by Rinker Buck
“I don’t know what we would have done without Sam on Monday,” he said a few days later. “There were too many people to meet and I couldn’t possibly have made small talk with all of them.”
And the people of Powell, and Wyoming, did come. There was never a long line outside the funeral home, but the reception area and viewing chapel were never empty, either. All the big farmers, equipment suppliers, and realtors of Powell were there, and ranchers from all over the Bighorn country—Worland, Greybull, Basin—showed up in their best Stetsons and pointy-toed boots. There were veterans groups from as far away as Thermopolis and Buffalo and every Cody native who had ever served in the military seemed to be there too. School groups and Boy Scout troops came, just to show their respect. Many of these visitors were deeply moved by the accounts of Shane Childers they had read in the papers, but there was curiosity too. Because he was the first killed in Iraq, and so clearly a stellar marine, Shane had assumed national significance, and that sort of fame doesn’t come often in northern Wyoming. Because most of these strangers didn’t know Shane personally and weren’t experiencing a strong emotional reaction, after a few moments of respectful silence before the casket they could then circulate around the room and visit with old friends. The funeral home felt almost festive, certainly it had a very conversational air. Shane and his story were the draw, and for most of the afternoon it felt like all of Wyoming was there.
And Sam seemed very good at meeting all these visitors, as effective as Shane might have been working the room. Sometimes Sam stood up by the casket and spoke with people, sometimes he crossed the room because Richard Brown or Captain Hutchison had pointed him out as the brother of the marine. The experience did help him a lot, and he left the funeral home feeling more resolved about Shane.
Back at the ranch, the West Virginia uncles, Robert Reagan, and some of Shane’s old marine buddies were gathered in their favorite spot now, the front of the toolshed. They talked, sat on the patio chairs, dished about Shane and his manic ways, frequently replenished by the mugs of coffee, soda, and sandwiches working their way out through the adjoining kitchen. There was a good mackerel sky that night, hazy with high scattered cirrus, pink and blue-gray, out toward Yellowstone and Cody. When the sun went down all they could see were a few ranch lights and the vague outline of Heart Mountain.
Robert Reagan told Sam that Joe was proud of the way he had conducted himself at the funeral home all afternoon. At least that’s what Joe had said when he was feeding the horses.
Sam had another thought as the night grew darker and more still.
“I still would give anything, anything, to get Shane back. I just wish he could have seen me today.”
On Tuesday morning, the first movement of Shane’s flag-draped casket went well. It was a simple transport, just from the back of the funeral home to the waiting hearse in the parking lot, but Captain Hutchison and First Sergeant Morgan were pleased. The pallbearers in their dress blues had moved in unison and with dignity, making their slow, coordinated steps, gently shipping the casket to the hearse bed so that it was perfectly level. It was a good sign for the rest of the day. Hutchison and Morgan wanted to be patient and execute every march perfectly. More than a thousand spectators, Governor Dave Freudenthal, and all the media were waiting for the funeral in the gym at Northwest College. But Hutchison and Morgan were also anxious for it all to be over and to have delivered Shane to his grave without a hitch.
Near the entrance to the Northwest College gym, where the marine pallbearers would carry the casket along a cement walk, a group of about forty Northwest students had begun to gather an hour before the funeral. They were mostly young women, with about fifteen male students, dressed the way college students usually are—hooded sweatshirts or faded Carhartt jackets, hip-hugging jeans, and either Nike shoes or work boots. They were holding to their chests small American flags and hand-painted signs that read SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, or GOOD-BYE SHANE. They were the daughters and sons of ranchers and schoolteachers, mostly from small northern Wyoming towns within easy reach of Powell. They didn’t seem to know a whole lot about the war in Iraq, and they weren’t particularly political. They didn’t know the Childers family. But they’d read about this Shane Childers in their local papers and they liked what they saw. He’d come from a small town in Mississippi not unlike Powell, and then he’d joined the marines and hadn’t gone to college right away probably because his family couldn’t afford it. He’d done well, traveled, and then the military paid his way through a famous school. They just really liked this guy, especially when they looked at his picture in the paper. And now he had been killed on desert terrain that looked a lot like the sandy prairie around Powell. All they wanted to do now, to show some respect, and make themselves feel better, was to stand outside their college gym and hold up American flags and signs that read GOOD-BYE SHANE.
