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Feeling both pride and fear, a sister struggles to understand her brother's life in Iraq

May-30-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

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By Rachel Howard, The San Francisco Chronicle

Editor's note: In February, Emmet Cullen, a sniper with the Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Team, returned to California on 15 days' leave from Iraq. This is the first of two parts on Cullen's short stay before returning to Iraq, as seen through the eyes of his sister Rachel Howard. Howard, a regular contributor to The Chronicle Datebook and Pink sections, has also written about her family in her first book "The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder," which will be published by Dutton in July.

My brother's job is to kill people. He's a sniper with the U.S. Army, an occupation that fills me with a mix of unease and admiration. But never have I felt more intensely conflicted than when he returned to California on 15 days' leave from Mosul, Iraq.

He was the same Emmet, only buffed. He zipped up the street on his tricked-out mountain bike, dismounting with unruly grace. He'd grown his hair well past Army-regulation length -- it was fuzzy on the sides, like a puppy's. Frayed cut-off corduroys stopped short of chiseled calves; a green T- shirt stretched across his muscled chest. He grinned with that brand of wry mischief that has always made my mother and me do whatever he pleased.

He hugged my mother, and she rubbed his head and said, "Your hair's getting awfully long." She was smiling -- with pride, and probably with relief that Emmet had raced over to see us.

Mom and I had already lost two days of his leave. Emmet chose to land in Santa Barbara, where he was staying with friends. My mother, Aleta, a night nurse in Merced, couldn't get out of work and I was living in San Francisco. The moment her shift ended, we'd hurried south together to my in-laws' house, our agenda simple: to fulfill Emmet's every whim, and hope that he would make time for us before heading back to a country where insurgents shot at him every day. [...]


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