by Rinker Buck
From the hardwood sill of his bedroom bay window, he could hear the wind outside, howling down from the rimrock plateaus. For some reason, the drive back and forth over the Pryors kept returning as he tried to fall asleep.
Drifting off, Hutchison made a mental note to call Richard Brown in Texas first thing in the morning. He wanted the sergeant to know that he cared. There was something else about it. Despite the sadness of the circumstances, the two weeks of sleeplessness and hell they were all going to endure, he was pleased by the image of Lieutenant Childers receiving his brother-in-law’s first salute.
NEXT OF KIN
The marine detail arrived at the Browns’ house, pulling up in a van. It was just after dinner and the rest of the family had settled down on the living-room couch. Sandy was showing everyone a collection of jewelry that she kept in a special box because Shane, Joe, and Judy had given the pieces to her over the years. They all felt tired and road-weary from the long drive across Texas that day.
When Richard stepped outside to greet the CACO team, the accumulated tensions—the waiting and waiting, not being able to share with anyone that his brother-in-law was dead—overwhelmed him once more. He stood out by the curb, shaking hands with the CACO detail, gasping in deep breaths and desperately attempting to compose himself and stand straight without doubling over in tears. When he turned back for the house, the three-man detail, a chaplain, a first sergeant, and a major named David Blassingame, followed him single file up the cement walk.
Richard led the marine detail into the living room and then stood slightly away, revealing three sets of crisply pressed, telltale dress blue slacks with red stripes down their sides.
A three-man marine detail in dress blues doesn’t show up on an army base for any other reason. They all knew, right then. It’s Shane. This explained why Richard had looked so awful all afternoon. Dropping the pieces of jewelry to the coffee table, they fell silent and looked up.
“Sandy! What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t tell you, couldn’t. I felt so torn,” Richard said.
The first sergeant and the chaplain stood side by side in a kind of respectful, parade rest position, with their hands clasped behind their backs. Major Blassingame stood in front, nervously examining a faxed piece of paper that he pulled out of his uniform pocket.
Good, Joe Childers thought, he’s going to do this straight from the book. That was Joe’s first reaction—relief—because he felt sorry for the major, who looked so uncomfortable. Delivering the news right out of the CACO manual would make it easier on an officer who obviously had been dragged into this at the last minute and had no idea how the family would react.
But, God, Shane, what happened here? Shane, what happened? Fighting his emotions, Joe decided to just sit there respectfully and let the major do it in his own way. Perhaps this was the last thing he could do for his son—showing these visiting marines just what kind of family Shane had.
“On behalf of the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, I regret to inform you that your son, Second Lieutenant Therrel Shane Childers, was killed in action on March 21…”
If they heard anything after that, none of them remembered it. Joe immediately welled up and unashamedly began to cry, Sandy wailed beside him, and Judy sat stoically at her end of the couch, reaching behind Sandy to touch Joe’s shoulder in support. Before they could say anything the chaplain stepped around the major, placed his arm around Joe’s shoulder and suggested that they pray. The Childers family had never been particularly religious and prayer right then wouldn’t have occurred to them, but they were all too dazed to do anything else except follow along. As the chaplain began his prayer, Richard began to sob uncontrollably and his eight-year-old daughter, Autumn, called out.
“Sandy, Dad, wait a minute!” Autumn cried. “What’s happening? I don’t understand. Is this about Shane? Is Shane hurt?”
On Tuesday morning, before they left for Lubbock, Sandy had woken up overwhelmed by the sudden fear that Shane would be killed in Iraq. She hadn’t dared express this to her parents and upset them and, besides, crazy premonitions were a big part of being a military sibling or wife. Maybe she was really just worrying in advance about Richard’s deployment, through Shane. She had brooded about it all afternoon in the car and finally talked herself out of worrying about it. Why trouble yourself with something that wasn’t even going to happen, or was months away? But now, here they were already, the marines. So soon and it’s Shane.
