Heartbreak High

Killeen Shoemaker, in the shadow of Fort Hood, is ground zero for the home front, a school where hundreds of students have parents who are deployed in Iraq and fear of death and danger is part of everyday life.

by Mimi Swartz

March 2006

(Page 2 of 4)

A few minutes later Critchfield hugs a diminutive sophomore with a thatch of neatly coiled dreads: Rohan Osbourne Jr., whose mother, Pamela, a supply sergeant, was killed racing to get a weapon as rockets rained down on her camp in Baghdad. With both the 1st Cavalry and the 4th Infantry Division based in Fort Hood but rotating through Iraq, there are many walking wounded here: a student who stayed up at night because he was afraid his mother would try to kill herself while his father was gone; a school employee whose husband had a breakdown just before he was to leave for his second Iraq tour and threatened to throw her out of her own house. A new economics teacher just back from Iraq replaced the one just sent to Afghanistan, and an assistant librarian’s husband has just left. Many, many students are connected to a parent through laptops and cell phones, waiting every day for a call or an e-mail. Fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters: For all the ripple effects the war in Iraq has caused in this small community, the fighting could be as close as Waco.

In the beginning, just after the war started, Critchfield wanted to do something to honor all the Shoemaker parents serving in Iraq, something that would make their kids feel good too. She went to Hobby Lobby with the other counselors, and out of their own pockets, they bought a hundred or so silver and blue stars at 84 cents each. Their plan was to mark each one with the name of a deployed soldier and his or her Shoemaker student and then hang the stars in the hallways, near the ceiling, as a sort of celestial tribute. To get the names, the counselors sent questionnaires to English classes, because, as Critchfield notes, “everyone has to take English.” When the surveys were counted, they came to more than five hundred. As the months passed, the number of stars increased to one thousand, then, as students came and went, pushed past two thousand, until Critchfield started to lose count. “We couldn’t keep up with it,” she says.

Then Jessica’s father was killed, and Critchfield bought a gold star, hanging it just inside the main entrance. Since then, she’s had to buy six more. “I hate buying them,” she admits. Last time she bought five extras, hoping she wouldn’t ever have to go back to the store for more. “I have to make myself do it.” Like the kids at Shoemaker, she’s been pressed into service, with no say in the matter.

“How many of these kids do you worry about?” I ask her, watching the lunch crowd thin out as the kids return to class.

“I worry about all of them,” she answers.

“You’ll love Michek,” Critchfield tells me, referring to one of her favorite recent graduates, a twenty-year-old who is packing off to Iraq in a week with the 1st Cavalry. “He will be the one to find bin Laden,” she adds definitively.

Though married with two teenagers of her own, Critchfield has been unable to establish much self-protective professional detachment. She has utterly failed at sticking to the traditional requirements of her job; she’s a far cry from the typical high school guidance counselor, whom students learn to avoid at all costs, the one who always says you won’t be able to get into the college of your choice. Many of the kids at Shoemaker have her cell phone number, and their frequent calls are a perpetual cause of friction in her otherwise happy marriage. “Military kids are different,” she insists to me: Worldly but childlike, tough but needy, bounced all over the world as hostages to their parents’ fortunes, they form quick but deep bonds with those who help them, their loyalty and love qualities Critchfield treasures.

For the past few weeks, in fact, she has been worrying about Michek, a former student whom no one, it seems, ever addresses by his given name of Christopher. Today, we are speeding toward an Applebee’s in her shiny black pickup to say good-bye, past “We Support Our Troops” signs and “Half My Heart Is in Iraq” bumper stickers, which in Killeen are as ubiquitous as teeth-whitening billboards in Houston. For Critchfield, the war has suddenly become intensely personal.

We arrive at the restaurant and meet a pale, shorn, muscular young man in a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, and heavy boots. Michek slides into our booth, and Critchfield beams at the sight of him. He looks and sounds like central casting’s idea of a gung-ho fighting man, excited about going to “the sandbox,” where, he’s heard, they have a bowling alley and a swimming pool on base—“everything a soldier could need.”

“You can go bowling here,” Critchfield quips.

“Yeah, but how many people can say they ever bowled in Iraq?” Michek counters, smiling at her the way a boy smiles at a mom he loves very much.

Critchfield asks him what he’s going to do the last few days he’s here. He looks at her for just a beat before answering. “Pray,” he says, and then grins. The grin she returns is weaker than previous efforts.

