by Rinker Buck
At the time, Hutchison thought that all this devotion to personal credos was embarrassing, the corny sort of thing that prep school teachers tried to develop in their students. A side of him still felt that way, but the problem with saber estar was that it worked. Whether he was touring Europe with his college friends, or rescuing one of his rifle platoon recruits from a drunken confrontation at a North Carolina strip joint, he had found that he never met someone new he didn’t somehow like. “You know, Barry,” Hutchison had occasionally said to Morgan, “I’ve never met a single person from whom I didn’t learn something important.” In reply, the first sergeant would just grunt.
Now the dust of a bumpy Wyoming drive was swirling up in vortices over the roof of his government vehicle, obscuring the windshield and settling in a thick film on the hood of the Suburban. Hutchison was reminded again that he would much rather be serving elsewhere, in a real war, not devoting himself to CACO work in this lonely, shitwreck remove of the western prairies. But saber estar. Wordlessly he parked the Suburban in between a pile of sun-bleached lumber and a mound of old tractor tires. It was his job now to fold himself into the lives of the Childers family, considering only their situation, not his.
Judy met Hutchison and Morgan at the front door and escorted them through the small sun room inside the shed addition. She had already turned the piano inside the dining room into an impromptu but surprisingly attractive shrine to Shane Childers, with his official marine portrait, flowers, press clips, snapshots, and condolence cards arranged along the sheet-music shelf and the top surface. When Hutchison and Morgan instinctively placed their dress caps on the piano stool, the look seemed to complete the tableau, creating a memorial that was almost too perfect, as if the piano and its mementos to Shane were a photographer’s still-life for a Hallmark card.
When they sat down at the large antique table in the dining room, clearly the center of the open floor plan of the house, they could see that they wouldn’t be overwhelming the Childerses. If anything, they were a welcome relief. All morning delivery trucks bearing flowers, condolences, and cooked meals from neighbors were arriving, and the phone was constantly ringing. Judy briskly made coffee and Joe came in from the barn wearing his USS Tortuga ball cap. They all fell in together around the table and Hutchison felt that the Childerses’ informality and warmth was infectious. Observing his best marine officer decorum—actually, it was a default to his prep school manners—Hutchison insisted on calling Judy “Mrs. Childers.” The third or fourth time she heard him address her that way, Judy cocked her head sideways, turned her mouth into a mock frown and reached over and touched Hutchison’s hand.
“Captain Hutchison,” Judy said, grandiloquently stretching out the syllables of his rank and name. “I’ll call you Kevin, and you’ll call me Judy, all right? That’s an order from Mrs. Childers. Got it?”
“Right, Mrs. Childers,” Hutchison said. “It’s Judy from now on. I promise.”
“Oh God, Joe, don’t you just love him?” Judy said, reaching across the table to squeeze Hutchison’s hand again. “So polite. Just like Shane.”
“Yeah, that was old Shane all right,” Joe said, his eyes misting up. “The neighbors would all tell me that Shane got all the manners that I never picked up.”
It truly was a mountain of paperwork and decision making that they had to plow through that morning, but Hutchison was relieved about it, even happy for himself. Crisply moving Joe and Judy through the forms, explaining everything in detail, for the first time he actually felt that he was doing something productive, really helping them. The first thing he did was hand them a check for $6,000 and a receipt form to sign—the death gratuity automatically paid by the Pentagon to the next of kin of any serviceman killed in training or action, so the family would have funds just to tide them over the first painful weeks. Judy quietly put that aside, beginning the pile of paperwork that she would meticulously maintain as they progressed. Hutchison then explained the payment of $250,000 for Shane’s military group life insurance policy, his pay arrears and certfication of combat pay, which had begun as soon as he left Camp Pendleton in February, his military 401(k) plan, the payoff of his student loans, and forms for the disposition of his remains to the family and the payment of a standard government allowance of $4,300 for funeral costs.