But now Sandy had to worry about her stepdaughter. In 1995, when she and Richard began dating, the Childerses had immediately accepted his daughter from an earlier marriage, and Autumn’s puppy-love for Shane had become a constant and touching source of humor for everyone in the family. When the Browns visited Wyoming and Shane was there, Autumn followed him around all day, moon-faced and in awe of her stepuncle, chattering at his heel as he moved from the barn to the corral to the fields. Shane made her laugh, he taught her how to hold newborn kittens and coil a lasso, he listened and he never talked down to her. They all loved the way Autumn would burst through the kitchen door exclaiming about Shane. “Mom, guess what Shane did? He fell off the mule and squished his cowboy hat.” A few times, when he rushed through Wyoming between assignments, Shane’s schedule was so tight that he flew in and out by airliner. Autumn loved riding into the Cody airport to see him off, and always insisted upon standing by the big glass windows and watching until his plane disappeared over the Bighorns.
Now Autumn was disconsolate and confused. Sandy knew that she had to get Autumn out of there and comfort her alone. She stepped up to lead her stepdaughter off to her bedroom.
Major Blassingame would be among the first to notice a curious but touching division of emotion in the Childers marriage. It was almost as if they had been working for years on redefining traditional expectations of gender. Joe was voluble and completely unashamed about his grief. “All right, major, just let me bawl my head off for a couple of minutes here and then maybe we can talk.” Judy, meanwhile, sat stolidly on the couch, biting her lip occasionally but maintaining control. She was naturally hospitable and insisted that the major and his detail relax. She was practical and take-charge, an experienced military wife comfortable with assuming authority over details while her adventuring husband was away. She wanted to know how the detail had first heard about Shane, how the marines had managed to track the family down in Texas, whom they should contact when they arrived back home.
Once he had calmed down, Joe seemed most comfortable telling stories, investing his unexpected visitors with his fabulous gift for talk. “Oh, my Shane, you know?” Joe told the marine detail. “Not many fathers get a son like this.” He could go on forever, with elaborate digressions, even digressions within digressions. Shane home for Christmas, jingling across the fields with the Belgians and sleigh, Shane climbing Kilimanjaro or the Alps, Shane filling the barn with cartons of “borrowed” military-issue Meals Ready to Eat, so they had enough stores for their next packing trip up to Jack Creek. Joe’s memory for dates was precise, and the word he used most often to describe his son was “intense.”
Major Blassingame and his detail stayed at the Browns for another two hours, mostly listening to Joe’s stories, eventually moving to the kitchen table. When he had arrived for his visit in Texas, Joe had tacked a snapshot that he carried in his wallet, of Shane in his dress-blue marine uniform, onto the edge of Sandra’s portrait gallery in the living room. When they all moved into the kitchen, Joe had taken down the picture and carried it in for Major Blassingame. The major brightened up as soon as he saw the photograph, astounded by the coincidence.
“Oh my God, I know this marine,” Blassingame said. “He was one of my students at Miramar.”
It was true. Over the summer of 1998, just before matriculating at The Citadel, Shane had attended a marine college-prep course at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, where Blassingame was one of his instructors.
“Well, Joe, you’re certainly right
about his intensity,” Blassingame said. “Shane was the kind of student you would assign ten problems in the textbook and the next morning he would come back having solved thirty of them in the rest of the chapter. I never forgot him.”
The Childerses were exultant about this. Shane’s friends in the service, and even a few of his professors at The Citadel, had always depicted him as a marine’s marine, the kind of soldier whom all the enlisted men and officers boasted about and who was well known throughout the network of marine bases across the country. Now his status as a Corps legend even seemed confirmed by the major who had come to notify them of his death.
Joe, in particular, seemed reluctant to let the CACO team leave, as if telling one more story about Shane, sharing one more yarn about his navy Seabee years would prevent the Childers family from being left alone with their terrible news. But Blassingame was eventually able to ease himself away by giving them Captain Hutchison’s name and explaining that the Billings command would assume responsibility for the family as soon as they returned home.
