by Rinker Buck
In the summer of 1999, following his freshman year, Shane traveled to France with a group of cadets for the five-week Citadel Summer Program in Montpelier, near the southern coast along the Mediterranean. Students lived with French families, studied until noon at the French Institute, and then took afternoon excursions into Marseilles or the bullfights down near the border with Spain. Professor Guy Toubiana, who was along on the trip, noticed an old trait of Shane’s on those afternoon jaunts. The touring cadets seemed less intimidated by the foreign culture and the difficulties of using public transportation as long as Shane was along. “The other students felt very, very safe in his presence,” Toubiana said. “His confidence was infectious.”
Late one evening in June, The Citadel cadets were returning from a particularly enjoyable junket, a visit to the topless beach at Palavas. In a crowded bus, a group of Arab-French toughs began harassing two teenage English tourists, both female. The thugs jabbed cigarettes in the girls’ faces, made sexual taunts, and then began aggressively pushing them around the back of the bus.
Shane was furious that no one on the bus was intervening to help the girls, and he quickly pushed forward through the crowd for the classic Childers rescue act. When he told the thugs to stop hassling the girls, they mocked his poorly accented French and pushed the girls around some more. Shane moved on all of them at once and then one of them pulled a knife.
It wasn’t much for Shane. He easily disarmed the member of the group with the knife and then kept the others at bay while telling the English girls to move to the other end of the bus, where The Citadel cadets would protect them. When the tough lunged at him to recover his knife, Shane held him back and addressed him in French.
“Dans ton estomachi, ami”—“This knife is for your stomach, not mine, friend.”
The bus howled with laughter over Shane’s atrocious pronunciation, and the thugs kept trying to lunge at him again or get behind his back, but he held them off with his back to the window.
Then another Arab man on the bus, believing that Arab pride had been offended, leaped forward and confronted Shane, but quickly got off the bus at the next stop when Shane muscled him around, too. At the stop after that Shane threw all the rest of the Arab-French gang off the bus, and then went back to comfort the English girls.
At the institute that night, all the other cadets were talking about it, rhapsodizing about Childers and his ability to take on so much opposition at once. Freakin’ Shane. He could disarm one guy with a knife, while holding three more off with his free arm. Professor Toubiana asked the other cadets why they hadn’t moved forward on the bus to help Shane.
“We didn’t even think about it,” one of them said. “Shane obviously didn’t need us.”
“I don’t think Shane really had that much of a problem handling those Arab kids,” Toubiana said. “He was a marine and exceptionally capable at things like that, taking care of trouble. Shane’s biggest problem was that he felt that his French wasn’t good enough to make it clear to these kids that he was in charge. But the other cadets were very impressed, and I think the story just got away from him after that.”
Indeed, by the time The Citadel Summer Program cadets had returned to campus in the fall, the details had become exaggerated, and Shane had taken on half the Arabs in southern France. Shane being Shane, the hyperbole seemed warranted, however, and it was just another tale about him that contributed to the mystery and his outsize legend.
But Toubiana considered one thing that Shane said about the incident to be strange, and so would others when the bus fracas in France came up in conversation.
“You know, Guy, I’ve been up against Arabs before,” Shane told his professor. “Now I am back here in France and they are confronting me again. It will be me or them someday. The Arabs will end up killing me. I will be killed by an Arab.”
Toubiana had no reason to receive this as a premonition—September 11, 2001, and the war on terror, was still two years away. Besides, Shane would occasionally say things like this. “I’m going to freeze to death up on Mount Shasta,” he would say, because bad ice storms had pushed him back from that California summit two times. An avalanche would take him out in the Alps, or he would smash his pickup. Shane was single, intense, and a fascinating bundle of contradictions—sometimes effortlessly social and fun, other times a moody Tennessee Williams loner—and this was the kind of thing that driven, lonely guys would say. An Arab would kill him someday. There was no reason to take this seriously at all, but it did speak to the underside of Shane’s character. People often had the uncomfortable feeling around him that one day Shane just might blow.
