by Tanya Biank
“We will be looking at the duty performance of the soldiers,” Davis said. “Were they good soldiers? What was the relationship? What was going on in the family? What was going on in that household? We will look at all of those issues together to see what we can put together as a total picture as to what was going on in that family.”
I liked Colonel Davis. He was a good-hearted man and expressed genuine concern over what had happened. He promised to seek answers, improve the system, and strengthen ties between the post and the community
Days passed and frustrations grew, as reporters felt the post was trying to shape their stories by controlling the information flow. Only a few officials were allowed to give interviews. Several reporters called me voicing their frustrations and seeking help with sources. My phone rang constantly, and it got to the point where my boss, Mike Adams, forbade me to answer it until I had met my own deadlines.
It was a difficult story to cover. News hacks who wanted to put some meat on their stories and go beyond talking with the people Bragg paraded in front of the cameras, with their perfunctory responses—family-oriented program directors and official post spokesmen—found they were largely shut out. Requests to interview leaders in Special Operations, where three of the four soldiers had served, were denied, as was access to individuals in the soldiers’ units and to the FRG groups. Bragg never did admit that Brandon Floyd was a member of Delta.
As the Army saw it, the reporters covering the murders were a distraction to the investigations and a disruption from operations and training. The media saw it as something else—stonewalling.
Everyone wanted to know why these men did it. The scandal and dishonor, the scrutiny and the gossip, swirled outside in the heat like a swarm of mosquitoes. Outside Fayetteville, people who knew nothing about the military squawked on about “trained killers,” while many career soldiers and their spouses were saddened to see the Army dragged into the debacle.
Blaming the Army outright for what these men did was ludicrous and too easy. Yes, the Army can make a bad marriage worse, but I don’t believe Army training played any role in the murders. Soldiers are not robots programmed to “kill” like some Bourne Identity assassin. The reason soldiers kill in combat isn’t for God, glory, and country but for self-preservation and for their buddies to the right and left of them. Ask any combat vet.
Meanwhile the debates raged all over Fayetteville. I heard a variety of commentary and snatches of conversation that summer. At one of Bragg’s mess halls, single soldiers sitting down at a square table to a meal of “chili mac,” a chow hall favorite, talked as the TV screen anchored near the ceiling, above a wall of fake plants, reported on the wife murders.
“Those women got what they deserved,” one soldier said. Soldiers always liked talking that kind of “smack.” “That’s what happens when you’re a cheat.”
“Yeah,” chimed in another. In the soldiers’ minds, the women must have committed adultery, the only thing that could have set an otherwise rational man over the edge.
“I don’t care what those women did or didn’t do; they didn’t deserve to die over it,” weighed in a third. “Look at the poor kids involved. No kid deserves to lose his mom. Some of them don’t have a mom or a dad now.” Young soldiers always had soft spots for children.
“Ya know what? If I had a wife and she cheated on me, I’d walk away and divorce her ass. If I knocked her off, I’d just be ruining my own life. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I’m not gonna rot in jail over her. But I’d bust up the guy she was with.”
Outside, in a park on the post, three Army wives sat on a blanket in the shade, watched their children play on the swings, and discussed the murders.
“Do you think your husband could get mad enough to do something like that to you?” one of them asked.
“No way. My husband won’t even kill a spider in the house. Those men were probably genetically inclined to such a thing.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” another said, as she swatted at flies. “My husband loves me, but if I ever betrayed him and rubbed it in his face—girl, he’d go nuts. There’s no telling what a man would do in that situation. Men have a lot of pride, especially military guys. He’d definitely hunt down and kill the guy, though.”
“But it’s such a double standard,” the third one said. “On my husband’s old team, one of the guys basically started a second family in Colombia when they were deployed down there, and here was his real wife stuck back at Bragg. Everybody in the unit knew about it but her. And when my husband’s buddy was in Bosnia, he was the only married guy on his team not cheating. His team captain, who was single, even warned everybody not to cheat.”
“Have your relatives called y’all yet? My mom telephoned wanting to know what’s going on down here. She wondered if I knew any of the women. I was, like, Mom, it’s a huge post. She wanted to know if deployments or Lariam [the antimalarial drug the Army gives soldiers in countries where there is a malaria risk] had anything to do with it. That’s what’s been on the news.”
“Well, if you’re gonna cheat, a deployment sure does give you the opportunity.”
“That’s not what I mean. I think a deployment plays with the guys’ minds. You know, the stress, the shitty environment they’re stuck in.”
“Well, every time my husband has been away like that, he’s just happy to be home with us. Sure there’s some adjustment afterward, but that’s normal. Soldiers aren’t robots—and no, I don’t think Lariam had anything to do with it either.”
“Well, I don’t think it should be the Army’s responsibility to get involved in soldiers’ marriages.”
“Why not? The Army gets involved in everything else.”
There was a lot of speculation. One of the biggest questions involved Lariam; I began receiving anonymous calls from soldiers telling me to look into Lariam as a possible factor in the crimes. Studies had shown that a small percentage of people who take the drug experience paranoia, aggression, depression, psychotic actions, hallucinations, and suicidal tendencies.
