by Rinker Buck
In the fall of 1978, when Joe returned to Tehran from a brief Seabee detachment in Bahrain, he could immediately feel the difference in the city. Marshal law had been declared and life became a blur as the shah’s regime began to collapse and the street demonstrations intensified. One afternoon, several buildings and a car dealership near the embassy were torched. As a precaution, Joe was delivered home in a security van. But the violence on the streets was so bad that the driver couldn’t risk stopping when they got to Alley Sharood. Instead, Joe was pushed out the door while the van was still moving.
In December that year, the embassy finally made the decision to evacuate all dependants of the compound’s personnel, and Judy hurriedly packed and took Sandra and Shane out of school. Judy and the children flew home to West Virginia, where they would wait until Joe got out of Iran. He remained behind in the apartment at Alley Sharood for two months and then moved to the military barracks on the embassy. In February 1979, as tensions continued to mount, the shah was deposed and Ayatollah Khomeini made his triumphant return.
Joe was briefly involved in a perilous but forgotten prelude to the more famous takeover of the American embassy in November 1979. This was the so-called Valentine’s Day storming of the embassy by Islamic militants in February, a one-day siege during which the American compound was swarmed by angry Shi’ite crowds and most of the embassy personnel were held hostage. Joe was among them, but was eventually released under an agreement with the Khomeini forces that allowed the Iranians to maintain a temporary presence on the compound. Joe remained on the embassy grounds for six more days, repairing generators and electrical equipment damaged during the takeover, and then was ordered out of the country. He was relieved to escape Iran unscathed, but for years afterward he still harbored regrets about his hurried departure.
“Those damn Iranians got an old rifle of mine that had been in the Childers family for years, and they also snitched some of my blacksmithing tools, dangit. It still pisses me off. Some Iranian over there is building a hut in back of his house with my tools, you know?”
But Iran also meant something more to them later, even after they settled back in America for the best ten years of their lives and the children grew. Joe would call it “the turning point for Shane.”
One Saturday evening in the summer of 1978 after he’d been shoeing at the Farrabad track, Joe arrived back at Alley Sharood to find Judy in a dither. Shane was bouncing off the walls again and she just found it so hard after a day like that to be herself, to enjoy life. Joe told Shane to put his swimming trunks on underneath his clothes and they headed off to the embassy together, enjoying the walk up past the food stalls and rug shops. When they got there, Joe tossed Shane into the pool to enjoy himself with the other embassy brats and sat down on a chaise longue to read an English-language paper.
It was a quiet night across Tehran. An orange disk of sun was falling in the smoky sky, embassy cars were whooshing in and out as the diplomats left for their dinner parties, and a group of marines from the embassy security guards were drilling on the lawn just down from the pool. The marines were practicing flanking steps off a point, presenting arms, and twirling their rifles around like airplane propellers in front of their faces. Shane swam to the side of the pool, propped himself over the edge on his arms, and stared down the hill at the marines.
When Joe finally pulled Shane out of the water, he wrapped him in a towel and they sat together on the chaise longue, with Shane between his father’s legs.
“Dad. What are marines? What do they do?”
Joe loved a question like that, not simply because he could go on for hours on this one, but because the knowledge shared with his son was so personal. He was a navy man and had always worked with marines. So he told Shane all about amphibious forces, first wave assaults, getting in there early and tough, and then leaving the cleanup work to a bunch of pansies from the army. Marines dropped from the air, landed by sea, they took beaches and mountains and deserts for which no one else was trained. Of course, there was nothing sophisticated or mechanical about the work, not like being a navy Seabee. Still, marines were the best. That was Joe’s opinion.
“Dad, I think I’m going to become a marine,” Shane said. “That’s what I want to do.”
Shane was five years old that summer, but there was never any doubt about it after that. It just became an accepted part of his personal progression, the family reality. Shane was growing up to become a marine.
“It’s a strange thing to say that you could hear a boy of five say something like that and then know that he was growing up to do it,” Joe later said. “But that was Shane. He was very confident and set when he made a decision. I was never concerned about the safety of it, or that he would qualify—he was too bright and ambitious to worry about that. I did worry though that the military could provide everything he was looking for, that it would be enough for someone who had so much going on in his head. But that was it, pretty much. At five years old he told me that he was going to be a marine.”
Iran remained an important memory for the Childerses, not simply because Islamic fundamentalism had deposed the shah and they had witnessed history there. It was a risky adventure, a family crucible that they had survived together. And Shane returned to America with wonderful images—the orange sun over the minarets at night, the embassy grounds, the views as the train climbed the mountains toward Tajrish. He didn’t know yet that he would reckon again with those Arabian sands, many times, in fact, or that his rendezvous there would become a personal obsession. Now it was time for him to resume a thoroughly American childhood among the cattail thickets of another memorable place, the banks of the Little Biloxi River.