This was the closest that the Powell Police Department would get all day to a demonstration of any kind, and the situation did not require much enforcement of the law. When the marines carried Shane by, most of the college students wept, some uncontrollably. They hugged each other, held their hair back from wet faces, and stared with looks of grief as the flag-draped casket disappeared through the gym doors. “Good-bye Shane.” It just seemed so depressing that a person like this from around here had to get killed all the way over there.
The funeral in the gym was dignified and somber. After the casket and color guard came in, the Childers family was seated to the right of Shane and the marine detail sat to the left. The first song was “Wind Beneath My Wings” and then they played “The Marine’s Hymn.” A few of the Childers women, and a few in the audience, were weeping, but mostly everyone just seemed to be cried out for now.
Retired navy chaplain Paul Moore, the Childerses old friend from Saucier, Mississippi, officiated and delivered the eulogy. He had known Shane, Reverend Moore said, since he was in the fourth grade and his son Scott and Shane were close friends. When Moore was deployed on ships or to distant naval bases, Joe had taken care of Becky Moore and his family. Moore told all the vintage Shane stories—Shane protecting the boys down on the Little Biloxi, the day the playmates watched as Shane killed the copperhead snake. “Dad,” Scott Moore had told his father, “I was never afraid of anything when I was out there with Shane.” The boy would grow into a man who naturally emanated courage.
The pallbearers’ march out of the gym went well, and the only thing that marred the funeral was an unruly race across the bleachers on the side of the gym by newspaper and magazine photographers, who were anxious to get an overhead shot of the flag and coffin going by. But most of the people in the funeral audience didn’t notice, and they sat respectfully until the Childers family had been escorted out by Hutchison and a few members of the marine detail.
The idea for a funeral parade did not originate out of any deliberate plan, and instead was more or less inspired by word of mouth. A number of store owners in Powell either couldn’t afford or couldn’t find extra help on the day of the funeral, and so they would not be able to attend the services over at Northwest College. Other town residents were aware that the capacity of the college gym was limited, and so they elected to stay away to make room for people who perhaps had a better reason to be there. Powell is known throughout northern Wyoming as a great small town for raising children, and many parents and school groups had passed word through to the police department that they would like a parade. The children needed to deal with this, to confront the fact that a local resident had been killed in the Iraq War, but they would fidget and cause trouble at a funeral but not at an outside parade.
Patriotism, too, was a factor—people wanted to show the flag for a fallen marine. But, really, it just came down to a few simple feelings. Residents of Powell felt terrible for the Childers family, they wanted a public venue for expressing condolence and respect, and as the week passed and they read more about Shane Childers, they just couldn’t shake off the idea of a funeral parade
.
Laura Richardson had originally been opposed to the idea, because she knew better than anyone how complicated this funeral would be, including the hearse route to the graveyard trailing hundreds of cars. But Hutchison’s quiet persistence had prevailed. He felt that the town had been open and welcoming to the marines, that people were anxious and upset about Shane’s death, and that a parade would help them recover. So he and Richardson informed the police and a route was devised. The hearse carrying Shane and the vans and cars with the Childers family would make a loop on North Absaroka Street to Highway 14A, and then on the main commercial street through town, North Bent. The word was passed, the Chamber of Commerce decorated with lamppost and storefront ribbons, and the Ace Hardware store and the Big “R” placed overnight orders for American flags.
Hutchison led the parade in the passenger seat of the hearse, with Laura Richardson driving. It was an interesting and even heartfelt experience for him. The presence of Shane right behind him, and the flag draped over his casket, was vaguely comforting, and he and Laura had their first real chance to get to know each other.
