Shane Comes Home by Rinker Buck

Author:Rinker Buck
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061873676
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE CITADEL YEARS

By the end of the week, Captain Hutchison was getting close to melting down and everyone around him saw it. The whole Billings command was affected by it. He wasn’t exercising in the morning, a violation of marine and personal doctrine, he wasn’t eating or sleeping well, and paperwork for the Childers CACO was strewn all around his desk. He worked late every night, CACO-obsessed. Hutchison had always liked to lead by example and loosely at that, and had never been sharp-tongued with his men. But he was now. Even the Mexicans working on his house noticed the change. Normally when he came in from his morning run, he’d make coffee and chatter away with them in Spanish for a while. But now they were just in the way, a nuisance waiting around for further instructions about shutters and paint. Hutchison was anxious to leave early for the armory to deal with the Childers CACO.

One of his most trusted noncommissioned officers, Staff Sergeant Travis Ridgeway, stepped into Hutchison’s office on Friday afternoon and expressed the concerns of the other marines.

“Sir,” the staff sergeant said. “You’re taking the Childers CACO way too seriously, way beyond the call of duty. Take some time off.”

But Hutchison felt that he had no choice except to ignore that advice. One of the problems was that Joe and Judy Childers were more than willing to accept Hutchison’s many generous offers to assume responsibility for the paperwork that families often did themselves. He was mired down in completing insurance forms, closing bank accounts, and chasing down the location of Shane’s storage locker outside Camp Pendleton in suburban San Diego. Meanwhile he had to coordinate all the details of a funeral parade in Powell with the local police, monitor carefully that they weren’t overreacting to the threat of peace protestors, field calls from the national media, and deal with the flood of reply faxes from Virginia and Washington on Shane’s CACO case. Headquarters branch at Quantico had now concluded that the crush of media, dignitaries, and veterans groups could overwhelm tiny Powell, and they didn’t want to botch the PR during a very public funeral for the first soldier killed in Iraq. Quantico was sending out two additional Marine Public Affairs Officers to assist with the funeral, help that was welcome. But each new layer of contact required additional complexity—motel reservations, transportation, more reporting up to a distant command.

And he still had no firm news for Joe and Judy about when Shane’s body would return. He did know at this point that Shane was at the national mortuary in Dover, Delaware, being prepared. Faxes had been exchanged about a proper medals rack for his burial uniform and the Childerses had selected a coffin. But it was nearly the weekend now, the Tuesday funeral and burial date loomed, and he still couldn’t provide specific information for funeral director Laura Richardson, the Powell police, or the family on when Shane would arrive. With casualties mounting in Iraq, Dover was backed up now and the mortuary couldn’t release a firm ship date.

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