“Yes, Shane did stand out, but not simply for his qualities,” Toubiana said. “His defects were right on the surface too. He was impatient, very tightly wound, short-tempered, too intense. You could be with him and have the sense that he was about to crack. He spoke very openly about his athleticism, all that biking, hiking, and running. He needed that outlet, maybe even in excess, just to stay balanced.”
Shane’s workaholic ways and frantic pace had by now produced another amusing behavioral trait, a reprise, actually, of his habits as a boy. By the early evening, often at dinnertime, he was so exhausted that he could collapse anywhere—on a friend’s couch, on the floor of The Citadel ROTC unit, in a library cubicle—and sleep soundly for an hour. One friend dubbed Shane “the caveman” for his ability to simply drop wherever he ran out of energy. Then he recovered ferociously, running himself back down all night. The resulting insomnia, a classic symptom of overwork and its distractions, led to the legendary late-night calls to family members and friends. These calls frequently stretched for hours, until well after midnight, with Shane droning on so monotonously that the person on the other end of the line fell asleep.
But everyone could see other, refreshing changes in Shane. His tastes and habits were maturing. Now he was spending forty-five minutes in a video store picking out a movie, and it was usually a foreign art-house flick—Run Lola Run by the German writer-director Tom Tykwer was a favorite. Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash were getting ditched for Sheryl Crow, U2, or the Dave Matthews Band. The summer language arts program at Middlebury College in Vermont was clearly a seminal experience for Shane, and he came back marveling to his friends about what had happened. “Liberal rich bitches” from schools like Mount Holyoke or Stanford, the sort of women he couldn’t attract before, not only seemed to accept him now, but they actively chased him. He took them hiking up Vermont’s tallest peak, Mount Mansfield, or over to the Adirondacks to do Mount Marcy. They invited him to join their study groups, asked him to go dancing, and then back to the room to smoke pot. And Shane wasn’t inhibited now about spending the night with a woman he knew he’d never see again once the summer program was over. That’s what happened to college men who could offer a girl something she’d never had before, a hip uber-marine who traveled the world and was very earnest about learning French.
“The Citadel years were huge for Shane, huge, college changed him so much,” said Jessi Walker, one of two West Virginia cousins with whom he became exceptionally close while he was living in Charleston. “He was becoming more human. He was listening better, chilling a little when he was away from his studying and work. He would always be this incredibly driven guy, but now he was open to different people, different ideas. There was a real sense we all had that Shane was turning. It was his turning moment and he was emerging so much.”
Jessi entertained another compelling theory about Shane. His upbringing and formative years had occurred in a succession of relatively isolated and unusual places—foreign countries, naval bases, then a rural Mississippi hamlet. He’d missed out on the major leavening force of his generation.
“Shane was never exposed to the moderating force of living in the suburbs or a relatively sophisticated community like that,” Jessi said. “He didn’t get while he was young the benefit of what he needed—a lot of bright kids his age, good schools, things like that. So all
the discipline and the atmosphere of extremism about him came from working out that issue. He’d had to push so hard for normal things that everything he discovered seemed new, new to him. The Citadel at least exposed him to more of a peer group, but of course he was already formed by then and so driven.”
Jonna Walker, Jessi’s sister, had a slightly different take on it. The cyclone of Shane could be understood only in the context of the Childers family, the genetic leaning toward hyperactivity that had to be contained. Joe Childers was a compelling example of rebellion and accomplishment, too, rejecting the family’s born-again Christianity, getting out of West Virginia as a young man, always kicking out of the domestic traces to run off and shoe horses somewhere. Shane had simply taken these frenetic gifts and channeled them toward different achievement, and a bit more upward mobility.
“He was this fascinating contradiction between attention deficit disorder and intense focus, always racing from interest to interest,” Jonna said. “That’s where the marines and The Citadel came in. He needed that discipline to somehow focus his energies and love of people.”