“My number one goal is to bring back my crew,” he says, suddenly thoughtful. “I want to come home too, but that’s my job. I’m coming home walking or on wheels or in a bag.” He stumbles over the next few words, trying to keep up with his own bluster. “I wouldn’t want to be in a bag … I don’t know … I’m gonna go over there, do my job, come back home.”

Michek is a classic example of the military kid: open, hardy, and independent, with just the slightest chip on his shoulder. He joined the military to follow in the footsteps of his father, who served in Vietnam and Desert Storm and now manages a vehicle repair facility for the 1st Cavalry, where Michek has been stopping in for talks every day since he got his orders to leave. As a kid, Michek was bounced around several cities and countries until he landed at Shoemaker, where he couldn’t be bothered to go to class. “Except for ROTC,” he points out. “My goal was to skip by and get in the Army.” He found a refuge in the counselors’ office, where Critchfield listened without judgment and didn’t ride him too much about his low grades. She knew what was good about him and left it at that. Maybe he reminded her of her own son, who never much liked school either.

As the moments tick away, her usually sunny face begins to show some cloud cover. “Why couldn’t you have worked construction or been a doctor?” she asks, trying to razz Michek, but a hint of a whine comes through.

“I couldn’t have been a doctor,” he says, without regret. He likes being a tank driver, like his dad. “It’s a blast to feel that tank rock,” he insists, cheered by the memory of his training in Korea, where he used to check satellite photos to see whether his father’s car was in the driveway in time for dinner back in Killeen. Michek isn’t one of those people who joined up to get the tax-free combat pay or the $20,000 for enlisting for three years with certain deployment to Iraq. “Soldiers soldier,” he says. “We sign a contract that we will support the president of the United States. Don’t we care that the Iraqis are free and democratic?”

Critchfield says nothing. Michek’s is only one of many opinions she hears daily about the war. There’s a surprising lack of consensus at the school, except for the notion that the biased American media report only the bad news about our soldiers. Generally, the kids whose mothers and fathers believe it’s their job to serve try to bear their absence with good grace—“As long as my mom gets back, I’m straight,” one tells me—while the children of parents angry about the war are angry themselves. “I think they should put a stick of dynamite up Bush’s ass and light the fuse” is the way another student put it. Mostly, the kids don’t like to talk about the war, because talking about it raises the specter of injury and death. Lots of students don’t even alert the school when a family member has been deployed; most of them have been raised, like Michek, to fend for themselves.

“I want my combat patch,” continues Michek, speaking of his goals. Critchfield is now avoiding his eyes and massaging one cheek, as if it hurts.

“Why don’t you just draw one on your arm?” she suggests, pointing to his tattoos and smiling.

When the time comes to say good-bye, the two of them linger between their pickups. “Just don’t get yourself shot,” she says, before pulling away.

Heading back toward Shoemaker, she is already worrying about how she’ll feel when she sends Michek e-mails and doesn’t get the quick answers she got when he was stationed in Korea. In past wars, like Vietnam, no news was usually good news; now, in a time of easy communication, it’s the reverse. No calls or e-mails often means the worst. The counselors at Shoemaker have learned how to brace themselves: They watch the news, and when the death of a Fort Hood soldier is reported from Iraq, they listen for the age. “If they were in their twenties, it was like, okay. If they were in their thirties and forties … ,” Critchfield trails off, preferring not to finish her sentence. But now it’s her own students, not just their parents, heading to war. “For the first time it’s like, whoa,” she says. “Now I know what these kids are going through.” She races back to school, seeking the solace of Shoemaker’s needs.

A WEEK OR SO LATER, I try to interview Jessica Blankenbecler and her mother, Linnie, but they cancel. Jessica was supposed to have been home at five, but she wasn’t, and now, as darkness falls and the weather turns unseasonably cold—the highway is icy, the sky black—Linnie won’t leave home without her. There is something taut in Linnie’s voice, something familiar to all parents; it is the anxiety of a mother trying to reel a child back from the edge. Barbara Critchfield has also spent much of the past few years trying to get Jessica to a safe place emotionally, often refereeing between mother and daughter. Despite her inherent sweetness, her smarts, and her good military manners, Jessica displays a dazed sort of detachment, as if all the connections and conventions of her life have irreparably frayed. “She does not want to love because she does not want to hurt” is how Linnie, a warm, pixieish woman in her late forties, describes her.

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