by Rinker Buck
They quickly realized that Childers had been an exemplary, even remarkable, marine. After enlisting in the U.S. Marines fresh out of high school in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1990, Childers had scored high marks at boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, and then at a Light Armored Driver’s course in California. Eight months after enlisting, Childers had briefly served in combat during the Persian Gulf War. After seasoning in a combat platoon at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Childers had been selected for a particularly coveted duty, marine security guard service at foreign embassies, and eventually had been stationed at embassies and consulates in Geneva; Paris; and Nairobi, Kenya. In a variety of disciplines—platoon tactics, light armored reconnaissance, guard command, and especially physical fitness—Childers had consistently achieved the highest training and personal evaluations, and scored average in only one area, marksmanship.
But one achievement stood out. Childers was what the marines called a prior enlist, one of a handful of grunts picked every year for promotion from the enlisted to commissioned officer ranks. After returning from a Western Pacific cruise in 1998, he had used the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program to enroll at the prestigious military academy, The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina, where he graduated with honors after just three years and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. After basic officers’ training and infantry-tactics school, he was assigned to the Fifth Marine Division at Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego. Within a year, Childers had already achieved every young marine officer’s dream—leading a rifle platoon in combat. He’d spent exactly twelve hours doing that before he was shot in Iraq.
The butterflies in Hutchison’s stomach returned and his arms felt weak. He couldn’t remember the last time he confronted a Basic Individual Record this strong. The subtle social connotations of a basic record, the character and personal choices implied by the raw test scores and the climb through the ranks, fascinated him, and he was particularly drawn to Childers’ prior enlist status. Was he one of those soldiers, like so many Hutchison had met, who had discovered himself in the military and become the first in his family to finish college? Hutchison loved that aspect of the military, how it acted as a social safety net, catapulting so many toward their first real shot at success in the civilian world. But maybe Childers had left home early for some other reason, only to be nagged later by his relatives to follow the family tradition toward a college degree. Which was it? Hutchison didn’t know, but in life—as with his death as the first killed in action in Iraq—Childers seemed to possess almost totemic significance as a model marine.
When Morgan looked up from the records, rubbing his hand through the stubble of his hair, Hutchison knew exactly what he was going to say. Fleetingly he recalled a distant curriculum point from basic officers’ school, which was that a command was probably working well when an officer and his noncom could always read each other’s thoughts. Morgan, a former drill sergeant, was so obsessive about guns that he was already teaching his two-year-old son how to break apart a rifle. Hutchison loved to needle his first sergeant about that, goading him about being such a hardass, overparenting his young son. He was pretty sure Morgan would focus on this one, relatively minor, weakness in Childers’ record.
“God, captain, this guy’s a real star,” Morgan said. “The only thing he couldn’t do was shoot.”
“Marksmanship isn’t everything, sergeant. Childers has an extraordinary record.”
“I know, sir, I know. I don’t want to face this family.”
“No,” Hutchison said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
Before they left, Hutchison and Morgan stepped into their offices to change into the dress blue uniforms required for a next-of-kin notification. They emerged a few minutes later in their pressed woolen dress blue slacks and spit-polished oxfords, with their white caps tucked under their arms. Because they didn’t want their dress-blue tunics to wrinkle during the hour-and-a-half drive to Wyoming, they carried these thrown over their shoulders on dry-cleaning hangers, with the clear plastic covering drooping down below their waists. Ordering their eleven-member command to assemble near the door, Hutchison and Morgan stood facing their men in crisp white T-shirts.
Hutchison was feeling tremendous pressure, and he was still battling emotionally to keep this from his men. Speedy next-of-kin notification was particularly important in this case not only because Lieutenant Childers’ status as the first killed-in-action was almost certain to draw intense media attention. Under marine regulations, CACO officers are officially designated as the personal representative of the commandant of the Marine Corps, and he knew he would be evaluated carefully for his performance. From Quantico, faxes and phone messages were already backed up, demanding to know if Hutchison and Morgan had left for Wyoming yet.
