Once again, the residents of Lee gathered yesterday as they had just five months ago, hands clasped in front of them, women dabbing eyes, and men staring stolidly ahead. About 450 residents - just about half the town - filled wooden bleachers and rows of fold-out chairs in the Lee Academy gymnasium to pay their respects to the village's second fallen son this year, killed, like the first, by a roadside bomb in Iraq on his second tour of duty.
"We are a small town," said Joan Scrivner, 78, of Lee, a retired school lunch cook. "And to lose two of our boys - well, it just seemed like it couldn't be possible."
And yet they sat yesterday staring at the flag-draped coffin of Army Sergeant Blair W. Emery, 24, killed Nov. 30 in Baqubah, as the sobs of a widow and the click of the honor guard's heels echoed in the gymnasium. It was the same spot they had mourned Army Sergeant Joel A. House, 22, who died June 23.
Their lives had been intertwined from an early age in this northern Maine village where livelihoods are hard-earned in the woods and nearby paper mills. Their fathers were loggers together, and House's father had graduated from high school with Emery's mother, Quie. The two had been teammates as boys, playing soccer and baseball in junior high and soccer at Lee Academy.
Both men chose the military after high school, having wrestled with their plans for the future.
Both ended up in Iraq and, despite serving in different units, followed similar paths.
They served in the same region of Iraq in their first deployment, by chance bumping into one another in a mess hall one morning during breakfast.
"It was good for them to see someone from their hometown," said Paul House, Joel House's father, who now runs a wilderness guide service in Lee and has been a frequent visitor at the Emery home since learning of the family's loss.
Emery and House deployed for their second tour of duty within days of each other, Emery on Nov. 5, 2006, and House on Oct. 31, 2006. Both men suffered serious injuries in Iraq in the spring and recovered. Both were manning a gun turret when roadside bombs claimed their lives.
"There are so many parallels there, it's scary," said Earl "Bill" Emery, Blair Emery's father, who was wearing a freshly pressed gray suit, black shirt, and tie.
Before their deaths, each sergeant had found long-term direction in their lives, friends and family members said.
House planned to become a game warden upon his return home; Emery hoped to become a police officer.
Emery's best friend, Frank Severance, who works at a paper mill in Lincoln, said Emery's death was his second big loss; his brother, Michael Severance, an Air Force staff sergeant serving in Abilene, Texas, was murdered in 2005 by his wife.
Emery, he said, was like a brother to him.
"When you get a best friend, you can't really explain it," he said. "When you work, you work."
Emery, nicknamed "Moose" and "El Blaino," was born in Lincoln and moved to Lee when he was 3 years old. He had been a star left-handed pitcher for the high school baseball team, helping to win the 2002 eastern Maine championship for Lee Academy.
Besides baseball, Emery loved his GMC pickup, the "Red Rocket," which he loaded with friends and drove around Lee. A light-hearted jokester, Emery went swimming on a frigid April day on a dare.
Emery hailed from a long military lineage; his grandfathers, an aunt, four uncles, and his two sisters served. As a child, he was often dressed in camouflage and a helmet and could fashion a gun out of almost anything he could get his hands on.
In his junior year of high school, his father said, he enlisted in the Army for a five-year stint, hoping to learn skills and earn money for college. He served with the 571st Military Police Company, 97th Military Police Battalion, 18th Military Police Brigade of Fort Lewis, Wash. He played bass while in Iraq, and with his keen confidence, caught the eye of his superiors.
Major General John W. Libby, adjutant general of the Maine National Guard, read a eulogy by Emery's battalion commander in Iraq that recounted a dinner party Emery attended while in Iraq.
"He was the life of the table," Libby said, reading the eulogy. "He was not intimidated by the presence of his battalion commander."
Emery met his wife, Chu, a supply sergeant who grew up in Korea and in Texas, while in Iraq on his first tour of duty. After he brought her home to meet his family two years ago, they married in an impromptu ceremony in the town offices.
"I go to work one day and I come home and I got a daughter-in-law," Bill Emery said.
Sergeant Emery had been scheduled to return home in early November, his father said, but the deployment was extended.
"He lost in overtime," Bill Emery said.
This being Northern Maine, stoicism was the coin of the realm yesterday.
But when Chu Emery, elegant in black stiletto heels and a black skirt, took to the podium, women cried and men shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
"My angel - my simple man who asked for so little," she said.
"Rest in peace, my love," Chu said, as a strand of hair fell in her face. She then returned, wobbly in her heels, her back slumped, to her chair, where her mother embraced her.
