Waiting For Answers

What are the circumstances surrounding the death of Ciara Durkin? Her family would like to know.

She was born in Ireland, in Connemara, but her family moved to Boston when she was ten. Some of her siblings returned to Ireland, to their roots, but Ciara joined the Massachusetts National Guard and accepted service in Afghanistan. Her sister has said that Ciara wanted to do something for her country, for America, so she volunteered.

On September 27, Ciara was killed by a single gunshot to the head. The U.S. Army is conducting an investigation, and they do not expect to have a report issued for another eight weeks. In the meantime, Ciara's family in Massachusetts and Connemara would like to know how and why she died.

The shooting occured on the grounds of Bagram airbase, but little more information than that has been released. There's been no mention of 'killed in action', not a word about firefights or enemy snipers. Neither has there been any suggestion that the National Guard volunteer was murdered by one of her colleagues. All that the Durkin family has are their own personal speculations and guesses and assumptions.

When the army releases Ciara's body from their facility in Delaware, her family plans to cremate her remains and bury half the ashes in America and half in Ireland. Then they'll wait to hear from the U.S. Army, to learn why their sister died.

The story hasn't made much of an impact in American newspapers, where the war in Afghanistan has moved to the back pages, into a few paragraphs in a single column. The Army may not want much publicity for the story anyway, not if it's a case of one soldier doing in another. However it happened, though, Ciara Durkin's story needs to be told and not forgotten, swept aside to make room for the big news and pointless Senate debates about what a radio talk show host might or might not have said.