by Rinker Buck
When he was training with his unit at Twentynine Palms, Shane often spent weekend nights with Steve and Robbin Whitten, his old marine friends from Nairobi, who had settled with their daughters nearby. After the Whittens picked him up at the marine base, Shane usually came in dog-tired from his training and either took a nap right away or quickly fell asleep after a barbecue. But he also liked sitting up late with Steve, drinking Moosehead beer and probing the retired master sergeant for ideas on how he could improve his platoon. It was clear to Whitten that the intensive training at Pendleton and Twenty-nine Palms was bringing out Shane’s perfectionist nature.
“We had a good time together, but it was very classic Shane, too,” said Whitten. “He was just so devoted and focused on the mission. Hey, Steve, how can I fix this problem with a staff sergeant I have? How can I make these improvements to the platoon? He was aware that his commanders rated his platoon highly, but still he could make it even better.”
Still, Shane’s seeming invincibility, his careful judgment about things, reassured everyone that he would be all right in Iraq. The last time the Whittens saw him in Twentynine Palms, in November 2002, Steve and one of his daughters drove Shane back to the base on Sunday night. They sat in the front seat of their car watching as he trudged across the base with his light pack, and then Shane paused, turned, and faced them.
“He was smiling and looking back at us with that confidence he had,” Whitten said. “His face seemed to be saying, ‘It will be okay. It will be okay.’ We just weren’t worried about it. Shane would be all right.”
In early February 2003, just before Shane deployed for Kuwait with his platoon, the possibility that Saddam Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons against American troops was receiving a lot of attention in the press. Jonna Walker was worried about this and e-mailed Shane. He responded in his usual way—very methodically. Via return e-mail, he shared with Jonna a Power Point presentation on defensive measures against chemical warfare and reassured her that the threat she was reading about in the news magazines was vastly overrated.
“Shane’s basic position was that I shouldn’t worry because chemical or biological weapons were too complicated and sensitive to use,” Jonna said. “He didn’t give the Iraqis credit for having enough sophistication to use them.”
Shane’s unit arrived in Kuwait during the first week of February and camped for the first two weeks in a rear area in the desert about forty miles south of the border with Iraq. Conditions slightly improved by the end of the month when tents with raised wooden floors and portable latrines were installed, but Shane’s letters home to Joe and Judy made it clear that the conditions were grim. The men had no air-conditioning, phones, or Internet access, and the portable shower units were so crowded that Shane rose at 2 A.M. to use one, just one day a week. The marines were mostly subsisting on prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat. The tension and boredom in camp about when the troops were finally going to move north into Iraq were relieved by desert warfare training exercises. At one point Shane’s unit was marching with heavy packs and keeping in shape just three miles from the Iraqi border.
On the night of March 17, Shane’s unit was finally ordered to stage up by the Iraqi border, and he and other company officers were briefed on their assignment. Alpha Company was to take and then secure an important first objective of the war, the huge oil field facility and pumping station at Rumaila, about eighteen miles north of the border with Kuwait. Securing the complex of industrial buildings and pipelines at Rumaila with a lightning strike was considered vital, because American military planners feared that the Hussein regime would order the oil fields torched and destroyed by retreating Iraqi soldiers, which would impede rebuilding the country once the military battles were over. Intelligence reports indicated that at least one thousand Iraqi soldiers were guarding the facility, most of them holed up in well-defended concrete bunkers.
Alpha Company stormed over the border and headed north over the Iraqi sands in their AAVs just before midnight on March 20. As they approached the massive pumping station at 3 A.M., a barrage by marine artillery units in front of them had just begun. After the artillery fire ceased, Shane and his unit moved closer in their AAVs, with Shane surveying the horizon from a stand-up conning station in the track. The sky was now filled with smoke from the fires set off by the exploding artillery and trench fires around the perimeter that the Iraqis had set. When he was ordered over his radio headset to take the facility, Shane instructed his men to exit the AAVs and to begin surrounding the outlying buildings for attack.
The “attack” on the pumping station at Rumaila, however, proved anticlimactic. In fact, long before the artillery barrage had begun, most of the Iraqi Army units had fled, many of them prompted by propaganda leaflets dropped the night before urging them to surrender. As the marines of Shane’s company began coursing through the buildings and mazes of pipes, they found a few Iraqi soldiers injured by the artillery fire, many more voluntarily emerging from their bunkers with white flags, others hurriedly attempting to escape across the desert with civilian robes thrown over their uniforms. The operation, in fact, was a complete rout of the Iraqis, abetted by the notoriously bad supply train of Saddam Hussein’s army, which had failed to motivate the defenders by providing adequate food, water, or arms.
But Shane was pleased, and too intelligent an officer to be disappointed by the lack of active fighting. His orders had specifically requested that the pumping station at Rumaila be secured before the Iraqis could torch it or sabotage it by destroying equipment. That was the priority, his objective—securing the oil field intact and in running order for the future of the Iraqi people. It didn’t matter that the Iraqis had fled, and were probably too inept and frightened to have even considered sabotaging their oil field. Shane Childers and his unit had taken the first objective of the desert campaign, according to orders, with only one injury on their side, a corporal who stepped on a land mine while searching a building. The operation was clearly a success, and perhaps even boded well for the rest of the war.
