” Reagan said to the other men. “Judy is the best.”
The cumulus formation was fully developed now and had moved over from the Beartooths, raking low across the prairie. The scattered clouds were intensely white and puffy with a patina of gray underneath. The landscape out to the mountains was a black mosaic of shadows, with the ground in between the clouds, where the sun got through, a rich bright gold.
“Yeah, but, Robert,” Richard Brown said, “are you sure that was fair to you? I mean Joe was late, too.”
“Oh Christ, kid,” Reagan said. “What are you, United States Army or something? Get with the program. Whenever we’re together, this is the deal. Joe screws the poodle, and I take the rap.”
Laughing and comfortable with each other, forgetting why they were all there, the men crushed their cigarettes out by foot and went inside to join the family dinner. Everyone was relaxed and casual around the table, enjoying the cornucopia of food delivered by the American Legion ladies—turkey tetrazzini and fried chicken, lasagne and country-fried steaks—and Joe’s stories were entertaining. He described the day Shane got thrown by the big black mule, and landed on his brand-new cowboy hat. When Shane was home, Joe frequently was leaving for work in his pickup just as Shane was riding off for Belfry on his mountain bike, and they raced the first couple of miles down the farm lane together, until Joe left him in a wake of dust. Joe’s stories were long, but relaxing. The house felt moody and reflective now, less stressful, now that Judy was finally having the emotional reaction everyone had wished for her.
It got even better after supper, when the Childers grandchildren were all banished from the house for a while, so Judy could have some peace and quiet. There was some pretty good Childers family mayhem out in the front of the house now. While the men talked and smoked on the patio, Joe dragooned Richard Brown and a couple of visiting marines into helping him move some farm machinery away from the parking space up on the hill. The grandchildren were tear-assing around in the middle of all this. Little Aksel and Aiden were chasing each other with sticks and rolling in the dirt, and Hannah and Marta were playing with the garden hose. Then one of them went plowing straight through the ornamental plaster donkey in the garden, neatly guillotining the head. When Judy came out and saw that, she blew her stack.
“Oh, this is good, this is good,” Robert said, watching from over by the toolshed. “She’s really piped now.”
Joe’s suggestion, earlier in the morning, about organizing a hayride had excited the grandchildren. They had been pestering him about it all day. Take us for a hayride, Granddaddy, take us for a hayride. When the West Virginia Childerses got back from Cody, some of the aunts got into the act, too. They wanted to see the country around Joe’s ranch.
Joe was ready to do it now. With a coterie of middle-aged men trailing behind him, he headed for the barn, harnessed and hitched up his matched Belgians, and then asked a few of the men to throw some hay bales up onto the wagon bed so he could form some passenger seats. When he got the team up front by the house, a Childers in-law held the horses by their bridles while Joe set up a small stepladder so that everyone could get over the freeboard of his hitch. It was joyful, festive even, as the children and all the West Virginia women piled up the ladder and then found places to sit among the bales of hay.
Once Joe had climbed back up to the front seat, he called back to his grandson.
“Aksel, c’mon up here and help me drive the team.”
Aksel brightened and smiled broadly, scrambling up over the bales and all his relatives legs to join Joe. He stood in between his grandfather’s knees, and Joe cupped Aksel’s hands around the reins, holding them in his callused palms.
“All right now, Aksel, we’re horsemen here, do you understand that?” Joe said. “We don’t razz our animals. We talk to them.”
With that, Joe looked back to make sure that his wheels were free of people and then pushed his USS Tortuga ball cap up and spoke to his team.
“Amigo. April. Let’s go.”
The Belgians smartly picked up their front hooves and jingled off, prancing, shying slightly sideways against their traces, just to show Joe that they were energetic and loved the work. The team pulled hard from their collars and bent their heads against the check lines to get the heavy wagon rolling.
As the wagon rumbled off, the jingle of the harness echoed back against the house. Joe was teaching Aksel how to gently hold the team to the center of his freshly graveled drive. His voice reached back to the men in front of the toolshed with pleasing attenuation.