The changes in Shane were also being expressed by a sort of adorable bachelor style that evolved as he prospered in Charleston. Weekend apartment guests were welcome because their pending arrival forced Shane to decorate and make his place comfortable. Jessi and Jonna were particularly prized as Charleston visitors because the Walker cousins had refined tastes and loved to teach Shane how to shop, how to pick out accessories, match colors, and the like.
“Oh, wow, Jess,” Shane said one day after a shopping session. “That’s what you do with this thing? Just stick it on the end of the couch like that?”
“Yes, Shane,” Jessi said. “It’s called a throw. It can actually go anywhere along the couch, just casual, you know?”
“Great, a throw. Jeez. And the colors, all right, you have to figure that out too I guess. Is there a book about this I can read?”
“Shane. Shane, please.”
“What?”
“You don’t need a book about it, okay? You’ve got your throw now, and you don’t need any more. All right? Chill, Shane. Chill.”
“Okay! Okay! I’m just saying. If there was a book on the subject, I could read up on throws.”
These weekend visits always followed a plan, because Shane was meticulous about having a written agenda before they got there. It was a mission, an objective to be seized, weekend fun was an activity to be organized just like the marines. Wake up the guests at 0700 (Shane’s calisthenics and run began at 0500), grab a quick breakfast at the apartment or a downtown café, careen out to the suburban Wal-Mart in Shane’s pickup and buy new glasses and towels. After that, they were scheduled to take the 1100 tourist ferry out to Fort Sumter. There Shane wonked for two hours about the opening battle of the Civil War, explaining in detail about how it had evolved primarily as an artillery event. By 1530, they were back in Charleston for a buggy ride through the historic district and then Guinness stout at Tommy Condon’s Irish Pub on Church Street. Back at the apartment, Shane would collapse on the couch for an hour before dinner, rebound, and then they would eat and listen to some new folk artist downtown or go dancing. For a good deal of this time—1030 to 1430, pretty much—Shane was yakking away with one of his ongoing “book reports” about the title he was reading at the moment, which could be anything from a new biography of Napoleon to the Alan Moorehead classic, The Blue Nile. It was maddening, and Jonna would tell Shane several times that she’d heard enough about the book. “Okay! Okay! I’m done, then. I promise. But look, let me just tell you this one more thing.” Like his father, Shane completely lacked summary function.
“You were always aware when you were with Shane that he was born to be a great marine, born to be this star achiever that made the family back in West Virginia so proud,” Jonna said. “But dealing with him on a daily basis? Forget it. You couldn’t keep up with him. Sometimes I thought that his only purpose in life was wearing other people out.”
In the spring of 2001, as his graduation approached, Shane pulled another classic Childers stunt, a fitting send-off to his unique Citadel career. His B.A. in French from The Citadel would now qualify him for the marine officer corps, and he would have to be formally commissioned. The event meant a lot to Shane, but was essentially pro forma. Before an audience of family, friends, and his fellow MECEP marines, Shane would receive his lieutenant’s bars and swear loyalty to his country and the Corps in an officer’s uniform. Those were the regs.
But Shane Childers had no intention of being commissioned a marine lieutenant in an officer’s uniform. He was an enlisted man who had climbed through the ranks, and a part of him would always be that person. He loved the Corps and he loved those men. To show proper respect, to symbolize his origins, Shane told the executive officer of The Citadel marine MECEP unit that he would be commissioned in his utility fatigues.
This was “undoable,” the XO told him. Marine regs were marine regs. He wasn’t even going to bother requesting up through command about what to do with Childers, because they would just say no. We love you, Shane, you’ve been a standout here, but the regs are the regs and you’ve done enough already trying to rewrite the rules. You’re getting commissioned in an officer’s uniform.
The contest went back and forth for several weeks, but Shane wouldn’t budge, even when he was given a direct order to comply. He was Bartleby the Scrivener about it, I prefer not to, sir. To Shane, high personal privilege and belief were involved.
