The Marine in dress greens appeared on the front porch of the East Northport home on a warm July morning.
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May 8, 2010 By MARTIN C. EVANS [email protected]
"Do you have a son, Cpl. Christopher Scherer, in the Marines . . . ?" she began. "The commandant of the Marine Corps has entrusted me to express his deep regret . . ."
Janet and Timothy Scherer's 21-year-old son had been killed by a sniper hours earlier in Iraq. First Sgt. Amber Kash, a casualty assistance calls officer, stood at the front door to deliver the news. The impression she made that day, July 21, 2007 - her sad, serious face, how her lips moved when she spoke, how her voice and her words seemed so unreal, how she delivered a message so filled with pain - have stayed with the couple every day since.
The Scherers and two other families she would later notify of combat deaths say that Amber, as they affectionately call her, melds duty with compassion.
She has returned often to the Scherer home to sit and talk with them, to let them know she was still there. Nearly three years after appearing on the porch, Kash has remained a vital presence in the couple's lives - a Marine who came on official business to tell an American family their son was dead, and stayed on as a friend. It is the same with members of two other families to whom she brought similar news - JoAnn Lyles in Sag Harbor, and Bob and Janet Argentine in Farmingdale.
This week, Kash will leave Long Island to begin a new deployment at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Among the treasured belongings she will take with her are copies of the dog tags worn by each of the Long Island Marines whose deaths she announced.
Families have grown attached
The families say Kash's departure will tear at them. For her part, Kash says, her voice breaking, the families will live in her heart for the rest of her life. Notifying them of their sons' deaths deeply affected her as it fundamentally changed them.
"The Marines are Semper Fidelis, always faithful. And I can see through Amber that that is etched in their soul, that she will always take care of me," said JoAnn Lyles, whose son Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter was killed in Iraq.
In the eight years since the United States first began sending troops to Afghanistan and later to Iraq, casualty officers representing all five military branches have visited the next of kin of the nearly 6,500 troops who have been killed in action - including at least 45 from Long Island.
Not only do casualty assistance calls officers inform families of a service member's death, they are expected to remain in close contact with the family through the funeral and beyond. In addition to comforting the bereaved, the casualty officer handles myriad details that a military death brings with it.
Acting on the family's wishes, they coordinate all aspects of the funeral details, even making sure the deceased's uniform at a viewing is perfect - the buttons of the jacket in alignment with the belt buckle, for example - and offer travel arrangements for eligible family members. They deliver the military's $100,000 "death gratuity" check to the Marine's survivors. They help with paperwork, insurance policies, survivor benefits, housing, education grants and other needs.
Some military notifications do not go smoothly. Dorine Kenney, whose son, Army Spc. Jacob Fletcher, was killed in Iraq in 2003, said she was forced to deal with a new casualty officer every few weeks as previous ones were called away on new deployments.
She said she was distraught when the Army surprised her with shipments of her son's personal effects without making sure a casualty assistance calls officer was there to ease the shock.
"I wanted someone with me because I was scared to death of what was inside," said Kenney, of Middle Island, who said she called a friend to open the boxes with her.
These possibilities floated through Kash's mind as she prepared to visit the Scherer home - her first assignment as a CACO.
Heartache at the door
"As I was walking up to the Scherer house, I literally almost threw up," Kash, 36, said. "It was a really, really emotional time for me, knowing I was going to have to do this. I was very, very hurt internally that I had to give this family the news. I looked at it like I just destroyed this family's life."
That's just how the Scherers saw it, too. "I saw the green uniforms step up and my heart stopped," Timothy Scherer said, recalling that Saturday morning.
"I told Tim not to let them in . . . thinking that if they didn't come in, that news didn't come in, either," said Janet Scherer, who had been watching television with her husband that morning when the government van pulled up and two Marines stepped out, Kash and Staff Sgt. Michael Gilmore. "But I saw the writing on the wall."
Kash arranged for government vans to take family members to the military mortuary at Dover, Del., where the Scherers saw their son's coffin for the first time. At one point, Kash approached Tim Scherer, got down on one knee, and handed him a pouch containing some of his son's personal effects.
"I said, 'We're ready to take your son home whenever you are,' " Kash recalled. The Scherers rose and hugged each other, then walked hand in hand to the waiting hearse.
