Ireland wants answers on death of Spc. Ciara Durkin

Call for new probe into Irish-American's death
Friday, 9 May 2008 16:20
A retired US Army Reserve Colonel has called on the US congress to compel the US army to re-investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Connemara native Ciara Durkin in Afghanistan last September.

Colonel Ann Wright has researched the suspicious noncombat deaths of military women in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

She has concluded that specific US Army units and certain US military bases in those countries have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of noncombat related injuries, with several identified as suicides.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/world/main3328739.shtml?source=mostpop_story

According to her research, 94 US military women have died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Twelve US civilian women have been killed during the operation.

Thirteen US military women have been killed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Twelve US Civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan. Colonel Wright says that at least 15 of these deaths occurred under extremely suspicious circumstances.

One such case was the death of Massachusetts Army National Guard Specialist Ciara Durkin.

The 30-year-old finance specialist was found lying near a church on the very secure Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, with a single gunshot wound to her head on 28 September 2007.

She had recently told her relatives to press for answers if anything happened to her while she was deployed in Afghanistan.
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http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0509/durkinc.html

Just a reminder of how odd her death was

How Did Specialist Ciara Durkin Die?
Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things" Is Found Dead
BOSTON, Oct. 4, 2007



(CBS/AP) Exactly how Ciara Durkin died remains a mystery. The Army National Guard soldier from Massachusetts was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Afghanistan last week, and now her family is demanding answers from the military.

Initially the Pentagon reported that Durkin, part of a finance unit deployed to Afghanistan in November 2006, had been killed in action, but then revised its statement to read she had died of injuries "suffered from a non-combat related incident" at Bagram Airfield. The statement had no specifics and said the circumstances are under investigation.

Durkin had a desk job doing payroll in an office about three miles inside the secure Bagram Air Base. About 90 minutes after she left work last Friday, her family says she was found dead near a chapel on the base with a single gunshot wound to the head.

The 30-year-old soldier, who was born in Ireland and came to the U.S. as a little girl, felt safer deployed in Afghanistan over Iraq, her family told CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace. Yet she was found dead within a highly secure base, with few answers.

"The family has been informed that she was in the compound, and she was shot in the head," Durkin's sister, Fiona Canavan, told the Boston Globe. "She was in a secure area of the compound, which, even though the investigation is not complete, leads the family to believe it was what is called friendly fire," she said.

Adding to the mystery is something the Army Specialist told her family: if something happened to her in Afghanistan, they should look into it. She was concerned about things she was seeing over there, one of her eight brothers and sisters said in an interview.

Pat Tillman's family still wants answers on his death. Family after family still want answers on the deaths of their family members place into the care of the military. To be killed in combat, well that's a lot easier to accept because the risk was known from the beginning. The problem with these deaths is that they were not caused by the enemy.

Sometimes non-combat deaths are because of the enemy in the minds of the soldiers. Those deaths are very hard to cope with because there is always the unanswered questions of what more could have been done. Yet when it comes to deaths like this under very suspicious circumstances, the answers need to be found. Someone is responsible for the life taken. It is not so out of the grasp of reality that someone was murdered. After all the men and women in the military are just as human as the rest of us are and there are some people who are not interested in membership of the military family but have ulterior motives being in the military. Thankfully they are few and far between but we need to face this fact. If you need more evidence of some criminals in the military, look at the rapes that have occurred and remember that it is a crime, yet the military treats it much differently than the rest of us do.

The headline from CBS shouts for an investigation

"Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things"

Is Found Dead" yet there are still unanswered questions surrounding her death. This is not a cut and dry case of suicide. Often the family members have a very hard time dealing with suicides and they will try to find other causes instead of accepting the suicide verdict. Most of the time, they are wrong but there are sometimes when they are right and their gut instinct vindicated their suspicion.

Colonel Ann Wright found 15 suspicious deaths for women in the military so how have these stories died? Is truth now a commodity too expensive to seek? What about honor? What about justice? We do still have investigators in the military, trained to find the answers. So where are they? What are they doing? How long does it take to do this right? In civilian life, law enforcement investigators seem to find the answers a lot faster. Why doesn't the military?

When I was researching the non-combat deaths for the video Death Because They Served, I found investigation after investigation still not closed. Years after the death, no one knows how it happened. The family member left behind are left with the haunting questions. Instead of finding closure and grieve for the loss, they are consumed with the lack of accountability from the military. There are many occasions when the military proves the theory they take care of their own but in these cases, it appears they are taking care of the perpetrator instead of the life gone from "friendly hands."

Was there a cover up in the death of Spc. Durkin? Will Ireland cause the investigation to become serious enough to get the family the answers they need to find the closure they need? Are women of lesser value? Too often we have examples this very well may be the case to far too many.
Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington