For Jeremy

Everyone deals with grief in different ways, and everyone honors dead loved ones in different ways.

For Chris Shank, a 23-year-old Southeast Missouri State University student eyeing a career in movies, his way of dealing with the emotional pain was to write a movie script.

"I wrote the first draft about a week and a half, two weeks after he died, right about the time of the funeral," Shank said, referring to the death of his brother, Jeremy. "It was one of those things where I had all these words and all these emotions flying around. They say it's healthy to get it down on paper. Well, this was the only way I knew how. I'm not a poet. I can't write good short stories. So I'll write a script."

The death of Shank's brother wasn't like the deaths most families deal with. Jeremy's death was a long, public affair that involved seemingly all of the Shanks' hometown, Jackson, and the greater Southeast Missouri region. Jeremy Shank was one of the first local casualties of the war in Iraq.

U.S. Army Cpl. Jeremy Shank died Sept. 6 in Balad, Iraq, from injuries received in combat with the Army's 25th Infantry Division while on a dismounted patrol, just weeks after he was deployed to Iraq. He was 18.

Hundreds of mourners and family supporters turned out for Shank's emotional funeral. Many of them considered him a hometown hero. To Chris, he was a brother and a best friend, and he was gone.

Numb, Chris said, "I didn't cry for a good two weeks after my brother died."

When the emotion came, Chris Shank poured it all out through a keyboard. The result was a script called "The Reservist," a movie that seeks to honor Jeremy and the community that supported the Shank family. Shank and movie-making partner and old friend, 23-year-old Blake Burress, hope 'The Reservist" will strike a chord not only with people familiar with the Shanks' story, but anyone who has ever lost a loved one or experienced the inevitable changes life forces on us.

"This is for Jeremy. This is a tribute to him and the people who have stood by Chris and his family in Jeremy's memory," Burress said.

The plot's protagonist is a mixture of the Shank brothers -- combining Jeremy's passion for being a member of the armed forces and the loss Chris experienced.

"I wanted to write a script based on my brother's life, being in the Army and the sacrifice that he made, but at the same time I also wanted to do a script about how it feels to lose someone you're close to," Shank said. "And all at once I realized I didn't have to write two scripts."

Shank and Burress don't want to give away too much plot, but the action all takes place locally, as the protagonist witnesses a friend go to war.

"It's just about a guy who realizes all at once that he is a mortal. He will die one day, there's no guarantee that he'll be here a week or a month down the line, and it scares him," Shank said.

Most of the script that Shank banged out in those days following his brother's death has been discarded, he said.

"The original one was a lot more angry," Chris said. And it didn't cover his own emotional "evolution" as time started to heal his grief and give him perspective on what had transpired.

In its current form, Burress calls the script a "valentine" to Jeremy's memory, the pain the Shank family went through and the solidarity Jackson and Southeast Missouri showed in September.

"A lot of people when they get to be our age, they think, I hate my small town, I want to get out," said Burress, who grew up with Jeremy as one of Chris' best friends since childhood. "I'm kind of fond of it."

"It takes something like that to realize what kind of a town you're actually from," Shank said.

The filmmakers say they've already received overwhelming support -- almost everyone who knows about the project wants to be involved. They're hoping that support will carry over March 25, when they'll have casting calls for all ages from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Osage Community Centre. Shank and Burress need a large number of actors for a variety of parts, so the results of the casting call will be essential to the feature-length movie's completion.

Burress and Shank hope to have filming completed by late May or early June and do any reshoots and editing over the summer, before their university classes start again.

There is no agenda to the film, they say.

"Some people might think it's pro-war, some people might think it's against the war," Shank said. "They're entitled to their own opinion. We're going to try to show what it's like to lose someone you're close to. Every person deals with that at some point in their life."

"The Reservist" is, more than anything, a coming-of-age tale, say Burress and Shank. The protagonist grows up, he changes and his relationships with others change.

The movie also deals with the changes veterans of the conflict in Iraq go through when they come home after months living in drastically different conditions, Burress said.

"We want to capture that feeling of being a stranger in a strange place, but in your own home," he said.

Along with all the support comes a lot of pressure, Shank and Burress say, to honor Jeremy's memory in a deserving way. The pressure also comes in dealing with a subject that is familiar to so many local people, especially when word about the project has already leaked out.

"It seems like, especially in Jackson, this has become a huge underground success already," Shank said.

The first audiences to see "The Reservist" will probably be local -- the people who lived through the drama after Jeremy's death. But Shank and Burress also plan to promote the film online and they hope to make national audiences aware of "The Reservist."

"There's pressure there, I think, but we just want to make something we can be proud of and something Jeremy would be proud of," Burress said.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182