The list was endless. Hutchison explained that there were government allowances available for family members to travel to the funeral, but only if they were “immediate next of kin.” Judy wanted to use that benefit to help pay for the travel costs of more distant relatives who probably couldn’t afford to come to the funeral. Hutchison promised to wiggle that through the Casualty Assistance branch in Quantico. Certifying Shane’s ribbons and medals so that his burial uniform could be prepared, transferring his car ownership to his parents and recovering the personal possessions that he’d left behind in a suburban San Diego storage facility, all required a separate set of multiple forms.
One aspect of this impressed Hutchison. All servicemen about to be posted overseas, especially for combat assignments, are required to run through a long series of records checklists to make certain that, in the event of injury or death, their insurance forms, medical history, and records of personal property are in order and immediately accessible by computer and in a single paper file. These personal records were supposed to be checked and double-checked by commanding officers, but often that process became the first casualty of a hectic deployment. Frequently, recovering the records or bank accounts of an injured or killed soldier was a nightmare for the battalion support staff or CACO officers back home. But Shane Childers’ files seemed to be in perfect order, with every credit card and its expiration date, every bank balance and college loan meticulously recorded in his small, precise handwriting on the proper forms.
“Judy, I’m really amazed by how these records are kept up—Shane must have been very…” Hutchison said, and then immediately regretted it, because perhaps he was evoking too painful a reminder.
“Organized,” Judy said. “He was very organized. I don’t think there’s a person I know who packed more in, had more fun, than Shane. It was crazy what he tried to do with a single day, how disorganized it all seemed. But then every paper that was due, every form that had to be filled out, was in order. That was Shane. The most organized disorganized person you could meet.”
The succession of paperwork and all the decisions they had to make frequently prompted memories from Judy and Joe, and Hutchison felt that he was slowly learning more about Shane, but in no particular order. The memories were returning disjunctively, flashback piling upon flashback. First Joe would talk about Shane hitching up his team to the sleigh when he was home for Christmas, and then he would digress to the horseshoeing junkets they had taken together in Virginia or Iran, when Shane was still a boy. Judy was the same way, but her stories were shorter and generally led to a point. When Hutchison mentioned how orderly Shane’s records were, for example, Judy jumped to something she wanted to say.
During the twelve years that they had lived in Wyoming, Shane was always buying them something new when he returned home. Aging color-television tubes or coffeemakers with broken timers aroused in him a deep, altruistic urge to blow some money on his parents—and he was the same way with his other relatives. While Joe and Judy were off at work, Shane would hop into his pickup and drive into the Wal-Mart in Cody or the Radio Shack at the mall in Billings, buy a new appliance, and then race in at twilight in a swirl of pickup dust. He loved surprising them with a new appliance, theatrically removing it from the cardboard box, installing it in the living room or the kitchen, and then squabbling with Joe about how to work the new remote or program the electronic features. Over dinner Shane would entertain them with stories about the people he’d met—to him, that’s what a shopping excursion was all about. The young community college student working behind the counter at Radio Shack—maybe, just maybe, Shane was never certain about this, she was flirting with him—who was thinking
of dropping out of school, but Shane was pretty sure that he had talked her out of it. At the food court at the Billings malls, he met old Indians from the Northern Cheyenne reservation, or refinery workers from the big Chevron plant, and argued with them about national politics or Custer’s Last Stand. As Shane grew older and matured, especially after he entered The Citadel in South Carolina, these conversations with strangers became both more confident and ecumenical. Shane loved to describe them to his parents, to debrief his “great freaking day.” Fun-fun, hop into the pickup and race up through the mountains for Billings, meet an architect or a French teacher at the food court and sponge everything he could from their brains, then ride back home along a new route through Red Lodge or Deaver, meeting still more people at the tourist traps or general stores. He was insatiable about it, addicted to the thrill of meeting new people. And he loved these vacation junkets best because he was wearing civilian clothes and no one could typecast him as a marine.