As soon as the marines left, Richard got on the phone and changed the reservations for his in-laws’ return flight from Monday to the next day. Earlier, on the couch in the living room and then in Sandy’s kitchen, as Joe’s stories had droned on, Judy was overwhelmed by a strong sensation, a sudden desire for escape. She just wanted to be home, now. Major Blassingame had told them that it might be a week, or even longer, before Shane’s body was returned. During their long wait, Judy knew, they would be inundated by relatives and friends pressing in on their lives, an enormous intrusion on the quiet ranch life that she and Joe enjoyed. Now she just wanted to be surrounded by the familiar mix of possessions and appliances of her own home—her photo albums, a phone message machine that she knew how to work, Joe’s work jackets and boots stored by the door. It was the most powerful of instincts, she thought—Shane’s dead, let’s get home.
Judy would later say that she thought Joe slept about twenty minutes that night, but that she slept a little more. At 4 A.M., realizing that neither of them was going to sleep any more, they rose and prepared to leave for the airport, lingering at the front door to hug Sandy and Richard before they left. There were a few times along the highway to Dallas that they actually felt unified with something to discuss—the anticipated arrival of relatives for Shane’s funeral, whether or not Sandy and Richard would be able to get up to Wyoming—but mostly Shane’s death seemed to have placed them in two different worlds, two sides of the car with a wall between them. Every forty or fifty miles, a sudden wave of uncontrollable emotions flowed over Joe and he started to cry. Judy was quiet, weeping a few times, but she didn’t break down like Joe.
That was the oddest part about it, Joe thought. The terrible helplessness of losing Shane never hit them the same way at the same time.
As soon as he woke on Saturday morning, Captain Hutchison decided to honor his personal pledge of the night before and call Richard Brown in Texas. Richard seemed much better now, less consumed by the shattering emotions caused by his brother-in-law’s death than the dilemma of whether to ship with his unit to Kuwait. Richard also told Hutchison that Joe and Judy Childers had changed their travel plans and were returning to Wyoming right away. Before they left the Browns in Texas, Joe and Judy had insisted that they didn’t need a marine detail to meet them in Billings and were confident that they could get back to Wyoming alone. They just wanted to get home.
Richard had told Hutchison, however, that everyone in the family was worried about calls from reporters now that the next of kin notification had been made and the Pentagon had released Shane’s identity to the media. After he hung up with Richard, Hutchison turned on his radio and heard several news broadcasts identifying Shane Childers, though it would take several hours for the media to track down the Childers family in Wyoming. This aroused Hutchison’s protective instincts, and he decided that he and Morgan would meet the family’s late-afternoon flight into Billings. He spent the rest of the day nervously anticipating the mission—at this point, he didn’t even know what the Childerses looked like, and he suspected that they might feel as frustrated and exhausted as he did about the difficulty in locating them the day before.
But these doubts were dispelled as soon as they reached the airport baggage area just before sunset. Near the baggage carousels, a couple obviously in distress and comforting each other stood apart from the rest of the crowd. Joe Childers looked surprisingly youthful and broad-shouldered, and he was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a western-cut shirt with a bright red navy cap bearing the insignia of the USS Tortuga, a gift Shane had given him after one of his Pacific expeditions. As soon as Childers saw the marines in their dress blues, he smiled and walked right over.
“Hi. I guess you folks are looking for me. I’m Joe Childers.”
Hutchison extended his hand, introduced himself and Morgan, and told Joe how sorry he was to learn the news about his son. Hutchison could see that Joe was bravely struggling to contain his emotions, and was impressed with how utterly candid and unashamed he was about that.
“I’m not afraid to tell you that I’m having a rough time with this, captain,” Joe said. “Shane was quite a son to lose. But look, we better get back over to Judy.”