But Hutchison felt stubborn about it. He wasn’t going to be rushed.
“Men,” he began, “there’s a colonel back in Quantico who’s called three times already demanding that we do this in a hurry. Some of you have talked to him already. But we’re not going to do that. We’re going to do this right. You got that? Right. Whatever this family needs in the next two weeks? Two months? Years? I don’t care. That’s what we’re going to do for them. Short of war, this is the most important duty you’ll ever face, and don’t any of you forget it.”
A chorus of “Yes, sir,” echoed off the walls as Hutchison and Morgan briskly saluted and marched out through the door.
As they walked side-by-side toward their Chevrolet Suburban in the armory garage, the dry-cleaning plastic covering their tunics gently lifted above their backs, catching the first light from the prairie streaming in through the large overhead doors.
Hutchison and Morgan drove west on Interstate 90 for several miles, turning south for the Wyoming line at Laurel. They were businesslike and glum as they passed down through the badland country of Rockvale and Edgar, quietly reviewing their CACO files, rehearsing what they’d say to the Childers family. Marine regulations stipulated that CACO officers calling on a family should always begin, “We regret to inform you,” but Hutchison and Morgan had already concluded that this was drivel out of a Hollywood script. They’d say whatever the hell came to their hearts first, depending on what they found there, who the Childers were. The important thing, they agreed, was to let the family know that they felt this loss too, that they were going to be there for the Childers for as long as they were needed.
After Bridger the sun finally poked through and the countryside changed, gradually giving way to the irrigated wheat fields and extensive ranch lands along the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River. The snowy crests of several discrete mountain ranges—the Pryors directly to the east, the Beartooths and Yellowstone Park to the south and west, and the massive, dreamy folds of the Bighorns dominating the horizon farther south—changed from gray to lavender and then hard blue as the sun rose against the Continental Divide. The two marines were more talkative now, even laughing, relieving their anxiety by falling back on the gently mocking humor that had always marked their relationship. Hutchison enjoyed chiding Morgan about his gun collection and the big, chrome-encrusted Harley-Davidson Classic Road King that took up a whole bay in his garage. Morgan considered his commanding officer a hopeless “wienie” for owning a Vespa motor scooter and for reading too many books.
Hutchison particularly loved one aspect of the American West. The big, soulful landscapes, with the aperture of light changing around every river bend or mountain pass, could profoundly alter and elevate his mood. As they approached Powell from the north, they crossed a long alkali plain surrounded by a massive, U-shaped formation called the Polecat Bench. Even in a speeding SUV, this stretch of high desert took more than thirty minutes to cross. The unforgiving terrain and the crepuscular shafts of light thrown down through holes in the overcast made Hutchison feel moody, almost manic. Since arriving in Montana the summer before he’d spent a great deal of his free time touring the neighboring Indian reservations, a
ll the battlefields and western museums, and his tables and shelves at home overflowed with books about General Custer and Lewis and Clark, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse. Driving anywhere on the high plains, even on a mission like this, reminded him of the long continuum of history way out here. To him, the vast mosaic of badlands and wheat fields, encompassed by the snowy Bighorns, conveyed both the limitless opportunity and the despair of a hard western land.
Powell, a farm-and-ranch town of five thousand just east of Cody, was surprisingly tidy and prosperous—not at all the shuttered and derelict downtown that Hutchison had come to expect after several months of traveling the agricultural West. The main commercial thoroughfare running off Route 14A, North Bent Street, was wide and long in the old western style, with thriving hardware, book, and furniture stores, two barbershops, even a pharmacy with an old-fashioned soda fountain stand. A mural painted on a building near a pedestrian mall advertised that the town was named after the famed western explorer and irrigation-system developer, John Wesley Powell. Hutchison also saw a small Homesteader Museum on the edge of town, near a restored railroad siding, and made a mental note to check it out.