“Sir, I am not disobeying an order,” he told his XO at one point. “I am merely interpreting it in my own way. I came up through the ranks. I want every man who ever serves under me to know how much I care for them, that I showed proper respect for who they are.”
The XO had wisely not advised higher command about his obdurate working-class hero, and so a convenient fiction was arranged. Shane would be inducted as an officer before family and fellow marines in a “private commissioning” ceremony. It was bull, pure Shane getting his way. There wasn’t any difference between a private commissioning and the very public one Shane received in The Citadel’s Thompson Hall on June 15, 2001. But the Mississippi-Wyoming boy, the marine who was a Gulf War veteran at eighteen, was commissioned according to his own standard of symbolism, in his utility fatigues.
It had been a strong run for Shane. The full baccalaureate course in three years, lots of summer study, and dean’s list most of the way, all that legend-building that was now known among his peers in the Corps. And during those three years, too, he had climbed Mount Shasta twice, the Pryors, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Presidentials, the Appalachians, the Adirondacks, and the Greens. It was a hell of a climb and now he was good to go for the Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course at Quantico.
And they all could never forget the sight of Shane being commissioned in Thompson Hall.
“He stood there at attention throughout the ceremony with his arms locked against his sides, shaking, literally shaking, with excitement,” Jonna Walker said. “His eyes were staring forward and glazed over, so intense. He just couldn’t wait for the commissioning to be over so he could start work as a marine lieutenant.”
After lunch on Friday, Hutchison and Morgan sat down together in Hutchison’s office at the Billings command to review their updated plans for the Childers funeral. This might be their last opportunity to meet face to face because Morgan would be drilling his honor guard team all weekend in the armory while Hutchison ran back and forth to Powell coordinating details. There was still a lot of paperwork to complete, and they were busy with all the police liaison and preparation for the funeral parade through town. Now Hutchison was running through the points of a long checklist that he had compiled on a yellow legal pad.
“Okay. Navy enlisted chief petty officer’s trousers for Joe Childers,” Hutchison said. “Where are we on that?”
“Like I said this morning, it’s done, sir,” Morgan said. “When I told FedEx what this was abo
ut, they promised to make us the first drop in the morning. The pants will be here in time for you to take them down to Powell.”
“Great, Barry. Thanks,” Hutchison said. “Now how are we paying for them? I don’t think the government covers this expense.”
“It’s taken care of, sir. We passed the hat for Joe’s pants.”
Hutchison let out a long sigh, looked up to his first noncom, and reached across the desk for his wallet.
“All right, well let me contribute too,” he said. “How much more do you still need?”
“Sir, it’s covered,” Morgan said. “You’ve already done enough.”
Hutchison sighed again and looked up.
“First sergeant, thanks. And look, I was short with you this morning about this and I apologize. I think we’re all overloaded by this CACO, but you’ve done a great job holding things together for us. How are the men?”
Oh, here we go, Morgan thought. The Hutch. My California-dreaming, super-sensitive Beach Boy head of command.
“Sir, they’re fine, really. But listen, why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? You should relax so everything we’ve got to do over the weekend isn’t too much.”
Hutchison thanked Morgan again, but said that he didn’t want to leave the Billings command. He was pretty sure that they would receive word before the weekend about a ship date and flight number for Shane Childers’ body, and he wanted to be close to all the phones and computers to be able to act quickly once they heard.
Morgan stepped up to return to his own office.
“All right then, sir. It’s another thing to scratch off your list. We’ve got the chief petty pants for Joe.”
Down in Powell, there were large, drum-shaped winter cumulus, blue-gray in the sky, hanging over the snowy Bighorns. The wind had picked up and blew from the southeast, pointing the half-mast flag for Shane off to the Pryors. But it was sunny, too. The fields around the Childers house were a crystalline mosaic of melting snow and freshened earth.