Home of the Brave 
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.
konrad weiss says: Ms. Swartz, MAAM and I use the term lightly. You do not know what you are talking about. Have you ever served in the miltary? do you honestly know what it is like? (November 6th, 2009 at 1:57pm)
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Jessica wasn’t that way when she arrived at Shoemaker, in August 2003. She was, then, a happy fourteen-year-old, the quintessential daddy’s girl. Linnie’s older children, Amanda and Joseph, were on their own, so Jessica had her father to herself. “They bonded from the beginning,” Linnie recalls. Strappingly tall and handsome, with dancing blue eyes, James Blankenbecler could do no wrong in Jessica’s eyes, so following him around the country—to Hawaii, to El Paso—as he advanced his military career was, for her, a great adventure. Things would be good in Killeen, he’d promised. At registration, he’d told Jessica that he knew Shoemaker would be a great school because so many of the boys wore Chuck Taylors, Jessica tells me, snuggling into the memory. He was forty then, a command sergeant major, the highest rank possible for a noncommissioned officer.
We meet up a day later, in the small tract home near Shoemaker that Linnie has transformed into a cheery refuge of brightly colored walls and fabrics, straw rugs and warm woods, and, of course, pictures of her husband. Even so, neither she nor Jessica has found the energy to put up a Christmas tree as the holiday looms, nor has anyone taken James’s voice off the answering machine.
He had never expected to go to war, but the transfer to Fort Hood for training meant otherwise. He would go without complaint: He was loyal to the military and President Bush. “Don’t be scared. Be proud,” James told Linnie. So it happened that a month after school began, not so long after Critchfield had started buying silver and blue stars, Jessica was called out of her seventh-period class. Descending a flight of stairs, she spied her father at the bottom, watching her, his arms folded. He reached for her hand and led her to their car for a drive to the airport. “He was so different that day,” Jessica remembers.
His own childhood had been rough, and so he cherished his small family with a passion that was sometimes haunting; in El Paso he’d once awakened, frightened, from a dream in which he’d begged God not to take him away from them. Now, somber at the airport, James paced the perimeter of the terminal to find the best spot for Jessica and Linnie to stand to watch his plane take off. In the departure lounge, he was silent, staring into space. When mother and daughter returned to the quiet house, they found messages he had written: in lipstick on the dresser mirror for Linnie—“I love you baby, and I miss you already”—and for Jessica, a note on her pillow.
He called from Kuwait, and then, settled in Tikrit, began to write regularly. He was circumspect in his letters to Jessica, but he wrote Linnie that he could not believe how many ways the insurgents had invented to try to kill him. His truck was riddled with bullet holes. “Everything is okay,” Linnie told Jessica, “as long as we don’t see any men in green suits in the front yard.”
But they appeared just eighteen days after James had landed in Iraq. Linnie and Jessica were coming back from the store, where they had gone to buy what Linnie calls a “love package” for James—items like Kool-Aid and Gatorade. Linnie turned onto their street on the base and saw the house they loved, with the little balcony Jessica had all to herself, and then slammed on the brakes, her knuckles white on the wheel. Jessica pitched forward in her seat and then saw them. “Please don’t let that be for us,” Linnie said, indicating three men in uniform on their street, but they already knew. Jessica started wailing.
Linnie inched the car forward, stopping every few feet or so—maybe by avoiding the visitors she could avoid their news. “Keep going!” Jessica screamed.
When they finally reached the house, one of the uniformed men asked Linnie to step out of the car. Jessica opened her door and collapsed to the ground. “They said his convoy was hit by weird things,” Linnie tells me. “I was listening, but at the same time, all these things were going through my head. I just couldn’t concentrate.” Jessica, sobbing, had to be dragged from the yard into the house.
The memorial service for James Blankenbecler was held on October 16, at the Killeen civic center. Linnie worried about who would come, because they had been in town for only a little more than six weeks and had no friends or family nearby. She was confused that day when the funeral procession took a detour by Shoemaker on the way to the service. But then she saw them: hundreds of students lining the road in a silent vigil, holding tiny American flags for the father of a girl they hardly knew.