Judy seemed to be in better shape. Her eyes were milky and she was bravely forcing a smile when they walked over but she was obviously more reserved and calm than Joe. There was an awkward moment or two while Hutchison decided whether or not to embrace her—ah, hell, yes, I should—but she was gracious about that and gave both Hutchison and Morgan long bear hugs. Hutchison’s first instinct was to focus his attention on the dead marine’s mother, saying all the obvious things and pouring on all the solicitous charm he could muster to console her. But when he began to speak and called her “Mrs. Childers,” Judy smiled again and held up her hand.
“Captain, number one, you just call me Judy and I’ll call you Kevin, all right? We’re pretty informal about that. Number two, I’m handling this a lot better than Joe. He’s the one we should be worried about.”
They all fell into an easy rapport together after that. Joe was obviously pleased to have the undivided attention of a big, beefy platoon sergeant like Morgan, and began regaling him with his Seabee tales. Hutchison spoke with Judy, compensating for her initial reticence by telling her about himself. A couple of times, when Joe broke down, Hutchison reached over and gently held his arm while continuing to speak with Judy, and Joe gratefully clutched him back. Hutchison liked the Childerses’ directness, how a sudden thought or emotion didn’t just sit there, unexpressed. When he was done describing his marine career, Judy said, “Well, I’m already not believing this. You remind me so much of Shane.”
Hutchison was particularly impressed with Morgan that afternoon and quickly realized that he had to check himself, resist his urge to command. When the baggage carousel started running and the Childerses briefly stepped out of earshot to look for their luggage, Hutchison spoke up.
“First sergeant, I think the best thing we can do for this couple now is just listen. You know? Just listen.”
“Sir, I am listening. Christ, I’ve already been from Puerto Rico to Nam with this guy. All right?”
All of them were also aware of another, quiet dynamic that had taken over in the baggage terminal as soon as Hutchison and Morgan had arrived in their dress blues. They were standing together in a small knot—two uniformed marines with a man in a bright red navy cap who was occasionally crying, and a wife trying to buck him up. When they saw the Childerses and the marines together, the other airline passengers waiting for their baggage, and their friends and relatives who had arrived to meet them, stood in small groups against the walls, saying nothing, abandoning the usual gaiety and bustle of a baggage terminal. A number of the men took off their cowboy hats and held them against their chests and stood politely, staring straight ahead. The building was as hushed as a church. They knew, they all knew what this meant, even the ones who hadn’t he
ard that the first casualty of Iraq was from nearby Wyoming. There was nothing embarrassing or uncomfortable about it. What the Childerses and their CACO detail felt from that silent airport crowd was respect.
At one point, after Judy had decided to rest on a bench near the wall, a Crow Indian woman quietly walked over, sat down beside Judy and patted her on the back. She told Judy that she was sorry for the family’s loss. Hutchison thanked her and spoke with her for a while about the Crow reservation, which he liked to visit when he was out seeing the Custer Battlefield along the Little Bighorn River nearby.
Hutchison’s initial feelings of respect and even deep affection for Joe and Judy were cemented once they had finally collected their luggage and they all headed out for the Childerses’ car in the airport parking lot. It was a tan, 1986 Ford LTD with high mileage, and it wouldn’t start. But this didn’t seem to faze the Childerses at all, and there was no trace of embarrassment or the need to explain as Joe stepped to the back of the car and opened the trunk, which was full of farm equipment, tools, and spare parts.
“Ah, dang it all anyway,” Joe said. “It’s the electrical system again.”
Once he had the front hood raised, Judy joined him at the engine and seemed even more adroit than Joe at monkeying around with the alternator and the battery connections until the engine turned over. The engine raced as they all said good-bye in the parking lot.
“Joe, are you sure that we can’t run you back down to Powell?” Hutchison asked. “We don’t mind at all.”
“Nah, that’s okay, cap’n,” Joe said. “After all this, you know? Judy and I would just like to spend tomorrow alone. Get settled.”
Hutchison said fine and handed Joe his business card with all his phone numbers, and urged him to call if he needed anything. Joe seemed to brighten as he read the business card and looked up with a playful smirk on his face.