Hutchison and Morgan lost almost an hour meandering around the lonely section roads west of town, trying to find the Childers place by consulting their maps. The mixed-use agricultural area was dotted with small cattle-raising operations, horse farms, and the occasional luxury vacation house. In other spots, concrete irrigation canals feeding immense barley and sugar-beet fields interrupted the grid pattern of the roads, resulting in frequent, unmarked dead ends. The CACO detail finally gave up and wandered back into town to ask for directions at the police station and the post office. For two reconnaissance officers who were supposed to know their way around, this proved embarrassing, but it was also quite tricky. The CACO rulebook stipulated that they remain inconspicuous and not inform anyone of their reason for being in town until they had made the next-of-kin notification directly to the family. It was almost 10 A.M. by the time they located the small, ramshackle Childers ranch three miles from town, just over the first rise on Road 12.
Pulling past the driveway, they parked down the hill, beside a small irrigation sluice roaring with the spring overflow from the nearby Shoshone River. Retrieving their tunics and caps from the car, they dressed and then gave each other a last-minute inspection.
“Ah, shit, sir,” Morgan said. “Here goes nothing. I don’t think I can stand the hurt we’re about to bring to these people.”
“Barry, I know, I know. Let’s just be as personal as we can. They’ve got to know that we’ll take care of them.”
“Sir. Yes.”
And so, their wheels turning up a gentle plume of dust, unaware of the high drama still left in their day, or the remarkable family saga they were about to confront, they drove up the rise and turned in for the house.
A RUMOR IN TOWN
The Childers house was a modest wood-frame structure with eaves facing east and west and simple, shed-roof additions slapped onto either side. The rubble from an unfinished foundation project was piled in front of the kitchen window and mounds of rusted farm machinery, lumber, and irrigation pipe were haphazardly scattered around the yard, almost as if God’s Little Acre of Appalachia had been transported whole to northern Wyoming. Out back, a dozen swayback jackasses, mules, and horses browsed among the hay piles of a dusty corral.
“Oh Christ, sir,” Morgan said. “Look at this place. Now we’ve got to go in there and tell them that the star of the family is dead.”
“Yes,” Hutchison said thoughtfully. “This marine has got to be a huge deal for this family.”
“Huge,” Morgan said. “Huge.”
For Hutchison, that moment seemed to reprise nine years of social conditioning in the marines. His own upbringing had been privileged. Hutchison’s father was the CEO of a successful industrial waste company in California, and he had been raised in a spacious, meticulously decorated contemporary perched on the cliffs of Palos Verdes south of Los Angeles, with spectacular views down to the surf at Haggerty’s Reef and west over the Pacific Ocean. Every Christmas his family vacationed along Mexico’s west coast and he often spent Thanksgiving and Easter at his father’s hunting camp in Arizona. But most of the officers and enlisted men he met in the marines had been raised on military bases, or in the trailer parks or gritty blue-collar neighborhoods of the South and Midwest. With such different backgrounds and none of the advantages that he enjoyed, how had so many of them succeeded? This was another riddle of military life that endlessly fascinated Hutchison and the experience humbled him every time.
At the door of the house, a small decal with the Marine Corps insignia was affixed to the pane of glass just above the handle. PROUD FAMILY OF A UNITED STATES MARINE. But when they rang the doorbell and then knocked more loudly on the door, no one seemed to be home.
Exasperated, feeling slightly creepy about it, the two marines circuited the house, knocking on every door, as if they were staking out a stranger’s house, or poking through a ghost town. The Childers place amazed them. Beside the house, an antique wooden sleigh was parked at an angle on the lawn, as if it had just been unhitched, and old iron-wheeled sickle-bar cutters, harrows, and tractor implements climbed the side hill. In the jumble of barns and sheds out back, every doorway was filled to the rafters with blacksmithing and welding equipment, harness and antique cavalry saddles, a collection of one-horse plows and piles of chains, come-alongs, acid-stained batteries, and tools. This could have been the storage annex of the Smithsonian Institution, or maybe the restoration shop of a prairie museum somewhere, and they were enormously intrigued about the Childerses now, and frustrated that no one was around. Their CACO manuals, which seemed to have provided for every conceivable contingency, made no provision for this, the most obvious of possibilities: that no one was home. The intense emotions that had built from dawn, and which should have climaxed here, were now deflated.
