by Tanya Biank
How on earth, she wondered, would they find the strength to bury their firstborn, their son?
On the following Monday evening, at 7:00, the Kalinofskis had a closed-casket wake at Rogers & Breece Funeral Home. By then Delores was in a fog. She was getting two or three hours of sleep each night and just barely holding up. The brigade surgeon had prescribed sleeping pills for her, but she refused to take any of them.
Delores had asked that her rosary be placed in Gary Shane’s hands, and she had the mortician place a photo of her and Gary Shane together in her son’s casket. It had been taken on the front lawn on Christmas morning 2000. He had just finished running and was wearing gray sweatpants and a gray Army sweatshirt. Delores had on a robe and ivory satin slippers, a Christmas gift from Gary Shane when he was fifteen. In the picture he was smiling and hugging his mother.
Now Delores wore a new black pants suit and stood beside her husband, touching her son’s casket and greeting mourners. Hundreds of people came, including some the Kalinofskis had known from their early Army days. Delores’s head ached, her throat was rough and scratchy, and her eyes were swollen from crying so much, but Gary Shane was all she could think of.
She had arrived at the funeral home fully intent on seeing her son’s body. Thomas Capel, who was serving as the Kalinofskis’ CAO, had told Delores that if she wanted to see Gary Shane’s remains he would be right by her side. The damage had been massive, and everyone had gently suggested that it would be better to remember the boy as he had looked before. Delores knew that much of her son’s face—his movie-star smile—was gone, but she still wanted to say a final good-bye and touch some part of him. As she leaned her head and arms on her son’s casket and sobbed, she thought she would ask Capel to let her see Gary Shane.
Years before, when Delores wasn’t quite ten years old, her brother, Richard, had burned himself over 95 percent of his body while playing with matches and kerosene on the farm. Delores’s piano teacher had taken the girl to the hospital and had told her that her eleven-year-old brother wasn’t hurt badly, that only his thumb had been burned. When Delores saw her brother wrapped like a mummy and in severe pain, she went hysterical. Ever since then, whenever anything happened, she did not want to be spared. Even now she wanted to imprint on her heart that her son was truly gone. If she could just see him.
When she looked up, her in-laws were surrounding her, and her mind suddenly was on other things. Later she would be thankful that she could remember her son as he had been.
Soon people filled the funeral home. Gary Shane’s casket stood in the A-B parlor, the same place Rennie Cory’s had been the previous April. How sad and tragic that had been, Delores thought. She and Ski had gone to the Corys’ quarters to take food and help out. At Rennie’s wake Delores prayed that she would never be in Andrea Lynne’s shoes. This could have happened to any one of the wives. We’re blessed, she remembered thinking. Our family is untouched by such a tragedy; how lucky we are. Life is short and precious.
Now Andrea Lynne came through the receiving line with tears in her eyes. This was the first wake she’d attended since her husband’s death. Rennie had been in this same spot, she realized.
“My heart breaks for you,” she told the Kalinofskis, trying to comfort them.
During the service they played Elvis Presley gospel songs Delores knew Gary Shane would have loved. She had learned about the soulful, bluesy gospel music as a child, from a wonderful black Christian lady named Althea who watched her while her grandparents worked. Delores would tell Althea to turn up the radio, and the two would sing and dance around the house as Althea cooked and mopped. The music soothed Delores’s soul, and it gave her comfort now. But when Ski began to read aloud a three-page farewell letter to his son, and his voice cracked and broke, Delores’s heart shattered all over again. To see any man cry, especially her husband, tore her to pieces.
The next day, following a ceremony at the Main Post Chapel, the Kalinofskis sat under a kelly green tent and saw their son’s casket lowered into the fourteenth grave in the eleventh row at the Fort Bragg Cemetery. Delores wanted her son to be buried on post, because that’s where her father’s grave was, in the twenty-fifth row. Delores wore another new black pants suit. Both had been purchased for her at the PX. Under the jacket she wore a white shirt and red silk tie that belonged to Gary Shane, clothes he had worn at his parents’ renewal of vows ceremony three years earlier.
Heavy rain had made the cemetery’s thick grass soggy, and mourners in overcoats and carrying umbrellas gathered in close, as Delores placed a long-stemmed red rose on her son’s casket. Its color seemed out of place against the still leafless trees and leaden sky.
At the end of March the Kalinofskis went to Fort Drum to pack up Gary Shane’s belongings. In the parking lot outside the barracks, they saw his ’96 teal green Chevrolet Cavalier coupe, which had a flat tire. Delores wanted to buy the car—it hadn’t been paid off—and tow it home to North Carolina, but it had broken down so many times on Gary Shane it didn’t seem worth it. Instead she sat in the driver’s seat and cried. In the center compartment she found a short yellow pencil with no eraser, the kind used to buy lottery tickets. With tears in her eyes, she tucked it into her purse as a keepsake.
The Kalinofskis cleaned out their son’s desk drawers, filled with his pens, pencils, and binders from high school, and his wall locker stacked with toilet paper, CDs, and the only new clothes he had bought since joining the Army—five shirts from the PX with the price tags still on, nineteen dollars apiece. They packed his possessions as lovingly as if he were coming home from college.
