“She said, and I thought she was joking, that if anything happened to her we had to investigate.”

Ciara Durkin's family have these words to haunt them as they press the Army to investigate the death of the 30 year old soldier who died of a single gunshot wound to the head. In a war zone this may seem nothing but ordinary except for the words above uttered were by Durkin just before her death while on leave from Bagram in Afghanistan where she worked as a payroll clerk on that secure Army base. Initially the family was told Durkin was “killed in action” but their story later changed saying she perished from “non-combat related” injuries. Durkin told her family "I discovered some things I don’t like and I made some enemies because of it." Also throwing questions into the mix is the fact that Durkin was gay which may or may not add to why someone would want to end her life in this spineless, needless way. This adds yet another woman to the string of mysterious deaths of female soldiers while on bases both in Iraq and Afghanistan further fueling the fire that this war is an uncontrollable monster of many things including greed and sexism allowed to flourish uncontrolled. The fact that there are so many "mysterious " deaths for females while on duty shows directly the double danger our female soldiers must face while in the military that still does not treat them as fully human.

Impressed into the mind of every new recruit is the idea that we are all one in the military, "WE ARE ALL GREEN". The problem with how we go to war in a civilian population like Iraq or Afghanistan is that the Iraqi's and Afghanis' are "OTHERS". Part of what secures soldiers while deployed is that we have one another's back. It seems however that even this cannot be relied upon, that our own fellow soldiers are "OTHERS" if they are willing to speak out against something whether it be war as in suspected in Pat Tillman's case, greed as is suspected in Ciara's case or sexual assault and rape as is suspected in too many cases to name.

Where is the honor in this?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/world/main3328739.shtml?source...

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CBS_Family_of_gay_soldier_wants_1004.html