by Rinker Buck
Deb looked directly at Hutchison’s face across the kitchen floor.
Hutchison was filled with such utter sympathy for her at that moment, and anger at himself, that he was practically speechless. All he could do was shake his head and repeat, “No. No-no-no.” Christ, I practically killed this poor woman here, racing all the way out from Powell in her car. I should have told her on the phone. How many other marine mothers, or marine wives, were there in Powell? They must all know by now. Forget the CACO rules. He knew that he could trust Deb because she was the mother of a marine and would probably understand the next-of-kin notification rules. But, mostly, he just wanted to take her out of her misery and tell her everything, then get her to help him find the Childerses.
Finally Hutchison said. “We have to find Joseph and Judy Childers. Their son has been killed in Iraq.”
Deb slowly lowered herself to a chair at the kitchen table and placed her face in her hands. Her shoulders began to shake as she cried. She blinked back tears as she looked back up to face Hutchison.
“Just tell me that it’s not Shane Childers. Captain, please say that. It’s not Shane, right?”
“Second Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers. Deb, we really are so sorry.”
“Oh my God. Shane. Shane, Shane. Oh, poor Judy and Joe. And my John. John is like a father to this boy. He’ll be so upset. Oh, captain, you just can’t know what this means. Who this boy was. Shane. You just thought that nothing could ever hurt Shane Childers.”
Deb cried some more and then, for a while, she cycled back and forth between the two marines in her life right now. Hutchison decided to let her vent. He’d already lost too much time trying to locate the Childerses, but he just didn’t have the meanness inside him, the practicality, to force her to focus right away. Besides, psychologically, he found what she was going through to be very interesting. It was almost as if she had intense, motherly feelings for two sons in the marines. But before she could break through to the terrible news about one, Shane, she had to expunge the trauma of racing home over the section roads of Powell, thinking that it was about the other, Travis.
“Okay, so, it’s a small community, right, and everyone in town knows why you’re here,” Deb told them. “We all thought it was about Travis—I mean, helicopters crash all the time. And, you know, the whole time Travis was in Afghanistan we never heard a word or even knew where he was, whether it was just that the marines kept him that busy, or he wasn’t allowed to tell us. And now. I can’t imagine what these mothers are going through. How they wait. This war in Iraq just seems so much more violent already.”
Deb was still overwrought about Shane, but she seemed to calm down once she began to tell them about the Childerses. The Van Valins had first met Joe and Judy twelve years ago, shortly after the Childerses had moved from Mississippi to Wyoming when Joe Childers retired from a twenty-two-year career in the Navy Seabees. John also raised mules, and he’d become curious about the Childerses after seeing mules in their fields, and dropped in one afternoon to introduce himself and check out the new neighbor’s jacks.
Joe was colorful and abrupt, Deb said, a nonstop talker and raconteur. The family had followed him around the world on his various Seabee billets—Midway Island, Puerto Rico, the Middle East, and even Iran—and led a very interesting life. Even while working full-time for the navy, Joe had spent most of his weekend and evening time as a blacksmith and farrier, and he told wonderful stories about his horseshoeing junkets on several continents. John Van Valin soon fell under Joe’s spell, and before long they were spending their weekends together, ranging out across the Wyoming countryside to take in the farm sales and mule auctions. Joe had joined a local trail-riding group, the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen, and John often tagged along on their outings and packing expeditions up into the mountains. The innumerable farm-equipment breakdowns over at the Childerses were legendary, a running joke between the two families.
Deb assured Hutchison and Morgan that, despite the circumstances, they were going to love the Childerses. Judy was a lot more understated than Joe, the one who kept the household running and everyone grounded, while Joe was off on another one of his adventures.
But, God, Shane. This was going to be such upsetting news for everybody. Shane wasn’t just the hope of the Childers family. He was this whirlwind of energy and talk, very grounded but also hilariously madcap in his own way. When he was visiting Wyoming and went to one of the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen barbecues, or just met people around town, all of the mothers would talk about him afterward. “Hey, what happened here. We got robbed. How come none of us got a son like Shane?”