Hutchison’s reassuring manner and natural curiosity about people helped draw her out, and her story was interesting. After she was divorced and moved back to Wyoming, she was aware that many people doubted her ability to successfully manage a funeral home. Northern Wyoming is conservative, with many evangelical and Mormon churches, with a mild but distinct prejudice against single working mothers. A single working mother trying to make it as a funeral director generated considerable, if unspoken, skepticism. But Richardson had done well, and now the Childers funeral, one of the biggest in Wyoming in years, was going off flawlessly. Richardson seemed almost emotional about it, as if the pressures of the week had produced renewed awareness and pride about what she had achieved.
And there was a pleasant and strong mind-wander in there for Hutchison, southwest over the rivers and the mountains to California and Palos Verdes, at the end of a week of many potent mental associations. When he was fifteen or sixteen, his mother had told him once that he should appreciate and develop his natural ability to get people to talk about themselves. People liked him, his mother said, and they trusted him, and that made them comfortable sharing with him. It was a gift to be cultivated, she thought. He was grateful now that she had said that, because perhaps without the encouragement from his mother, moments like this would not come so easily to him.
When the hearse was finally off and the parade started to move through town, Hutchison, and many of the Childerses in the vans behind him, were amazed at how many people Powell had turned out. There were hundreds of people out on the streets—the whole town, it seemed. People with flags on their porches, people with chairs set up on their lawns, kids in trees with more flags, and many more hand-drawn signs reading SUPPORT OUR TROOPS and GOOD-BYE SHANE.
Hutchison lost it far down on North Absoraka, at a corner with a vacant lot just before the hearse reached Highway 14A. A father and two boys had walked across the lot as the hearse approached. At the sidewalk, the older boy stood respectfully holding an American flag. The father stood in the middle, holding his sons’ hands. Then the younger boy, maybe a lad of five or six, clicked the heels of his sneakers together, threw his shoulders tall and his chin out, and briskly saluted Shane going by.
Doubtless this was the little boy’s first salute, and one of the last for Shane, and it pushed Hutchison past the threshold of catharsis that he needed. All the pressures of this ten-day CACO, his sadness for Shane and his love for the Childerses, came gloriously pouring out as he wailed in the front seat of the hearse.
And he could feel Shane back there now, with him.
Oh Christ, Childers, what have you gotten me into here? Semper Fidelis, Shane. And you know Shane I don’t give a rat’s ass for all this manufactured patriotism we’re seeing on television right now. You can take all the politicians and the anchormen, too, and throw them out the door without chutes. We’re the marines who have to go over there and get shot at and they’re the ones who just talk. Manufactured patriotic talk. And I don’t care either about how many people might be opposed to this war. It’s America. We’re supposed to differ. So fuck it and Semp Fi, Shane. It’s right here, in Powell, that I’m seeing the pure patriotism, something real, something that I can accept. A little boy just made his first salute to you from a vacant lot. You’re back in the Bighorns now, Shane, Semp Fi, and there’s Heart Mountain. We’re going to bury you now because your work is done, but I wish we could have met sometime and discussed this. But Christ, thanks and Semp Fi. I’m glad I saw this, and the parade has been for you, Shane.
After Hutchison had been crying for a few minutes, Laura Richardson joined him, and they rode the rest of the parade that way, crying together in the front seat of the hearse.
Shane Childers was buried that afternoon with full military honors at Crown Hill Cemetery in Powell. The graveyard stands on a slight rise east of town with expansive views down the valley to the Bighorn massif on one end and west to Yellowstone and Heart Mountain on the other. After the funeral and the parade, it had taken nearly an hour for everyone to get over to the cemetery, and for the marine guard and veterans groups to form their lines. The ranchers wore their Stetsons and western-cut jackets, the veterans had their blue and red caps with pins, and many of the women had placed quilted ski jackets over their church dresses to protect themselves from the chill Wyoming wind. A large stack of baled hay from the farm next door was piled almost thirty feet high near the edge of the cemetery, so that it felt that Shane was being placed to rest right where he belonged, in cattle country, among fields of barley and winter wheat, around the land where his father had dreamed of moving someday. Of course, being a Childers, he had done it.