The Kalinofskis drove back to North Carolina with a stack of plastic containers holding their son’s belongings in the back of their rented Ford. They had gone to Fort Drum hoping for clues that would help them piece together a life they once thought they understood. They were looking for answers, Ski would tell me later, but found none.
The Army was searching for answers, too. The week before the Kalinofskis made their trip north, Special Agent Justin Ryan, from Fort Bragg’s CID (Criminal Investigation Division), paid the Kalinofskis a visit. Ryan arrived in civilian clothes: black slacks and black shoes, a white shirt and tie. His features were as nondescript as his attire. He was average-looking, with a medium build, no prominent features, and dark brown hair. He stood an inch shorter than Delores, and he was in his twenties—young enough to be her son.
As Delores led him into the kitchen, Ryan looked around the house. He’s checking to see if we live like slobs, Ski thought. The agent placed a soda he had brought with him on the kitchen table along with a file, then set up his laptop.
The Army’s CID “special agents” are junior-enlisted soldiers with an important-sounding title. I asked a lot of Army folks with years of experience about their dealings with and opinions of special agents. Down to a man, I received similar responses: There are good CID agents, but as a group, they are viewed by the rest of the Army as amateurs. The younger ones are kids with a badge and a gun, who get on-the-job training but frequently lack the ability to deal appropriately with victims or perpetrators. They also tend to believe that they are above the normal rules of military decorum and are almost always suspicious of senior officers and NCOs. They generally consider everyone they investigate guilty until proved innocent.
Ski had already been interviewed by CID in Kosovo.
“What could have happened?” he was asked repeatedly by agents there. His answer was always the same.
“Nothing happened. I just saw him.” Ski went over the story again and again. “Everything was fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Now Ski answered the same questions one more time for Special Agent Ryan, recounting his last visit with his son.
Ryan asked about Gary Shane’s childhood, his upbringing, how Ski disciplined him. He wanted to know if Ski treated Gary Shane like a soldier or a son. He kept referring back to the contents of the file as
he asked his questions. Once, when Delores touched the file, Special Agent Ryan yanked it away.
“These are statements, but nothing you can officially see at this time,” he said as he pulled the papers closer.
When Special Agent Ryan finally finished with Ski, the sergeant major read his statement, wrote “end,” and initialed and signed it.
“I know you want to talk with Delores. It might be better if I’m not here,” he said. “I’ll go to bed.”
Delores was sitting in her son’s chair. She steeled herself for the questions she knew were coming.
Ryan weighed in with little introduction: “How do you perceive a padded mailer that was given to Pfc. Kalinofski by his father in Kosovo on Monday, March 4, 2002, to be not on Pfc. Kalinofski’s person at the crime scene?”
“I don’t know,” Delores said. “I was told that Gary Shane had forgotten it on the table in the DFAC (dining facility).”
Ryan kept asking about the envelope. The only things in it, Delores said, were the teddy bear card, two magazines, and some snacks and cookies.
“And why was it that none of the contents were found at the death scene?”
“I have no idea. I was told by several people that he left the envelope on the DFAC table in the tent after chow.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. You’ve asked me this same question at least nine times now. How would I know how the envelope wasn’t at the death scene or on my son’s person at the time of his death?”
Delores wanted to shout, “Don’t you know we just buried our son? Don’t you know that Gary Shane was the most special and loved Pfc. of all? Don’t you know that we are a Christian family and don’t deserve to be grilled like this?” But she kept silent and endured Ryan’s relentless questions.
“Your husband gave your son a coin. How come the coin also wasn’t on Pfc. Kalinofski’s person or at the scene at time of death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The agent asked the same question again and again, then finally moved on.
“Do you know or remember what you had written to Pfc. Kalinofski in your letters in that padded envelope?”
“It wasn’t letters; it was one card. Yes, I clearly remember what I wrote to my son. I’m grieving—I haven’t lost my senses.”
“Please write it down.” The agent pulled out a sheet of paper from his file. Delores remembered exactly what she had written—about loving him and missing him and seeing him soon—but it was grueling to rewrite it.
“Did you write Pfc. Kalinofski other letters?”
“Yes.”
“Did you send packages?”
“Yes. Gary’s Shane’s last package from his dad and me was thirty-eight pounds.”
A dozen times the agent asked her about their last conversation. “Did you argue on the phone?”
“No. Gary Shane was laughing out loud. Ask anyone who heard him speaking to me. Colonel Campbell said he heard everything Gary Shane was saying to me. He was as rational as always, happy-go-lucky-nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Did you tell Pfc. Kalinofski that you loved him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hate your son?” Ryan asked.
“No, of course not!”
“Did you ever tell any of Pfc. Kalinofski’s friends that you hated him?”
“Of course not.”
“Did Pfc. Kalinofski hate you?
“No!” Delores was tired of being grilled. What could I possibly know? When will this all be over? The agent was way too young, she thought, to understand how much they had invested in their son, how much they loved him, how much they had lost.
“We loved Gary Shane,” she said. “We can’t understand why he chose to end his life. We love both of our children. And I know for a fact that Gary Shane loved us. I know, because I’m his mother. He hugged his father, and he told us that he loved us.”