A few days later, when he left for Camp Lejeune or The Citadel, Shane would leave an envelope behind on the kitchen counter. It contained duplicates of the warranty forms and service contracts that he had neatly filled out and mailed to the appliance manufacturer. Sometimes he would also include hand-written instructions or suggestions for Joe and Judy. For weeks afterward Shane would pester them with e-mails and calls. Were they following the instructions? Had Joe learned to work the remote?
“Shane wasn’t exactly what you’d call a control freak,” Judy said to Hutchison. “He was too nice for that. But you definitely knew that he had plans for your life.”
Over the weekend, Hutchison had worried about what to tell the Childerses about the return of Shane’s body. A full colonel at Quantico had already told him that because of Shane Childers’ status as the first killed in the war, and what the marines expected to be considerable media attention, his case was being given high priority—right up to division command. Whatever Hutchison needed in order to expedite the return of Shane Childers’ remains, whatever problems he encountered, the captain merely had to inform Quantico and they’d pull rank up through the command. But Hutchison knew he couldn’t trust this. After being placed in a body bag and a plain aluminum transport coffin filled with ice, Shane’s body would be flown by Air Force cargo plane from a field morgue in Kuwait to Germany. From there, with the timing depending on other casualties and returning cargo, the body would be transshipped to the joint services national mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Again, depending on how busy the mortuary was, the mandatory autopsy and forensic reports, embalming, fitting Shane’s body with a dress blue uniform and a proper medals rack, and then a coffin of the Childerses’ choice, required at least another two to three days. The flag-draped coffin would then be returned to the family in Wyoming, with a marine officer as escort, in the cargo hold of a scheduled airliner. But the “information flow” concerning the progress of the body toward home was actually distributed through three military locations—Quantico, Dover, and a navy logistical support center (the marines are technically a division of the navy) at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois. Red tape and delays were almost guaranteed. The wait for the return of a soldier’s body could take at least a week or ten days.
Hutchison worried that if he was honest with the Childerses and told them that he really didn’t know when the body was returning, they would lose confidence in him and become upset. But if he lied and adopted a posture of false assurance, that might eventually upset them more. His marine CACO manual was 150 pages long and had something to say about everything, but not this.
When he started to explain the procedures for returning Shane’s body, Judy Childers interrupted and held up her hand.
“Kevin, it’s okay, you can just tell us,” Judy said, holding up her hand. “You don’t know, right?”
“No, Judy, I don’t know for sure,” Hutchison said. “Not yet.”
“Well you don’t have to apologize for that,” Judy said. “We’re a military family and we understand. Just be honest with us. Just tell us what you know, and what you don’t know. That’s all we expect.”
Hutchison felt awful about it. He was the CACO officer. The family relied on him to know. But he didn’t know and instead of really being able to help the Childerses by focusing on details, he was frequently distracted by all these queer leaps of intuition, brought on by the intensity of the CACO experience and the plaintive scene. While he sat there explaining the return of Shane’s body, the prairie wind moaned around the corners of the ranch house, rattling the gutters and the windowpanes, and then the sun briefly but intensely broke through the clouds. Outside, it illuminated the gray-brown striations on the Polecat Bench. Inside, a bright triangle of light beamed across the shrine to Shane on the piano, glinting off the gold braid on Hutchison’s and Morgan’s dress caps and the glass flower vases.
Okay, yeah, now I can tell, Hutchison thought. Judy likes me and she’s such a strong reader of body language—just like my mother, always anticipating my thoughts. I just wish my voice wouldn’t hesitate and crack when I spoke.
