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Family: Longer tour cut GI’s life short

LEE, Maine — The family of a soldier from Fort Lewis, Wash., who died in Iraq says he would have been safe on U.S. soil if his tour had not been extended.

Bill Emery said his son, Army Cpl. Blair William Emery, was supposed to come home in October. Instead, his tour was extended by another three months.

“That’s what bothers me the most right now,” Bill Emery said.

Emery, 24, assigned to the 571st Military Police Company, 97th Military Police Battalion, 18th Military Police Brigade at Fort Lewis, had been injured twice before he was killed by an improvised explosive device that was detonated near his vehicle on Nov. 30 in Baqubah.

In March, he suffered a concussion and an injured hip from another IED blast, and he was hit by a bullet fragment while he was standing in his vehicle’s turret in another incident, his father told the Bangor Daily News.

Emery is receiving a posthumous promotion to sergeant.

Bill Emery said his son always had a strong sense of right and wrong that asserted itself when the boy was only 3 or 4 years old. That’s around the time he stopped his family from picking apples from a neighbor’s tree because of a “no trespassing” sign.

“We knew the people who owned the tree and they wouldn’t have minded, but he wouldn’t let us go,” said Blair’s sister, Betsy Siegfried.

“He put up a fit,” Bill Emery said. “That was the way he was. He respected other people’s property. We didn’t get any apples that day.”