As the US plans to send more troops to Afghanistan, the family of a marine and father-to-be killed in action tell LARA MARLOWEof their loss and pride
TONIGHT PRESIDENT Barack Obama will announce the deployment of some 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Almost 5,300 US soldiers have already perished in the Iraq and Afghan wars. One of them was an Irish-American of exceptional promise, Marine Sgt Bill Cahir, who was felled by a bullet to the neck while on foot patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on August 13th.
René Browne, the attorney who married Bill in April 2006, is pregnant with twin daughters. In the only interview she has given since his death, Browne described to NBC’s Today Show the moment dreaded by every soldier’s family: “When I saw them coming up my walk, all I could think was, ‘Please go away. Don’t be coming to my house’.”
But the uniformed men knocked on the door, and René opened it. “And they told me that he was gone . . It took a very long time to sink in, and sometimes I’m still not sure it has.”
A few days before Bill’s death, the couple spoke for the last time. “Bill remembered that I had my doctor’s appointment that day,” René said. “He called to ask me how it went. They had told me we were having girls and so I told him, and he was just ecstatic.” When the girls are born, before Bill’s 41st birthday on December 20th, those who loved him will be buffeted between joy and grief, life and death. “We are all excited about the babies, but the reality of his absence will impact us tremendously,” predicts Bill’s older sister Ellen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
I met Bill Cahir’s father, John, a retired professor of meteorology and vice-provost at Penn State University, and his sisters Ellen and Kathryn at a coffee shop in Virginia, a few miles from Bill’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. John told me how his father left Co Clare and his mother left Galway for Boston almost 100 years ago.
A postcard of Cahir Castle in Co Tipperary was on display in the Cahir home when Bill was growing up. In 1990, after finishing his bachelor’s degree in English at Penn State, Bill visited Ireland, and a photograph of him on an Irish fishing boat is among those on the website created by his friends, www.billcahirmemorialfund.org
The other Cahir children were good at maths and science, but Bill had a furious need to communicate. “Bill was the writer, the one who could act and sing. He had all the talent,” says Ellen.
Their mother Mary Anne demanded that the Cahir children be home for supper every evening. The family discussed politics, and Bill was always the best informed. After university, he went to Washington to work as a staffer for Senator Ted Kennedy. The day before Kennedy died, René received a letter of condolence. “Bill was a true Profile in Courage and his selfless dedication to our country will never be forgotten,” Kennedy wrote.
In 1995 Bill became a newspaper journalist, covering Washington for the Newhouse chain. After the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, he decided to join the Marine Corps reserves. To some, it seemed a strange choice for a progressive Democrat. “He felt pretty strongly that people who have choices and knowledge and background shouldn’t be avoiding the military,” explains his sister Kathryn, a graduate student in architecture.
In 2003, around the time Bill began dating René, he went to boot camp. His family wondered at first whether an attractive, professional woman would stay with a man whose life was changing so dramatically at the age of 34.
“Bill’s sense of humour could be goofy,” says Kathryn. “He was never as polished as some of the DC crowd, the movers and shakers. René appreciated the realness of him.” At boot camp and during his first tour in Iraq, Bill wrote letters to René in a spiral notebook, by flashlight, at night under a blanket. When he came home he proposed.
“There were a few close calls in Iraq,” says Brett Lieberman, a close friend and journalist who worked with Bill at Newhouse. “But you wouldn’t know about it unless you asked. Other marines told me more than he did. He wasn’t a braggart.”
During his first tour Bill participated in the November 2004 battle of Falluja. In his second tour, his civil affairs unit helped foster the Sunni “awakening” that drove al-Qaeda out of Anbar province. There is something Hemingway-esque about Bill in photographs of the period, with his moustache, cigar and pet dogs.
After his second tour in Iraq, Bill stood for Congress in Pennsylvania. Though he came second in the Democratic primary, his first steps in politics were promising. Then he was sent to Afghanistan.
Bill’s last letter to his parents arrived two weeks after his death. “It was probably the most optimistic of all,” says John. “He said they were making progress and the Taliban were leaving the area,” adds Ellen.
Was it worth it? What does the heroism signified by three achievement medals, two combat action ribbons and a Purple Heart weigh compared to the fact that Bill Cahir will never hold his baby daughters? It’s the hardest question of all, and Bill’s family are reluctant to pass judgment on the escalating war in Afghanistan.
Bill Cahir wanted to be in the thick of things, not an observer on the sidelines. That desire to do, not watch, and the camaraderie of the Marine Corps, were perhaps equivalent to the “lonely impulse of delight” that motivated Yeats’s Irish airman. “He really came alive in the marines. He was passionate about it,” says Brett Lieberman. “The bond he shared with the marines was the byproduct of the risk he took,” says his sister Kathryn. “He found meaning in his service.”
When Bill joined up, Ellen tried to convince him to stay in journalism. But, she says now, “It was the best thing Bill ever did for himself. He grew into the man he wanted to be. It was unlucky for us. But he wouldn’t have run for Congress . . . He would have regretted it his whole life if he hadn’t done it.”