Some of the men who had been in Afghanistan had indeed taken Lariam. And though I never believed Lariam had anything to do with the crimes, I couldn’t say that at the time. I wanted to remain open-minded and explore every possibility.
The side effects of Lariam were well known in the Army. I had heard soldiers joking about the drug for years. Whenever anyone was in a bad mood or lost his temper on deployment, the comment was always, “It must be the Lariam.” Soldiers often took their dosage on a designated day, “Mad Mondays,” for example.
The Lariam connection hit the airwaves with a vengeance, and I found myself talking about it on CNN and Good Morning America. Millions of Americans going abroad had been prescribed Lariam without incident. I had taken Lariam myself several months earlier when I went to Vietnam. My experience with the drug wasn’t a great one, it made me so sick to my stomach that I never took my last dosage upon returning to the States, not a smart thing when you consider the alternative, which is getting malaria.
Meanwhile, Lariam hysteria swept through the housing areas, as wives with husbands on their way to Afghanistan asked, “Are you going to have to take that?”
“Probably,” was the reply.
On Bragg some wives confided in their friends, “What if it makes them go crazy when they come home?” Others treated it as a big joke. “My husband’s been back from Afghanistan for three weeks, and I’m still alive.”
Lariam was never a real issue with the cops or the DA, nor, as it would turn out later, with the Army. As the speculation rose to a frenzy over what had led the men to murder—deployment stress, Army training, and now Lariam—detectives like Pennica, who had dealt with homicide cases for years, wanted to jump up and yell, “Bullshit!” The Army wives died because serious domestic issues resulted in violence, and in the detectives’ minds the Army had nothing to do with it. For me the questions remained: Did aspects of military life contribute to or exac
erbate marriages already in trouble? And if so, could those be fixed? Congressmen on the House Armed Services Committee were planning to come down to find out for themselves, and the Pentagon was sending an epidemiology team of its own to investigate.
On post something else was happening: Chaplains and FRG leaders were getting calls from wives, some of them abused women, worried about problems in their own marriages and asking for help. I got my own share of calls, and before long my coverage had sprouted another branch, domestic violence in the military.
It had turned out to be quite a fourth week of July in Fayetteville. Aside from the dead wives and the reporters crawling all over town, it was still hotter than heck. And a few other scandals livened the local news. Police issued a citation to the chamber of commerce president, who was caught in a prostitution sting (he denied the charges, which were later dropped), then Fayetteville’s beauty queen, who had gone on to be crowned Miss North Carolina, abruptly resigned after an ex-boyfriend allegedly told pageant officials he had topless photos of her. Fayettenam was back like a bad aftertaste. Could it get worse?
I got my answer when news came that a Fort Bragg officer’s wife had been charged with murdering her husband.
In the early morning of Tuesday, July 23, Major David Shannon had been shot in the head and chest as he slept. The Shannons lived in a rented, sixties-era, three-bedroom ranch home in Cottonade, a large subdivision just outside post, filled with mostly military families and retirees. Major Shannon, forty, was a fifteen-year veteran and worked in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command headquarters. His thirty-five-year-old wife, Joan, told police she saw an intruder. The couple had been married eleven years.
After the murder Joan had been comforted by an Army chaplain and families from her husband’s office. Her coworkers at the Fort Bragg Federal Credit Union, where she worked as a secretary, raised five hundred dollars for the family. A week after the killing, on July 30, police charged Joan with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. She has denied the charges. The motive was insurance money, police believe. Joan’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, David Shannon’s stepdaughter, was charged with the same offenses and would later admit to actually pulling the trigger. The girl said her mother had been bugging her to do it.
Joan Shannon claimed that she had a good marriage, though according to police records she said she had a boyfriend, who had been introduced to her by her husband. She also told police that in their free time she and her husband engaged in group sex and partner swaps with local couples they met over the Internet. I had learned about that from sources in the early days of the investigation, though that information wouldn’t come out publicly until much later.
Bragg now had its fifth Army domestic slaying of the summer. One local news station actually inquired at Fort Bragg whether the post thought the weather had made people go mad. It was the one question regarding the murders Bragg could give a definitive answer to: No.
In early August, over sweet tea at a monthly officers’ wives gathering I attended, the conversation quickly turned to Joan Shannon’s unkempt appearance. Footage of the officer’s wife had played repeatedly on Fayetteville news. There she was, shuffling along before the television cameras, hunched over in her bulky orange jumpsuit, her hands cuffed across her abdomen. Long strands of brown greasy hair hung in her sullen face. She wore no makeup, just oversize glasses. This was not a look sanctioned in the Officers’ Wives’ Handbook.
A major’s wife no less … . How embarrassing … . She looked godawful … . Couldn’t she have washed that hair? … What a sight … . The women winced just talking about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The deaths of four Fort Bragg Army wives continued to receive attention throughout the month of August as talk of toppling Saddam and invading Iraq made headlines. At that point the threat of invasion of Iraq was a sleeping beast for military wives. Amid the swirl of a chaotic and deadly summer in Fayetteville, Army wives far from the spotlight soldiered on.