Shane was Joe and Judy’s second child and oldest son, and he had enlisted in the marines the same year the Childerses had moved to Wyoming, 1990. Deb had met him the following year, when he was just eighteen, a raw recruit returning from the Persian Gulf War, and watched him grow over the years as he passed through Wyoming in between his marine assignments. Shane was particularly fastidious about his body, his physical conditioning. In the mornings, when Shane was home, Deb would see him on her way out to work, pedaling furiously on his mountain bike as he began a twenty-five-mile circuit out over the mountains. Home by noon, Shane once helped John carpet a friend’s house, and then Joe would chase them down by phone because his baler had broken down while he was haying one of his fields. That night, driving back in from work and some food shopping, Deb would see them all together out on the corner of the Childers place, while Shane helped Joe break apart and fix the New Holland baler. Everyone could see that there was a lot of Joe in Shane—all that chronic Childers intensity, the racing from event to event, interest to interest, from dawn to dusk. But Shane was different too, more organized and thorough. Even Joe said that Shane always got his projects done.
Deb had always felt that Shane was irresistible in another way. He had taken the opportunities for travel and adventure much further than the average marine, and was always bubbling over with new curiosities and passions, and told such interesting stories, when he raced through Wyoming between assignments. When he was stationed in Europe, he toured art museums, learned to sail on Lake Geneva, and climbed the Alps. In California, he surfed and climbed Mount Shasta. Shane spoke with particular affection and awe about Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, a peak he’d climbed several times. In the late 1990s, he had entered The Citadel in South Carolina and become intensely involved in his college courses. After that, everyone had noticed a big change and thought that Shane was beginning to round a new corner. Now all that manic energy was poured into books, and an intense enthusiasm for people. At the Shoshone Horsemen barbecues, when he was home, Shane would meet someone new and get involved in long, windy conversations about French literature, the Battle of Shiloh or changing careers—whatever interested him at the moment, or had just come up in conversation with his new friend. Then he’d chase across the driveway to his pickup truck, swing open the door of his cab, and pull out a particular book from the pile behind the seat. “Okay, this is a novel, but it’s really a great self-improvement book too, see? You’ve got to read it. And I will be e-mailing you about this.”
Shane Childers, Deb said, was lovably, irresistibly, intense.
Deb said one other thing about Shane. “Okay, so sorry, captain, but you know marines. Too many of them have this kick-butt, macho attitude about everything, always bragging about their accomplishments, and that even includes my son. But Shane wasn’t like that at all. He was definitely all marine, and totally believed in the mission, but also very polite, considerate, a total gentleman. You should just know that, captain.”
Hutchison waited patiently for Deb to talk herself out, his mind occasionally distracted by other thoughts. He was very close to his own mother and older sister, and spoke with each of them by phone several times a week. What if he had taken this bullet in Iraq, and the CACO detail had just arrived at his house in California? Would they treat his mother and sister, or their friends, the same way? And Shane Chil
ders. He was beginning to feel very drawn to Childers’ story. He could tell from what Deb said that he would have liked Childers quite a lot, and this reminded him of his own loneliness sometimes, the lack of intellectual companionship, of officers who shared his interests, in the Marine Corps. The day so far seemed such a jumble, impossibly tragic and dreamy at once. He was supposed to be on a CACO call, but his mind kept wandering off like that—Powell to Palos Verdes, Iraq to the Bighorn country, with the snowy bosom of mountains outside the Van Valin kitchen window throwing long lavender shadows on the browsing cattle below.