Hutchison and Morgan drove back out to the section road and stopped at the closest house, a gray clapboard ranch just across the road. Lance Hoffman, the son of the owners, answered the door, and couldn’t have been more helpful. He didn’t seem to know much about the Childerses—the first indication Hutchison would have about how private they were—but by calling his mother at work Hoffman was able to learn that they were probably traveling. Mrs. Hoffman had seen the pickup truck of another neighbor two miles down the road, John Van Valin, driving in every morning and evening, probably to feed the horses. John and Deb Van Valin, Mrs. Hoffman said, were close friends of the Childerses.
So the two marines piled back into their government Suburban, chased down the valley to the Van Valins, found no one at home there either, and then drove back to the Hoffmans to use the phone. While Morgan disappeared with Lance Hoffman to swap hunting tales and tour the house—the walls of the living room and den were covered with the stuffed heads and racks of elk, antelope, and Bighorn sheep—Hutchison started dialing around Powell to find the Van Valins, whom he hoped could lead him to the Childerses.
By now, Hutchison was beginning to realize just how delicate, even precarious, his situation was. On the second day of a war, two marines in dress blues and a big, shiny government Suburban had been poking around a small town in Wyoming for two hours, asking at the police station, knocking on doors, circuiting the desolate section roads of a community where the neighbors could usually tell who was driving by just by the signature of their pickup’s dust cloud. Half the town must know about their arrival by now, but the CACO rules forbade them to reveal their mission to anyone except the immediate next of kin. Meanwhile, an annoyed colonel from Marine Corps headquarters in Virginia had already called Hutchison on his cell phone twice, asking whether the family had been notified yet. It was already past noon on the east coast and the newspapers and major television networks were hounding the Pentagon for identification of the young marine shot at the Rumaila oil field, fixating, as Hutchison had suspected they woul
d, on Childers’ status as the first killed in action in Iraq.
“Captain, we’ll give you every resource you need,” the colonel from Quantico had told him over the phone. “You have the complete support of headquarters and the Fifth Marine Division, if you need it.” Translation? “Hutchison, don’t fuck up.” But that’s exactly what the day was shaping up to be—a classic, CACO fuckup that Hutchison had vowed to avoid.
When he finally tracked Deb Van Valin down at work, Hutchison thought she was very helpful, but also quite shaky, as if she’d already heard that a marine detail was poking around Powell and had reason to be worried.
“Captain, just tell me, all right? Why are you here?”
“Ah, ma’am, I can’t tell you that right away. I’m sorry. But can we meet with you? We need your help.”
“Okay, captain. I know the rules. Meet me back at my house. I’m leaving right now.”
The Van Valin house stands on land with a broad, picturesque vista down the Powell Valley. While he waited for Deb Van Valin to arrive, Hutchison leaned against the fender of the Suburban, taking in the view. The morning clouds had finally broken up, revealing the immense, moody folds of the Bighorns to the east. This was altogether too beautiful a place, Hutchison thought, too beautiful a day, to be deciding what he could or couldn’t tell this woman about his mission.
Deb Van Valin is angular and trim, with a few wisps of gray in her brown hair, warm but very direct. As soon as she invited the two marines into her house, Hutchison could understand why she had seemed so concerned. On the living room wall there was a recent photograph of a young marine noncom. He was Deb’s son, Sergeant Travis Dusenberry, a helicopter crew chief who had been briefly deployed over the winter in Afghanistan. He was now stationed at Quantico, Virginia, and assigned to the crew of Marine One, the aviation detail that operates the shiny olive-drab helicopters that whisk the president, his staff, and the press on White House trips.