As the first dawn light reached the murky sky around the oil field complex, there was a feeling of elation and purposeful work. Along with other marine officers now on the scene, Shane ordered his men to dig in around the perimeters in case of a counterattack, which was not really expected. The rounding up and processing of prisoners began, and medical corpsmen were brought forward to attend to the Iraqi wounded and the injured marine corporal.
One event that occurred just after dawn pointed up either a weakness in reconnaissance information or just a failure of the marines to appreciate, this early in the war, a peculiar habit of the Iraqis. The concrete bunkers surrounding the Rumaila works were large enough to drive trucks and cars into, and the Iraqis had positioned vehicles inside for quick escapes. Just after dawn an Iraqi soldier burst out of a bunker on a motorcycle, trying to flee across the desert, and was quickly cut down by marine M-16 rifle fire. But the incident seemed a fluke, unimportant, and as the building searches and the herding up of prisoners continued, no one thought much about the hazards of other Iraqis trying to escape that way.
A couple of hours after dawn, after the complex appeared to be fully secured, Shane ordered his men back to the cluster of AAVs along the perimeter of the oil field. He was planning on debriefing the operation with his marines, breaking for a hasty breakfast of Meals Ready to Eat, and then await further instructions from his battalion commanders. As Shane walked along the perimeter road toward his men, a Toyota pickup raced around the corner of a bunker and accelerated down the road toward his position. Shane crouched onto his knees and peered intently at the approaching truck, switched off the safety on his M-16, being deliberately careful not to overreact. He was just raising his rifle to fire when the pickup reached a few feet from his position on the road.
The pickup was filled with six or seven Iraqis who somehow had eluded the search operation at the complex. As they fled down the road toward Shane’s position, they opened
up with a “spray and pray” burst of automatic rifle fire, in an attempt to clear the area of Shane and other marines in order to flee across the desert to avoid capture. Marine Corporal Jesse Odom, who was standing near Shane on the road, saw the ground break into dust storms around him, and orange muzzle fire from the guns in the pickup, as the fleeing Iraqis sped past.
There was more confusion in the area as the marines from back by the AAVs opened up on the truck, finally stopping it a hundred yards down the road. Under the murky skies, with fires burning all around, a few marines ran down the road to surround the pickup and capture the surviving Iraqis on the truck.
In the chaos all around now, no one sensed right away that Shane was hit. He had been kneeling anyway, squinting ahead to the truck on the road, and now he was still kneeling, holding his rifle in his hands, with his Kevlar helmet plunked onto the sandy roadway. He didn’t yell out. No one could see a wound. But then he just fell sideways, pivoting on his knees and helmet, into a fetal position by the road.
When Corporal Odom rushed over, Shane had a vacant expression on his face and was staring into the sky. He groaned and tried to say something.
“I’m hit. In the gut.”
Shane died rather quickly after that, falling in and out of consciousness a few times and occasionally muttering, “Can’t believe I got shot.” Before medics could reach him, he stopped breathing once, and Odom revived him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When the medics arrived and stripped off his clothes, they found a small, bloodless entry wound in Shane’s abdomen just below the bottom of his body armor. But the AK-47 bullet severed a major artery and caused massive internal bleeding, hit his kidney and other organs before exiting through the back. With his blood pressure plummeting, Shane was moved over to a grove of palm trees and placed on the metal ramp of an AAV. The medics gave him a shot of morphine and delivered fluids through an intravenous line attached to his arm.
But it was no use. Shane’s internal bleeding was too massive. He died beneath the palm trees while Corporal Odom gently stroked his face.
The medevac helicopter called in for the marine who had stepped on the land mine carried Shane away. On his third trip to the Middle Eastern sands—four if you count Iran as a boy—Shane was dead at thirty. He had always tried to be first in everything, and now he was the first killed in action in Iraq. Perhaps his fearlessness and his unique fighting style, his caution in a crisis—the boy who never raised his fists against bullies—was fatal, and he should have squeezed off a few early shots against the Toyota. But perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference.
But he was dead now, and speculation was pointless.
Dust was swirling near the edge of the Rumaila oil field now, the helicopter was rising into a sooty sky, and Shane had begun his journey home to Powell.
All weekend, up at the armory in suburban Billings, First Sergeant Barry Morgan had been drilling his men. Morgan is a former boot camp drill sergeant and loves the work, but he was also under pressure because he knew that the arrival and departure of Shane’s flag-draped coffin from three locations—the funeral home, the gym at Northwest College, and the cemetery—had to be pulled off flawlessly. The governor of Wyoming, the media, Marine Public Affairs officers from Quantico and probably more than a thousand spectators would be there. Veterans groups, who would be attending in great numbers, are notoriously picky about the ceremonial drilling at military funerals. As they age, the VFW members and Legionnaires become more sentimental, the marching matters a lot to them, and they consider it an important part of the show. But mostly, Morgan just wanted to make sure that the funeral and graveside service were done right for the Childerses.