This was one thing about Hutchison that royally pissed off Morgan. Hutch. Captain Hutch. Always nice to everybody, always ready with some engaging thought. Morgan did consider Hutchison an outstanding head of command. He liked working with him, and particularly appreciated how graciously Hutchison responded to a ribbing. Still, all of these commissioned officers were the same—college-educated and thus dumb as shit. This pimply-faced, dogmeat enlistee is having girlfriend problems, so Hutch spends hours with him, dispensing worldly advice. This trailer-trash grunt doesn’t know his ass from a munitions dump about obtaining a mortgage, so Hutch takes an afternoon to brief him on interest rates. Now, when they desperately need to locate the Childers family to make a next-of-kin notification, the captain was letting this neighbor down the road moan on and on about her feelings. Christ. If the fucking guy wanted to be a psychiatrist, why the hell didn’t he go to medical school instead of joining the marines?
“Ah, sir,” Morgan said from across the kitchen floor, shifting on his feet. “Would you mind if we maybe got down to…”
Deb Van Valin held up her hand.
“No, that’s okay, sergeant,” she said. “You’re right. I can help you find Joe and Judy Childers. They’re in Texas.”
The Childerses had spent that week at Fort Hood, Texas, the sprawling military base just north of Killeen that houses the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. Joe and Judy’s daughter, Sandra, was married to Richard Brown, a Powell resident who had originally served in the air force and then worked at several jobs around Wyoming before deciding to reenlist in the military, this time the army. He now worked as a sergeant for the 297th Transportation Company at Fort Hood. For several months, the Childerses had known that they faced a kind of double jeopardy as a military family. Since the previous fall, it had been abundantly clear that Shane’s unit, with the First Battalion of the Fifth Marine Division, would be one of the first fighting forces sent into Iraq. They had trained intensively since the summer at Camp Pendleton, California, and then worked on specialized assault tactics at the marines’ combined arms warfare center in Twentynine Palms. Then, over the winter, Richard had gradually realized that his army unit would be sent too, as part of the large convoy force that would be shuttling between Kuwait and Iraq, ferrying munitions and supplies north. In early March, Sandra let her parents know that Richard’s unit would be deploying by the end of the month. Joe had already asked for a week off from his job as a mechanic at a large oil and gas service company outside Powell, and Judy had booked a flight for Dallas and reserved a rental car.
Joe had looked forward to the trip. More than thirty years ago, as a much younger man, he had shipped out for two tours in Vietnam, but his parents still had school-age children at home, and were too tied up with work on their small West Virginia farm, to see him off for war. Now he could be there for Sandra during the chaos and high emotions of her husband’s deployment, something he’d always vowed to do if any of his children joined or married into the service.
And they’d been having a good time so far. Sandra was still fixing up the interior of her small, detached house in a subdivision on the base, and Judy had kept her busy with those projects. Joe had particularly enjoyed his tour of the vast Fort Hood motor-pool parking lots and bays, crouching on one knee as he inspected the big convoy trucks, drawling away in his soft, West Virginia accent about this hydraulic line or that suspension system, all the elaborate trailer hitches. Just the sight of a diesel-fired auxiliary power unit, or a bumper-mounted winch, set Joe off, and Richard’s friends in the motor pool had enjoyed listening to Joe’s yarns about Vietnam or horseshoeing forays across several continents. Richard was still laughing about it when he got home.
“Hey, Sandy, Judy, everyone in the unit loves Joe. They want to kidnap him and bring him with us to Kuwait.”
That week, Joe, Judy, Sandy, and her two children had all driven together for six hours west across Texas to visit Judy’s sister and brother-in-law in Lubbock. The visit had gone well, but it was a confusing time. Sandy had already said good-bye to Richard, because she expected his unit to be deployed before she returned, but then he had called Lubbock Thursday night to report that the 297th wasn’t leaving until the weekend. When they returned to Fort Hood on Friday, Sandy would have to say hello and good-bye to Richard all over again—the standard, hurry-up-and-wait emotional torture experienced by military families during major deployments. On the radio as they drove to Lubbock, and then on the evening television news at their in-law’s house, the drumbeat for war was building. President George W. Bush’s final ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction, or to leave Iraq, expired on Thursday night, and then the “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraqi cities had begun. Shane’s unit would be going over the berm into Iraq any hour now. Then Richard would deploy. It was a double-whammy of butterflies and last-minute changes of plans as the Childerses waited for the war to commence.
