On March 21, 2003, while leading a rifle platoon into combat, Marine Lieutenant Shane Childers became the first combat fatality of the Iraq War. In this gripping, beautifully written personal history, award-winning writer Rinker Buck chronicles Shane's death and his life, exploring its meaning for his family, his fellow soldiers, and the country itself. It is the story of an intelligent, gifted soldier who embodied the soul of today's all-volunteer warrior class; of the town of Powell, Wyoming, which had taken Shane into its heart; and of the Marine detail sent to deliver the news to the Childers family and the extraordinary connection that formed between them.
At once an inspiring account of commitment to the military and a moving story of family and devotion, Shane Comes Home rises above politics to capture the life of a remarkable young man who came to symbolize the heart of America during a difficult time.
At 4:30 in the morning on Friday, March 21, 2003, while Americans on the East Coast were waking up to the first news reports about the invasion of Iraq, the commander of a small United States Marine Corps reserve detachment in Billings, Montana, was awakened by an urgent phone call. Later, Captain Kevin Hutchison would recall that he had slept poorly the night before, and not simply because his house was under renovation and he'd spent the night on a spare combat mattress on the hardwood sill of his bedroom bay window. He was also depressed. No marine enjoys being left behind while his fellow officers are fighting overseas, and Hutchison had spent Thursday night watching Nightline and CNN, fitfully dozing off to the images of military convoys massing at the border of Iraq. As the cameras panned south, the long formations of tanks, Humvees, and light armored vehicles thinning off into the sands reminded him of his own humiliating distance from the war. But now the vast terrain between the deserts of Iraq and the Montana high country were about to be joined.
Hutchison was an unusual marine. A suave, worldly Californian -- bookish and sensitive, almost to a fault -- he had nevertheless succeeded brilliantly in the man's-man world of the marine officer corps. At thirty-three, he was one of the marine's most highly rated and youngest captains. Qualified with "expert" rankings in underwater demolition, parachute jumping, reconnaissance, and mountain and river warfare, Hutchison had led rifle platoons in Okinawa and Greece and, because of his fluency in Spanish, drawn several plum assignments in Latin America during the late 1990s. In Peru, where he had spent eighteen months training counter-drug police, he had acquired a stunning Peruvian girlfriend and spent long romantic weekends with her camping out in an elevated, Tarzan-style "jungle-hut" that he had built from driftwood along the broad, sandy banks of a river outside Lima. Blond, rail-thin, as charmingly earnest as he was tough, Hutchison epitomized the sort of glamorous image promoted by those catchy marine recruitment spots -- "The Few. The Proud" -- broadcast during the halftimes of weekend NFL games.
Over the past year, however, Hutchison's dream existence as a globe-trotting marine had come to a dispiriting end. As part of a routine noncombat rotation used to season young officers, he had been assigned to lead the small training battalion in Billings that handled all marine affairs across a broad expanse of the west, a five-state area running from the Dakotas to Idaho. Now his days were filled with the humdrum details of running a military command in backwater Montana -- whipping out-of-shape weekend warrior reservists through training exercises, fielding requests to provide marine details for Memorial Day parades or the openings of new car lots, providing color guards and gun salutes for the funerals of Greatest Generation World War II marines who, with lugubrious regularity, were dying off as the new century progressed.
Indeed, by late March that year, Hutchison's mood had reached a typically conflicted state. He had just returned from a seven-week Winter Mountain Leaders Course at a marine camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe, California. The grueling regimen of forced marches on cross-country skis, winter camping in the peaks, and precision night reconnaissance had left Hutchison feeling strangely refreshed, even euphoric about his marine career. But when he returned to his office inside a modern, low-rise armory on the outskirts of Billings, a mountain of paperwork and personnel hassles had accumulated on his desk. It was grim, getting back to staff work.
Then there was Iraq...
Home