The counselors’ office, denoted by a cheerfully lettered sign and a “We Support Our Troops” sticker on the door, is ground zero in the fight for student stability at Shoemaker. Sit long enough in this cramped, cluttered, and often crowded warren of offices and you can watch the entire panoply of high school anxieties and ambitions parade by, tinted by the shadow of the war. Kids weep over breakups, court dates, parental abuse, and disappointing grades; they celebrate a return visit by 2005 graduate Roy Miller, who would play for the Texas Longhorns in the Rose Bowl. (His father too served in Iraq.) The counselors—along with the coaches, teachers, ROTC commanders, and Communities in Schools supervisors—have turned their offices into temporary day care centers, helped families evicted from their homes, taken students grocery shopping, taught giggling girls how to tune up their cars and change the oil, taught earnest boys to pay bills, and made sure everyone made it to the prom and homecoming. “There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for these kids, as long as it’s legal,” Critchfield says. “When their grades fall, we stay on ’em.” The most successful threat to a Shoemaker kid with falling grades is “Don’t make me call your daddy in Iraq.”
On this December day, Critchfield wears a snowman sweatshirt in honor of the Christmas season, and also as a reminder to touch base with the kids whose loneliness increases because their parents are gone. The holidays, she knows, are toughest on students who are alone.
She wants me to meet Rohan Osbourne Jr., who strides into her office while she is simultaneously talking on the phone and checking her e-mail. “Hey!” she says exuberantly when he arrives, as if it has been months instead of hours since she has seen him.
Rohan, now a sophomore, is a strikingly beautiful, strikingly self-possessed boy. He has skin the color of burnished mahogany, with eyes that sparkle even when he is talking about the saddest things. Today he wears an immaculate oversized white hoodie and an enormous watch. After Rohan’s mother was killed, an aunt moved with her children from Florida to Killeen, buoying Rohan with food, family, and a feminine presence. His father, Rohan Senior, does not speak to the media about Sergeant Pamela Osbourne’s death at 38, but he allows his son to make his own decisions on the subject. You can feel her presence when Rohan talks about her, her love for him and his for her.
Pamela and Rohan Senior emigrated separately from Jamaica to Florida, meeting in high school in the Miami area. They married and had three children, and Rohan Junior grew up in some fairly rough neighborhoods, one reason he is grateful for the peace he finds in Killeen. His mother joined the military out of gratitude for her U.S. citizenship. “She wanted to do something for her country,” Rohan tells me. She was like her son, small and radiant. Rohan remembers how beautiful she was in her fatigues. “She looked sooo good,” he says, warmed by the memory. “She had a big smile no matter what, through good and bad.”
The two were close. Rohan’s favorite times with his mother were those when they did almost nothing, like lying on their backs in the grass looking for shapes in the clouds drifting high over town. When Pamela was sent to Iraq in the spring of 2004, Rohan tried to avoid all the talk in the school hallways about other parents who were there, because it made him worry. In late October, another student, a junior named Leeza Weibley, lost her stepfather, Army Sergeant First Class Michael Battles Sr., in Iraq. It was some comfort to Rohan that his mother called every morning at around six o’clock—nighttime in Iraq—and that she made it home for two weeks of R & R, stressed but happy to see her kids. “Stay strong,” Rohan’s father told him. A car salesman, he bought a white BMW for Pamela upon her return.
But early one morning, Rohan’s father awoke from a dream, shouting his wife’s name. Rohan and his younger sister, LaToya, rushed in, and all three realized that Pamela hadn’t called. The men in uniform showed up the next morning. Seeing them, Rohan fled into the bathroom, closed the door, and wept. Then he got dressed and went to Shoemaker. “I didn’t want to stay home,” he tells me.
When Rohan mentions that his mother loved a particular reggae singer, Beres Hammond, Critchfield swivels around in her chair to find him on Google. Rohan stands behind her, leaning happily on the chair. She clicks the keyboard again, and one of Pamela’s favorite songs—“What Can You Do to Stop a Man From Trying?”—plays softly. Rohan falls into a reverie, closing his eyes and lifting his chin. “Can you play some more?” he asks Critchfield. She clicks on another song, and then another, as if she has all the time in the world.
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