Judy and Joe had briefly toyed with the idea of burying Shane at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C., which would have made traveling to the funeral so much easier for the populous Childers clan in West Virginia. Besides, it would have been so Shane. Shane, wonking out on every battle of the Civil War, Shane who knew the Normandy invasion and the long slog toward Berlin so well. Now he’d be buried in the company of soldiers he practically knew, overlooking the Potomac and the Washington Monument. But in the end they decided that it wasn’t practical. They’d miss visiting Shane at his grave and the family seat was in Wyoming now. Crown Hill Cemetery on the eastern edge of Powell was a beautiful place, high up, with commanding views of the Shoshone River plain and the Bighorn massif to the east. In 1996, when he had returned from marine security guard duty at the American embassies in Geneva and Nairobi, Shane had spent several days staying in shape by pedaling like mad on his bike all the way out to Clark’s Fork and then making the big Deaver loop. He loved the snow-capped mountains out there, which reminded him of the Alps and Mount Kilimanjaro, which he had climbed several times. Back from Pendleton, or back from Twentynine Palms on his way to Iraq, he had dreamed with Joe about another run with the mules up to Jack Creek. This was his country and he had loved visiting his parents there. That’s where he belonged now, they decided, back in the snowy bosom of the Bighorns.
Hutchison sat at the table and patiently listened while the Childerses discussed the burial plans. It was a useful step, he thought, part of the process. Who knows what shape the body will be in and how we’re going to deal with that? The Childerses would be confronting a lot while they waited for Shane to return. Talking about burying Shane, instead of just being flooded by memories of him alive, was a way of facing the awful finality of his death.
Judy told Hutchison that she thought it was best for them to establish a firm date for the funeral and memorial service, because that would make it easier for family members who needed to make plans to travel all the way to Wyoming. Veterans’ groups, local politicians, and even the governor’s office had called to ask about the funeral, and they would need a certain date too. She was thinking of a week from Tuesday. Hutchison agreed on the need to set a firm date but suggested that they wait, just a day or two, until he knew more.
Hutchison and Morgan noticed something again about the Childerses, which they discussed later in the car. Judy was affectionate and warm, very realistic, but also very composed emotionally. She showed no signs of breaking down about Shane, which worried both of them. Joe, meanwhile, seemed to have no filter on his emotions, and he defaulted in a particular way. Whenever there was a new form to sign or a decision to make, he would instantly derail, put down the pen, and launch into another story about Shane, which just boiled him up toward a long crying jag.
“Oh, my Shane, you know?” Joe would begin in his West Virginia drawl. “You should have seen
him come home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, hitch my Belgians to the sleigh and then jingle out across the snow to feed the cattle. You should have seen that boy ride a mule up into Jack Creek. Then he’d come back, break down my combine and fix it. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. Shane.”
Two things always set Joe off—events he had shared with Shane, or plans he had made with Shane. Hutchison and Morgan admired Joe for being so frank with his emotions, letting it all out. But his yarns, with all the obligatory Childers digressions, were awfully long, and toward the end of them Judy would start to fidget, lose her patience, and then place a pen in Joe’s hand and make him sign the form.
Morgan recognized in the Childerses a prototype from his youth—the Iowa farm couples he’d known around Waterloo in the late 1970s. So many of them were interesting but troubled couples, made so by the dire farm economy of the Midwest. The men were all fun-loving and great storytellers, yapping away about their quail hunts or plans for laying new drainage tile in their fields, even if they were hocked right up to the top of their new silo clusters in bank debt. They literally jawed their worries away, they were adventurers in farming whose narcotic was talk. Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, their expressionless and preoccupied wives monitored the bank debt, made sure the crop insurance was paid on time, and fretted about the children and whether they’d be able to attend college. The men provided all the colorful identity and dreams on those Iowa farms. But it was the women who established the real center of gravity and kept those farms and families together.
When they were done with most of the paperwork, at a little after 1 P.M., Judy stood up and walked toward the kitchen, suggesting that the CACO team remain for lunch. Hutchison was about to thank her—he thought that they should, if asked, stay for lunch—but then Morgan cleared his throat, stepped over for his officer’s cap on the piano stool, and spoke.