After Iran, settling down in America felt effortless, safe, familiar—what life should be. For the next ten years Joe would serve at the big Seabee base in Gulfport, Mississippi, near the naval yards on the Gulf of Mexico, and the Childerses would enjoy their first long stretch of stability. Joe continued to travel overseas for the navy, shoe horses on weekends, and devote himself to the welding or tractor-repair needs of his neighbors while his own projects languished at home. But the Childerses still felt strongly that Judy should remain home with the family, and Joe needed the extra income to supplement his modest navy pay. The three Childers children would grow up ambivalent and even a little hurt by passing through adolescence without their father around, but later they came to love Joe for it. By then they were out of the house and working second jobs themselves.
But Joe did find that dream farm, which compensated for a lot at the time. It was six acres of rich bottomland near a horseshoe bend of the Little Biloxi River, just outside the remote hamlet of Saucier, Mississippi. The place wasn’t much at first, just a four-bedroom brick ranch with a garage that Joe converted into a den, some open fields, and then thick, impenetrable stands of cattails and tall canary grass that fell to the massive willow trees along the river. But Joe soon made the place over in his image. “Within two years, there was farm machinery everywhere,” Sam Childers said. “Whenever Dad got back from an overseas trip, he bought more.” Over time, Joe and Shane laid in fence lines to pasture horses and mules, and they all cleared some land together to build a barn. Horse vans, hay wagons, and antique tractors in various states of repair completed the mix, and Sam later said that he and Shane grew up with that curious insecurity of the most popular neighborhood kids. “Our place was a train wreck, with way too much going on most of the time,” he said. “So how come all the other kids just loved being at our house?”
Shane’s first pony was a palomino named Honey, and Joe enjoyed exploring with him just how the equestrian relationship worked. If he told his son not to ride Honey up past the stop sign on the corner, Shane automatically did it. When he told Shane not to try and break the pony to harness without his help, Shane did it anyway and wrecked the cart. Later, Joe bought Shane his first horse, from the divorced wife of a Seabee pal. It was a three-year-old bay mare, a Thoroughbred–quarter horse cros
s named Anay. This time, Shane listened and watched pensively as Joe taught him how to train the mare. Anay meant freedom for Shane, his own Childers wander. On Friday nights after school, he saddled up the mare, loaded her down with camping gear, food, a lantern, even his homework and the cat. Then he rode off for the distant woods or a sandy clearing along the river that he particularly liked and camped until Saturday afternoon. They never really knew what the hell Shane was doing back there, but he always returned bright-faced and happy, talking to his horse. Clearly, he enjoyed being alone and naturally took to the woods.
Shane and Sam, along with four or five other neighborhood boys, spent most of the summer down along the Little Biloxi, running barefoot and swimming all day. “That’s where Shane and I grew up, right there,” Sam said. “He was our leader-king and we loved following him down there.” Pillaging from Joe’s piles of lumber up in the yard, they built Huck Finn rafts and a tree fort, hung a swinging rope from a bough over the river, fished, and snagged bullfrogs. All the other boys would run and wait at a safe distance when they came across a copperhead snake, watching as Shane caught and killed it.
Everyone who knew the future marine as he emerged into adolescence unfailingly mentioned three points—ferocious energy, fearlessness, and the endless curiosity about people. Leadership came naturally to him because he had that knack, even in a group, of making everyone feel that he was there just for him.
Becky Moore, the wife of a navy chaplain from the base down at Gulfport, got to know the Childerses well in Saucier after Joe began shoeing their horses. Her son Scott was Shane’s age and ran around with the Little Biloxi gang.
“I remember my son coming up from the river one day and telling me that he was never afraid of anything as long as he was with Shane. That was the effect Shane had on people. He was never afraid of anything. And the boys would follow him anywhere because he made it clear that he liked them so much.”
In school, Shane emerged as a capable if barely interested B and C student. The Mississippi schools weren’t very good, with few inspiring teachers, and after Shane began attending high school in Gulfport, the bus during the long ride south from Saucier was filled with bullies who called all the other kids “fags” or “Jews.” Shane spent an inordinate amount of time intervening to protect the weaker kids and then having to explain himself to teachers. By his sophomore year Shane had purchased a marine physical fitness training manual and rose every morning at dawn, wolfed down raw eggs for breakfast, and then pushed himself through a grueling regimen of calisthenics and then a five-mile run. He also played sports—baseball and football—and most years held down one or two part-time jobs after school and on weekends, becoming the same blur around the house that his father was. The bristling intellectuality and love of books that he would later display as a mid-twenties marine—for history, literature, psychology, the arts—just couldn’t come out yet. There were too many other issues to work on. Shane wasn’t so much a case of arrested development as development that just had to wait until all the energy could come out that way.
Besides, by now the wall of silence that so often falls between fathers and their adolescent sons had closed in on Joe and Shane. Joe was either away with the navy or off shoeing horses most of the time; Shane was coming in late after working at Quincy’s Steakhouse. They passed each other like guests at a motel and found it hard to discover things to talk about. Joe was annoyed that Shane and Sam were fighting a lot now, always yelling in the house. And Shane was annoyed by Joe’s nonstop chatter and storytelling, his complete lack of summary function, which embarrassed Shane in front of his friends. Meanwhile, Joe was increasingly preoccupied with discovering new things about himself. Frequently, but particularly in he fall, he was plagued with long spells of the blues, melancholy, and guilt over his mounting list of unfinished projects, which just made him more lethargic about getting anything done. Eventually, he was diagnosed with a thyroid problem that the doctors said might contribute to depression. For the first time he heard about a syndrome—attention-deficit disorder—that he cheerfully agreed probably explained his eternal restlessness and ennui.