On Friday morning, Joe and Judy woke at 6 A.M. and she immediately turned on the television. All the morning news shows were carrying the same reports.
“Oh, Joe, look,” Judy said. “The ground war has begun.”
“Yeah, well, here we go then,” Joe said. “I just sure hope that they can manage this thing to minimize the casualties. That’s what I hope.”
Most of the television cameramen and reporters embedded with the army and marines seemed to be with units that were swinging west and then north for Nasiriya and Najaf in central Iraq, deliberately avoiding the first few engagements in the south, about which little was known so far. But there were scattered reports of fighting at several key objectives in southern Iraq as British units advanced toward Basra and the Shatt al Arab waterway, and a few U.S. Marine assault platoons pushed due north toward oil field installations that Pentagon planners were determined to secure before the Iraqis set them on fire as they retreated. Most of the network and cable news reports also included one other piece of information. A marine officer had been killed while his unit was attacking a pumping station at the Rumaila oil field, barely twenty miles inside Iraq. His identification was being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
Joe and Judy both thought the same thing but decided not to talk about it.
It made no sense to worry right then whether or not the marine officer who had been killed was Shane. From his Vietnam experience, Joe knew that Shane was in danger—marine platoon leaders, because they were trained to lead from the front, had exceptionally high casualty rates. But Joe had also served his first tour in Vietnam during the explosive, violent Tet Offensive in 1968, and he knew that there was an incredible randomness to war casualties. Even if he did know where Shane’s unit was, that didn’t mean that his son was engaged or even hurt—there would have been dozens of other marine officers in the same area. Besides, the Childerses were familiar with the precise military procedures for notifying families of soldiers who had been killed. Probably by the time they returned to Fort Hood that afternoon, they’d learn that the marine officer had been identified and that there was no longer any reason to worry about Shane.
But all across Texas that day, as they drove through the dry and scrubby Brazos River country and then pushed east through Sweet-water and Abilene, the radio reports were the same. The marine officer killed at Rumaila still hadn’t been identified. They tried to force themselves not to worry. Once his grandchildren settled down in the bac
kseat and the car was quiet, Joe had a lot of time to daydream and think while he enjoyed the Texas ranchland and the occasional irrigated farm belts they passed through.
At Christmas, Shane had visited Wyoming for almost a week, just before he raced off in his red pickup to join some friends in Oregon for a predeployment skiing trip. He’d devoted the vacation to his usual frantic curriculum—rising early to make his morning run along the icy roads around Powell, noodling around with his laptop and e-mailing friends across the country from the dining room table, then making a stab at his father’s foundation project out front until the frost line stopped him. A decent snow had fallen on the eastern face of the Rockies that week. One afternoon, Shane decided to hitch up his father’s team of matched Belgian draft horses, Amigo and April, and take them out for a sleigh ride. He found the team in the corral out back, curried and harnessed them in the barn, then drove them out on foot to the large, crazyass assemblage of antique farm machinery and vehicles—almost forty in all—that Joe kept out back.
Joe’s box sleigh has two fixed sets of runners under the rear flatbed, with a steerable bob, mounted on a fifth wheel, up front—an enormously fun rig. Shane had a ball out there, urging on the big prancing horses while the harness jingled, the hooves pounded the prairie snow, turning up fluffy rooster tails from the rusty front runners every time he pulled the team around through a tight turn. After careening around the hayfields for a while, he headed out back for the steeper, winding terrain up against the Polecat Bench. Shane loved it back there, all that Wyoming vastness, the views of the snowy Pryors and the Bighorns, the slight quiver of weightlessness as he stood up from the seat and pushed the horses hard uphill and then went for some air as he cleared the top of a gulch.