“Did you raise your son with morals and values?”
“Yes.”
Special Agent Ryan asked his last question: “Were you a good mother to Pfc. Kalinofski?”
The words stung Delores to her core, and she began to cry, nearly as hard as the day she was told of Gary Shane’s death.
“Yes, I was a good mother,” she said. “No, I take that back. I was a great mother to Gary Shane. Ask anyone who knows me at Fort Bragg or in Fayetteville or at Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church. My children were the first thing I ever talked about.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to have upset you or to have made you cry. But I needed answers to these questions.”
“I know you have a job to do,” Delores said. “But I’m exhausted, and this has been excruciating. It’s way past my bedtime. What more could you ask of me? I only loved my Gary Shane. Now he’s gone. Can’t we just wrap this up?”
It was two minutes before midnight when Delores signed her statement. As the agent packed up his laptop and took his file, he turned to Delores. “I want to come back and get a statement from your daughter. I need to see if Pfc. Kalinofski was a victim of child abuse when he lived at home.”
Delores wanted to scream that the very idea was absurd. In the end the Kalinofskis said no, that they had had enough.
After Special Agent Ryan left, Delores let her poodle, Daisy, out in the backyard. Tears were flowing down her cheeks, and she had no strength left. She had been made to feel responsible for the suicide of her son.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Six months after 9/11, the United States was fully engaged in war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with troops hunting down the elusive Osama bin Laden. By March, Fayetteville had gotten a taste of what was to come. Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base suffered their first combat deaths in Afghanistan, Green Berets received medals for bravery, and in midmonth President Bush came to rally the troops. He told them the battle was far from over. His words were accurate. A year almost to the day after his visit to Fayetteville, the president declared war against Iraq.
At the end of March, following my trip to Vietnam, where I had spent much of the month confronting the ghosts of a different war, I drove back to Fayetteville. It was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week for Christians, who believe the week culminates with Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday The holiday is rich in symbolism and often associated with the onset of spring, new life after death, darkness to light, forgiveness of sins. A second chance. For the Floyds, though, the season would be coldly cruel, as the promise of new beginnings faded.
Brandon was lying in bed, his bandaged leg propped up with pillows and a pair of crutches on the carpet next to the bed. On a tray next to him was an untouched plate of Hamburger Helper. A week earlier he had had knee surgery to repair ligaments he’d torn during a pickup game of basketball on post. He was still pissed at himself for getting hurt. It was the same knee he’d hurt years earlier in a ski accident. His stepmother was staying at the house and had been a big help, but Brandon hated being dependent on others. He flipped through the TV channels listlessly. He wasn’t one to keep still, and the lack of mobility irritated him as much as the pain. He could hear the Labs barking outside. It irked him to know that he should be training them.
He’d be out of work for a while, and that ticked him off, too. Plus the leg hurt like hell, but he would never tell the guys in his unit that. No one talked about injuries or sickness. No one wanted to give the perception of weakness.
That’s how it is in elite units as well as in the officer corps. One officer told me that the only way he would go to the doctor is if he were dead. Officers, sometimes to the detriment of their own health, believe they are setting an example for young troops, who are always going on sick call, by not seeking help themselves. I think it has as much to do with ego.
Brandon had been doing so well at his job, and now he faced months of physical therapy, though everyone expected a full recovery. The fact that he was injured hurt his pride more than
anything. It was March, and he’d only been back from Afghanistan six weeks. With all that was going on in the Middle East, this was the worst time to be “broke”—the soldiers’ expression for being hurt or injured. He didn’t want his teammates doing missions without him.
It was late in the afternoon on Sunday, and Andrea came into the bedroom with an armful of her work clothes to iron. The new house had an oversize master bedroom, the kind that doesn’t lend itself well to intimacy. Andrea plopped the clothes on an ironing board that was set up near the closet door.
“You didn’t eat your dinner.”
Her mother-in-law had been making dinners during the week while Andrea worked, but on Sunday she could do the cooking herself.
“Would it be too much to ask for you to cook something different for a change?” Brandon kept his eyes on the TV.
“The kids like it,” Andrea said defensively, glaring at him. Cooking was not Andrea’s thing. She didn’t like it, though she had a knack for cooking deer meat, of all things, perfectly. And she did love baking, especially for the kids, things like banana-nut bread, muffins, and chocolate chip cookies.
Brandon sometimes joked about her cooking in front of friends. “Well, I guess we’re having something out of the freezer tonight,” he would say Those kinds of comments didn’t bother her when he was just playing around, but tonight was different. Andrea could tell he was in a bad mood. The same bad mood he’d been in since he got home from the hospital.
“Well, it tastes like crap,” he said. “I’d rather eat fast food than eat your shit.”
“Look, don’t give me an attitude, Brandon,” Andrea came back. “I’ve been busy, and I’ve been working weekends and buying things for the house, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, I have noticed, and the house looks like crap, too. You need to be working extra shifts with all the money you’ve blown while I was away.” Brandon blamed Andrea for spending the ten thousand dollars his family had loaned them.