“Okay, see? Just gently with the reins, Aksel, just guide them. We don’t yank our horses around here,” Joe said. “This is how I taught your Uncle Shane.”
The men back in the driveway were pleased, infinitely pleased for Joe. He needed this, and not simply as a distraction from Shane. Most of the family hadn’t seen Wyoming yet, or Joe’s dream ranch. It was good for him to be the paterfamilias of them all, and to show them the neighboring prairie, to share with them his stories and running commentary while the team pulled up front.
“Oh, this is so good for Joe, he’s in his element,” said his brother, Richard Childers, who had arrived the night before from Huntington, West Virginia. “He always told us that he’d settle in the West someday, and we never believed him. Look at him now.”
“Yeah, he’s a pretty good washed-up old Seabee now,” Robert Reagan said. “Freaking Joe. He’s got his dream ranch.”
And from the prospect of the hill above the house, the team and wagon moving down the Wyoming section road were as pretty and as lyric as a photograph in National Geographic. The metallic ringing of the harness was carried back by the wind, the wagon wheels curled up some dust, the children and aunts sitting on the hay were laughing and enjoying themselves as the prairie went by. The big sky was full of gorgeous low cumulus, and where the land was not a black mosaic of shadows from the clouds, it was golden bright from the sun. Joe would take them all the way down past the Van Valins and right up to the edge of the Polecat Bench. Eventually, the team and wagon grew smaller, and then disappeared over the rise. It was a lovely scene, really, just a good Wyoming family and the visiting relatives out for a Sunday drive behind a well-matched team of cream Belgians.
Back in front of the toolshed, the men were glad that Joe was off with his team for another reason. They had all viewed Shane as a hero, and considered him the star of the Childers clan. They were still having difficulty coping with his death, but they were trying to restrain themselves in front of Joe and Judy. Now at least they could talk and some of them were close to tears.
“The last time I saw Shane was in August, and it was pouring rain in Salt Rock,” Richard Childers said. “Shane was out on one of his fifteen-mile runs over the hollows to visit all the relatives. He didn’t have a shirt on, just shorts and running shoes, and he was real excited about getting back to Pendleton after his leave and training his platoon. It’s just hard, hard, accepting the loss of a person like that.”
Now that Joe wasn’t near, Robert Reagan could let down his guard, too. Every time he thought of Shane, focused on him with a specific memory, his heart would suddenly race and he felt profoundly sad and anxious. He was having “panic attacks for Shane,” he said. He knew that Richard Childers and some of the other men around the toolshed were Missionary Baptists, but he didn’t let that affect h
is choice of words.
“Yeah, well, my ass isn’t very happy about this either,” Reagan said. “The last time I saw Shane was in London, and he was diddly-boppin’ down that street with a ninety-pound knapsack, headed for the Alps. I told him where to go to find new hiking boots. Jesus, I’m just so sad over this. It’s a sonofabitchin’ deal. Shane Childers, dead. I still can’t believe it.”
An hour later, when Joe returned in the hay wagon, Robert, Sam, and Bill Hendry helped him off-load the grandchildren and all the Childers aunts. Then they hopped on board and jingled through the barnyard, opened the gate by the field, and went out with Joe to use the hay to feed the cattle. It was chilly by the time they got back to the barn, almost nightfall, and steam rose off the backs of the team while Joe removed and stowed away the harness, fed his horses and mules, and then tidied up the stable while chatting with Robert and Sam.
That night, Judy finished sewing the hems on Joe’s new chief petty officer’s pants. Before he had taken the grandchildren out on the hayride that afternoon, Judy had stood Joe in the dining room with his old Seabee uniform on, fitting the legs of the trousers with straight pins taken from a glass dish beside her on the floor. Before he went to bed that night, Joe tried them on, pronouncing them “just right,” with the proper amount of break. He had new shoes as well, and along with the belt also provided by the Billings marines, he was all set for the funeral Tuesday.