For three Fort Bragg women, Delores, Andrea Lynne, and Rita, that meant standing strong on some days and trying not to show their weakness on others, faking for their children’s sake. Meanwhile a fourth wife, Andrea Floyd, was buried on the last Saturday in July near a huge old oak in a cemetery along a country road in her hometown.
By the end of the month in Fayetteville, after days of temperatures in the triple digits and months of aridity, rain poured down like liquid sheets soaking thirsty soil and flooding some streets. As a retired colonel would later tell me, life’s blessings are always mixed.
Delores sat in her Camry in the Watters Center parking lot, crying and wondering why she had come. There was no way she could go back into that building. It’s too soon. I’ll just go home. No one will know the difference. Rain pelted her windshield. She had been there for thirty minutes, parked in the same spot in which she had parked the morning her life changed on March 4. She purposely wore the same clothes she had worn that day, hoping now they might give her strength and courage: jeans, white sneakers, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and the black 82nd shirt with her name and a rose embroidered on it. It was 10:00 A.M., on the first Monday in August, and one hundred senior Bragg wives were half an hour into their monthly Command and Staff meeting.
Delores had stayed away from wives’ meetings and committees for months; she gave up her cleaning jobs and put her substitute-teaching plans on hold. She had always seen herself as an Army wife working behind the scenes, serving selflessly with dignity and style. Now she was on an extended leave of absence. She focused solely on her home life and her daughter. She knew some people might consider her overprotective, but after having lost one child, she couldn’t bear to have anything happen to Cherish. She put all her energy into her family, which was more important than any meeting.
On several mornings Delores had woken up to the sound of Cherish crying. The girl had been greatly affected by her brother’s death. She had a small bulletin board in her room, covered with pictures, that she called her Gary Shane Angel Board. On the sole of her right sneaker she had written in permanent black marker, My Angel Gary Shane. Once she asked Delores, “Mom, did Gary Shane die because he thought I got all the attention because I was the baby?”
Delores tried to reassure her. “No, sweetie, no one is to blame except for Gary Shane. It was just a major mistake. He should have talked to me, or Dad, or a chaplain … or someone. What his pain was we’ll never know, but none of us are to blame for what he did. Only Gary Shane.” She wiped her daughter’s tears. “God holds Gary Shane now. He is free from his pain at last.”
But the pain had now taken hold of his family. The heartache was so great that Delores and Ski couldn’t really talk about it. Instead they talked around it. Delores wanted to hear, over and over, what had happened that day in Kosovo. Patiently Ski would go over it with her again, and if his wording changed ever so slightly, she would break in, “But I thought you said—” He knew Delores was looking for answers, hoping that maybe he had forgotten some crucial, revealing detail.
“Did you make him call me?” Delores asked.
“He wanted to.”
“What did he say when you got off the phone?”
“Delores, we’ve been over this so many times.”
“Are you sure something else didn’t happen?”
“Wouldn’t I have told you by now?” Ski felt tremendous anxiety He was the one who had seen Gary Shane last. After all these years, Ski thought he could sense when something wasn’t right with a soldier. What did I miss? What should I have seen that would have prevented this from happening? Was there anything I could have done? I thought he was so grounded, but maybe he needed to tell me things.
For her part Delores felt like a failure as a mother. She couldn’t avoid every Army function, and she often found herself chatting with people she had never met. With so much coming and going on the post, there constantly were new people to be introduced to, and those first conversations a
lways pulled from the same reservoir of questions: What unit is your husband in? Do you live on or off post? Where are you from originally? How long have you been here? And the one Delores didn’t know how to respond to: Do you have children?
The topic of children invariably came up. Sometimes Delores would say they had lost a son in Kosovo, and if someone asked how, she would answer, “to suicide.” She was neither ashamed nor embarrassed over the way Gary Shane died, but the S word abruptly ended the chitchat.
Sometimes Delores would run into wives at the commissary or the PX. “Delores, how are you doing?” the women would ask. “Check your calendar. Let’s do lunch.” There were dozens of lunches and conversations that allowed Delores to focus on memories of her son.
So many people at Bragg had helped the family through their grief. Wives sent her cards and letters; friends passed along books on suicide and grieving. People would never know how much their support had meant to her and her family.
But there was a dark side, too, a contagion of whispers and innuendos from some of the same people who offered their friendship. Army life is fishbowl living, and unfortunately the Kalinofskis, who were experiencing their worst nightmare, were not spared speculation and gossip: Delores is too fragile. You know, she’s not Gary Shane’s biological mother. Command Sergeant Major Kalinofski’s finished. He’ll retire. He forced his son to join the Army. They had a terrible fight in Kosovo, didn’t you hear? I heard all those fabrications and gossip, but I also know that those who truly cared about the Kalinofskis gave them loyalty and love.