“I had a lot of things that I wanted to do, you know?” Joe said later. “It was only when I got into my fifties that I realized the impact it all had on Shane. I would get lethargic and couldn’t get things done, which just made me more ADD, and then Shane would come along and get all his projects done. I guess we were frustrated with each other, that’s all. I take the blame for it now, as long as I get the credit for improving our relationship later, after he became a marine. But, you know, it’s there. I didn’t spend the time with him as a teenager that I should have, just showing him that I cared.”
In the summer of 1988, when Shane was sixteen, he escaped the tensions of his immediate family by spending three months up in Salt Rock, West Virginia. He was already adored as a kind of hero grandson in the Childers clan and that summer annealed his connection to the family for the rest of his life. He lived with his uncle and aunt, Dave and Mary Bias, who considered him almost a son, and worked at their used-car lot and garage, rebuilding sedans and pickups for auto auctions. Shane was a blur of activity, and everyone called him “All-Shane, All the Time.” Every morning he rose before dawn and ran three miles over the hollows to his grandparents, laughed with them all through breakfast, then ran to another uncle’s house, visited some more, and was home and showered by the time Dave Bias was ready to leave for his car lot. Shane organized hay rides for the younger cousins, dredged ponds with the neighbors, blushed and laughed uneasily when his aunts teased him about the way he turned the girls’ heads at county fairs. But his work always got done and none of the Childerses had much difficulty figuring him out.
“Shane was absolutely fanatical about finishing what he started,” his aunt Mary said. “It came from watching his father never get anything done.”
Shane’s big project that summer was his first car, a 1977 Mustang II, which he and Uncle Dave fastidiously rebuilt from bumper to bumper—a new block and cylinders, shocks, drive train, exhaust, the works. Back in Mississippi, however, he became hell on wheels, and indeed for the rest of his life, everyone who knew him would draw straws not to ride with Shane. The impatience, the overconfidence, the urgency to race to the next event, all came out when he was behind the wheel. In February 1989, while racing home after his job at Quincy’s Steakhouse on a rainy night, Shane hit the bad curve just south of the house and rolled the ’Stang.
Joe called a wrecker and went over with Shane to inspect the crash site. “Oh God, did we laugh our asses off at Shane that night,” Joe said. “He was all hell to tarnation about it, kicking the bumper and using language that I had to pretend to be shocked about. He loved that vehicle, his first car. But now it was a total loss, bottoms up in the reeds.”
In 1990, while still a senior at Harrison Central High School in Gulfport, Shane preenlisted in the marine’s “early entry program.” He’d been eating raw eggs every morning and practicing self-defense moves from a marine manual for three years, so there wasn’t the least doubt about how well he would do. But there was one quality, one consistent display of self-restraint, that astounded everyone who knew him. They were immensely curious about how it would play out once this engaging and unforgettable boy reached the marines.
Over the years, during literally dozens of fights in the tough Mississippi schools, Shane had evolved a unique martial style. In high school, Shane was wiry and muscular, but never particularly big—five foot seven and 160 pounds. After boot camp he finally filled out to five nine and 175. He was fearless about taking on much larger boys, even a couple of very mean, dirty fighters at once, and he remained calm, almost relaxed. But he never applied more force than was needed, and preferred less. Not once had he ever slugged another kid, even in self-defense. Not a single punch, ever. That fighting was psychology, not physical combat, seemed to have arrived naturally and at a young age.
When Shane was seven or eight, an older boy sl
ugged him while he was coming off the school bus. When he got home, he asked Judy, “Mom, why did that boy do that? I wasn’t threatening him at all.” It was almost as if he was saying, “Could someone be that stupid? Hitting me?”
In the fall of 1988, just after he got back from West Virginia, Shane and Sam were at the horse arena outside Saucier one night when a much bigger bully from town, a six-footer named Chuck, sauntered over to tell Shane that he was taking him out. Shane had insulted a friend of Chuck’s by telling him to stop calling a girl a “slut.”
Shane stood there calmly and waited for Chuck to make his first move, which came quickly enough, a punch to Shane’s chin.
After a couple of quick karate moves, Shane moved deftly behind Chuck, locked up his arms, and then kicked out his legs. Now he had Chuck pinned to the dirt by his stomach and cheek.
“Let me up, you bastard.”
“If I let you up,” Shane said, “you going to hit me?”
“No!”
Shane let him up, and Chuck slugged him again.
“Oh God,” Shane said, before pinning him to the dirt again. “This is sooooo boring.”
They cycled through it two or three more times, and then finally Shane was truly bored and tossed Chuck into the crowd that had gathered. They all laughed at Chuck and told him to go away. When Shane dusted off and stood up, they all cheered.