Among marines, drilling and marching is a passion, and there is a simple truth about it. Performing properly, a formation of dress-blue marines is supposed to look effortlessly graceful, even simple in their movements, but it’s actually an enormously complex business to organize. From his small command in Billings, Morgan had to recruit and make travel arrangements for reservists from all over Wyoming and Montana, most of whom would have to travel hundreds of miles in just one direction and give up three days of their regular jobs to practice and perform at the Childers funeral. Authorization forms for paying day rates for extra color guard members had to be filled out and then routed through the proper marine channels. More than a dozen reservists and active-duty marines had to be whipped into shape by the end of Monday and coordinated into thinking alike, marching step-to-step, with perfect shoulder-to-shoulder confirmation. From the outside, it’s supposed to look easy. But it’s hard to do.
And nothing was being spared for the Childers ceremonies. There were four separate teams—the rifle detail that would fire the twenty-one-gun salute, the coffin pallbearers, a color guard bearing the Marine Corps and United States flag, and then Morgan and Hutchison as joint heads of detail, who would fold the flag draped over Shane’s coffin and then hand it to Judy. In addition to all this, Morgan had to find a bugler to play taps and make sure he could get each note perfect.
The various teams were practicing separately and then together all day Sunday and Monday, marching in the parking lot and the indoor motor-pool area of the armory. The pallbearers had a particularly difficult job because they had to look coordinated and graceful while carrying a great deal of weight. Morgan rehearsed them back and forth across the armory floor using a six-foot embarkation crate loaded with two hundred pounds of weights. None of the drilling marines complained about the long days of rehearsing, with just an hour break for lunch. For once, they didn’t mind their drill sergeant’s perfectionism. It was unspoken but agreed among all of them. The Childers funeral had to be perfect.
But Morgan took particular pride in the drilling for the Childers ceremony for another reason. While his California surfer-boy captain was obsessing on all the other details of the CACO, and sensitively negotiating so many emotions, this was the first sergeant’s purview, his role to play as noncom and second in command. Morgan’s habitual irreverence doesn’t simply project the typical cynicism of the enlisted man, a kind of blue-collar flippancy, toward the officer corps. In fact, his attitudes, particularly about drilling, are what make him such a marine’s marine.
“Drilling is built into the Marine Corps philosophy, but it’s basically an enlisted man’s specialty,” Morgan said. “Kevin Hutchison doesn’t know shit about drilling. He’s an officer. What the frig would he know about drilling? It’s a real job, you know? In twenty-one years in the United States Marine Corps, I’ve never met an officer who can tell me shit about drilling. So Kevin left me alone to prepare the teams for the Childers funeral. He knew that I would do it right.”
That was their drill for the weekend, their CACO division of labor. While Hutchison negotiated the emotional shoals down in Powell, Morgan was drilling his men up in Billings.
On Sunday night, when Morgan was ready to release his teams after a full day of practice, the pallbearers asked if they could work for another hour, slowly marching back and forth across the motor-pool floor with their substitute coffin. They felt that they still weren’t getting the complicated turns just right, and they preferred starting their second day of practice with things nearly perfect. Morgan agreed and they worked until after dark.
They were all tired when it was finally time to go. Outside the armory on the asphalt ramp, the sky was black against the distant mountains, with just the lights of a nearby oil refinery and the hum of the interstate intruding on the peace of the night. But the honor guard teams still had work to do. Most of the men were returning to their homes or motel rooms to spit-polish their shoes, shine their brass buckles, and meticulously place their medal racks on their tunics.
It was an unspoken agenda between them all. The Childers funeral had to be perfect, right down to the last shiny button on their chests.
SHANE’S LAST SKY
Captain Hutchison arrived at the funeral home at 11 A.M. on Monday, an hour before the wake was scheduled to begin. There
were many last-minute details requiring attention. The green fourragère for Shane’s uniform had arrived via FedEx and had to be properly placed on the body. With Laura Richardson’s help, he opened the casket and did that, and then he inspected Shane’s face for skin tone, agreeing with Laura that the new rouge and cosmetics helped, but only a little. Cases of mineral water had been delivered to the funeral home and Hutchison made sure that the chilled bottles and plastic cups were strategically placed around the viewing chapel and reception area. Boxes of tissues were also distributed around both rooms. Hutchison carefully inspected the arrangements of donated flowers up by the casket and the floral displays around the funeral home.
Two public affairs officers from Marine Corps headquarters in Quantico had arrived in Wyoming the night before and were now at the funeral home. Pensively biting his lip while he cupped his hand on his chin, Hutchison discussed with them the possibility of newspaper or television reporters arriving and attempting to conduct interviews during the wake. They agreed that it would be best for the P.A. officers to stand near the front door of the funeral home and discreetly intervene if that happened. They didn’t want to discourage the press or make a scene—interviews with members of Shane’s family, or visiting marines who had known him, could always be conducted outside on the porch, or in the parking lot. But they didn’t want press-shy members of the Childers family, or the hundreds of local residents and veterans who were expected to pay their respects today, to feel intimidated when they came through the door.