Now the chaplain was finishing his prayers above Shane’s casket. “Comfort thou your servants that are mourning,” Chaplain Moore said. But sometimes these are just words that the ministers say. There wasn’t much comfort to go around when it was Shane Childers they were mourning.
Civilians jumped and babies wailed as the marines fired their twenty-one-gun salute. Unseen, from behind the trees of the opposite hill, the bugler sounded taps and all the Childers women wept. Captain Hutchison and his detail folded the flag from the casket, tucked in the dog tags, and handed it to Judy Childers, who stood bravely and wept as she received the flag. Richard Brown was saluting his brother-in-law again, and then he comforted his wife, Sandra, who had her hand to her mouth as she wept for Shane. Joe Childers looked firm and proud in his navy Seabee uniform, bearing now, and bearing well, the grievous loss of an achieving son. As the crowd slowly stepped forward, some to greet the family, some just to linger, the brisk Wyoming wind picked up even more.
At that moment, just then, a large bank of puffy cumulus clouds rolled over the Bighorns, blocking the sun for a few minutes and revealing a soft, blue haze down low near the peaks. The more tender light and shadows seemed to evoke other vistas, even meaning.
Shane Childers would never see the Bighorns again. He’d led a marine’s life, cut short at thirty. But perhaps it’s a mistake to measure in standard units of time such things as service, intensity, and self-improvement. Valor in battle, or even something as simple as just being there for your friends and the younger cousins, can’t be toted up according to the calendar and the clock. In twelve years of hard, dense-packed living since he’d left home, he’d fought in one war, served in Europe and Africa, become the first in his family to be college-educated and then he went over the line into Iraq and he took that objective. He didn’t need any more years, years piled upon years so that someday he would be celebrated for having grown old. Meteors, pretty much, come and go fast.
And there was something else in the big sky that afternoon. Mount Kilimanjaro was there, and so were the Alps and Mount Shasta, Mount Mansfield in Vermont, the Appalachian Trail, and maybe even Lake Geneva and Captain Hutchison’s distant, dreamy cliffs at Palos Verdes. On a clear day from the prosp
ect at the cemetery, there are views to the snow line at Jack Creek and the road that he biked up to Belfry.
After the services were over and the crowd had dispersed, the Childerses left regretfully but deliberately for town, pleased that there was an excuse to pull themselves away. A roast beef dinner awaited them and all their friends and the marines at the American Legion Hall. But it was hard for a few minutes, leaving Shane. Jessi Walker for one felt that the high plains there were desolate and without trees, so that they were placing Shane in too lonely a place. Like everyone else she vowed to come back and visit.
First Sergeant Morgan, too, suddenly and intensely felt the loneliness of the graveyard, which seemed to be swallowed up by the surrounding Wyoming prairie. He was gratified that his pallbearers, color guard, and rifle-salute team had performed without a mistake. He realized that the discipline of drilling his teams all weekend, and worrying all week about the funeral, had shielded him from an emotional response. But now, as most of his men left for their cars parked along the road to the cemetery, he felt intensely sorry for the Childers family. Crown Hill was a lonely place to leave their son, his fellow marine.
As the cumulus clouds rolled free of the peaks again, a few men, perhaps three dozen in all, remained behind in the cemetery and stood in clusters near the gravesite. There were a few ranchers among them, a few members of the marine honor guard, and a lot of veterans. They talked about the weather and the spring planting, about what they had read in the papers about this soldier, and about how brave and composed the family had looked. They were there simply because they didn’t feel like leaving yet. They would stay behind and linger with their marine.
Then there was movement near the gravesite. A backhoe came over to move dirt, the artificial-grass tarp over the topsoil was removed, and the low aluminum barriers around the grave were taken apart and carried away. The men waiting behind knew what to do now. They gathered in one large group behind the grave, removed their Stetsons and military caps, faced Heart Mountain, and saluted. That’s the tradition, the direction to face, when a good marine is finally “going west.”