By the end of the weekend, the Childerses had also discovered new information about Shane’s death which was upsetting, but helped them accept his loss because now they finally knew. Judy and Captain Hutchison had been looking at articles about Shane on the Internet to make sure that the memorial albums they were compiling weren’t missing any important clips. Jonna Walker was checking newspaper websites because she thought they might contain an account of Shane’s last moments that might help her to understand.
More or less simultaneously—afterward, they all couldn’t figure out who made the discovery first—they came across an account of Alpha Company’s encounter with the ragtag Iraqi army units defending Pumping Station Number 2 in Rumaila, written by Gordon Dillow, a reporter with the Orange County Register of southern California, who was embedded with Shane’s unit. Dillow’s articles appeared in the Register the weekend after Shane was killed and described a haphazard and essentially pointless firefight that occurred after the pumping station had been taken. These reports confirmed that Shane had lost consciousness and died within a few minutes after being shot on the desert floor, and not after a prolonged death agony at a field hospital in Kuwait, as the first incomplete accounts seemed to indicate. This was something that the family had been worried about, and now they could move on to a funeral at least partially resolved about how Shane died.
They went to bed that night a family preparing to attend their son’s wake the next day. The house was quiet and restful now, with the rooms slowly emptying of guests and the grandchildren finally asleep. From the road toward Powell, the Childers place looked lonely, but distinct, on the prairie. Late on Sunday the sky was clear and awesomely black, with just a few clusters of stars. A thin purple line marked the ridge along the Polecat Bench. And, from the way the lights rigged from the house glowed around the half-mast flag, there was a sense that the family’s sacrifice could be seen for miles and miles across the Bighorn country.
The reflective, intensely bookish and cultured marine officer who graduated from The Citadel in June 2001—the Shane everyone felt was about to turn a major corner in his life—never really had a chance to emerge. While Shane was at Quantico attending basic officer’s and then infantry officer’s training, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, was transforming both the world and the U.S. Marines, making it difficult for anyone in the military to pursue much of a personal agenda. By the time he reached Camp Pendleton in southern California in the late spring of 2002 and took over the leadership of his platoon in Alpha Company, events were already hurtling toward an American invasion of Iraq and Shane was swept up by the frantic preparations for war.
Settling into an apartment in suburban San Clemente that soon filled with his usual athletic accoutrements—surfboards, a kayak, his mountain bike, and mountain-climbing gear—Shane was soon so busy training his platoon that he virtually dispensed with all pretense of a personal life, or at least one that he shared much with others. His reading was now mostly devoted to tactics manuals and the technical specifications for the equipment operated by his unit. The long, meandering late-night phone calls were often spent with the sergeants of his company, discussing training for the next day.
Preparations for the war in Iraq brought out his lonely, brooding side. The effortless sociability of Shane’s Nairobi or Charleston years was now a thing of the past, something he didn’t have time for anymore. On Sundays, to escape the grinding regimen of marine training, Shane appeased his need for adventuresome physicality by surfing alone, or occasionally hiking in the San Bernardino National Forest. He seemed his old self again only when he could completely escape the performance-mentality of the marine camps and get away for long spells with friends—occasional vacation skiing trips and journeys home to Joe and Judy in Wyoming.
The pack trip on mules up to the snow line along the Jack Creek Trail that Shane and Joe made in May 2002, just after Shane finished infantry officer’s school at Quantico, was deeply symbolic for this reason. Shane was on his way to Pendleton to accept command of his platoon, every young marine officer’s dream. But he wasn’t quite in the frantic marine-mode training environment yet. He was relaxed and fun, calmed by the long pickup drive across the country to the Powell ranch. When they got up to the snow line with the mules, he sat up late with Joe in the campsite, laughing and talking. That night, Shane told his father about the dreams he had for himself after the war in Iraq was over. He was planning on a big adventure. He wanted to use his savings to buy a sailboat and go on an around-the-world cruise. He was also beginning to think about buying a ranch like his father’s, right here in Wyoming. All through that pack trip, Shane exclaimed about the beauty of the scenery, and how much he liked the timber spruce up above the Greybull River.
Jack Creek was the last time Joe saw his son that way—the comfortable outdoorsman and horseman he remembered—Shane undistracted by preparing for war. Shane’s visits from Pendleton after that were often rushed, made by airline connections into Cody, and it always took him several days to decompress from the training intensity of a marine camp before he was himself again. Then it was almost time for him to return to Pendleton.
The looming war in Iraq, and the events of September 11, altered Shane’s outlook in another important way. His most compelling personality feature was his bristling, restless intellectuality. Shane had always been somewhat conservative, pro-military and pro-Republican, but his rejection of evangelical Christianity and right-wing intolerance and gay-bashing also demonstrated a flexibility, an openness toward others that reflected the broad intelligence of a humanist. He was still very much that way, when he had a few moments away from Pendleton to reflect. But now he’d also become a fervent defender of the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes against perceived enemies like Saddam Hussein, a crusader who believed in the American mission to rid the world of Islamic terrorists. Everyone around Shane now knew that it was pointless to argue with him about American policy or the coming war. He was more than his old insistent self when it came to discussing these matters. He was dogmatic.
In a very real sense, September 11 had brought out a side of Shane that had always been there. The boy along the Little Biloxi River who defended his playmates by killing copperhead snakes, The Citadel cadet who defended gays, now had a new group of people to defend. They were the innocent American civilians threatened by Arab terrorists and the rogue nations alleged to be harboring weapons of mass destruction.
At Pendleton, and later at the Twentynine Palms training area on the edge of the Mojave Desert,
Shane was as compulsive as ever and quickly gained a reputation as an officer who asked a lot from his men by his intense example. “He was the kind of officer who didn’t have to give many orders,” said Captain Matt Ward, an aviation weapon systems officer who knew Shane at Pendleton. “You took one look at him and just followed.” With eleven years service as an active-duty marine, five of them as an infantry grunt, Shane was considered an exceptionally valuable officer because he knew and understood the enlisted men who would do most of the fighting during a war. His platoon soon emerged as a front-line unit, one that would probably be positioned to be among the first over the line into Iraq. Under Lieutenant Shane Childers, the Second Platoon of Alpha Company consistently scored high performance grades in training and earned their place at the front.
“During his visits home, Shane wouldn’t say much about what his group was specifically training for,” Joe Childers said, “but we were all aware from what Shane said that last summer and fall that his unit was training real well and getting all these great performance marks. It just seemed to be expected that he would be right up front.”
Shane was focused on high performance for another reason. He told many friends that he lived in fear of being assigned a position as a support or supply officer, and he hadn’t worked hard getting through The Citadel and becoming an officer to accept a position like that. “This is not well known, but it’s actually pretty rare to get a chance to lead men in battle,” said Lieutenant Kerry Quinby, a naval aviator who met Shane at the Basic School at Quantico. “Only about eight out of twenty-four officer positions in the marines are actual combat slots, and Shane wasn’t the sort of person who wanted to sit out a war helping with planning or delivering ammunition.”
Shane’s Alpha Company group at Camp Pendleton in California, even though it would spend the fall of 2002 preparing for desert warfare in Iraq, was called in marine parlance a “boat unit.” These forces traveled in twenty-eight-ton amphibious assault vehicles (AAVs), also called “tracks,” which carried about twenty marines apiece in a cramped passenger compartment in the rear. Boat units were trained for making mechanized sprints across beaches or short patches of land after being delivered to their destination by ships. They are considered elite units because they are frequently used to make the first assault against primary objectives in a war, and thus face the toughest resistance from well-defended enemy positions. For Iraq, however, these amphibious units had to make drastic adjustments for the conditions they would face—preparing for both a long, marathon run across almost five hundred miles of desert to Baghdad, and urban warfare. It was tough, grueling work, particularly when twenty or more marines had to be jammed into the rear passenger compartment of the AAVs for long practice runs across the Mojave Desert. The vehicles had been designed for short runs and then quick exits as the marines reached their objectives, but now Alpha Company members were riding inside them and making long crossings for a whole day.