Later, when the Scherers invited family and friends to their home to celebrate their son's life, Kash joined them. She was not there in an official capacity - but as a person who wanted to be close at hand. She swapped her formal Marine Corps blues for casual blue jeans. She hugged family members and they hugged her. They all sat in the living room, relaxed, the way friends relax. To the Scherers, she was now a member of the family.
Kash has visited several times since, sometimes talking about her own life, even sharing with them her dream of retiring one day to a log cabin in Tennessee.
Last month, as Kash prepared for a new assignment at Camp Lejeune, she joined the Scherers and JoAnn Lyles for dinner and drinks at a restaurant in Fort Salonga. She sipped chardonnay while asking about various family members whose names she now knows, and musing about her beloved Kansas City Chiefs football team.
"I feel like she is a daughter to us now," Janet Scherer said. "I care so much about her. She's become part of the family."
"We share our ups and downs with her and she shares her ups and downs with us," Tim Scherer said.
Kash said tragic deaths in her own family have helped her connect with others experiencing sudden loss.
"Knowing and understanding that some of my family members ran out of the room - I was one of them that ran out of the room - when I heard my brother was killed by a drunk driver . . . certain reactions I understand are going to happen," she said.
"Has it helped me? Yes," she said. "Is it overwhelming? Yes. Because I did not want to change these families' lives, and I did."
A duty she did not choose
This is not a job Kash chose. She grew up in a corn and cattle town 40 miles south of Kansas City, Mo., and joined the Army in April 1993, when she was 17. She was too young to sign up on her own, and her mother would not let her enlist in the Marines - too dangerous, mom thought. Kash, though, transferred to the Marines when she turned 18, even though it meant she had to go through boot camp all over again. She finished at the top of her class and later shaped young recruits as a Parris Island, S.C., drill sergeant.
She did two tours of duty in Iraq - in 2004 and 2006. There, one of her duties as an adjutant was preparing casualty reports based on information collected by Marines who recovered the bodies of the dead. The casualty reports tell CACOs the circumstances of a service member's death, which they later convey to the family.
Not long after returning from her second combat tour, in April 2007, Kash was assigned to deliver death notices to Suffolk County families of fallen Marines. She worked out of the 6th Communication Battalion's Amityville office, a mile south of the Southern State Parkway.
From her first day, as she busied herself with other duties there, she kept a freshly pressed green service uniform - the Marines' equivalent of a business suit - hanging in a locker by her desk. A government van with a full tank was parked outside. She kept her cell phone charged. She hoped it would never ring.
Gilmore, of Astoria, retired from the Marines not long after he went with Kash to the Scherer home. "I served in combat in Iraq and I can honestly say I was never more terrified than the morning we walked up to the Scherers' door," he said. "It's the greatest privilege the Marine Corps ever gave me and the worst job they ever gave me."
The armed forces do everything they can to make sure that a Marine's family never learn of their loved one's death by reading a newspaper or watching the evening news. That makes notification a race against time, particularly now that news footage and battlefield accounts arrive back in the United States with the speed of an e-mail or cell phone call.
A race against time
Time was particularly urgent on April 22, 2008 - the day Kash delivered her second death notice.
CNN was reporting a suicide attack on Marines stationed in Ramadi. In Sag Harbor, a worried Christian Haerter, who heard the CNN report, picked up the telephone and called ex-wife JoAnn Lyles' cell phone. Their son, Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter, 19, had recently been stationed in Ramadi, and Haerter had a bad feeling.
Less than an hour earlier, Kash, desperate to reach Haerter's mother before the news, had tracked down Lyles at the kitchen showroom in Riverhead where she worked. In a quiet room, she told Lyles that her son was dead. When her ex-husband called her, she and Kash were in the van headed for Christian Haerter's Sag Harbor office.
"She told me, 'You can't pick that up,' " Lyles remembered. "She said, 'If you pick that phone up, he will know from your voice . . . ' "
It was Kash's duty to tell him.
After notifying Lyles and Haerter, Kash stayed in Lyles' home in Sag Harbor until Lyles' brother arrived. Lyles said she seethed and walked out of her house and waited at the end of her driveway, leaving Kash alone in the living room.
"When I first met 1st Sgt. Amber Kash, I have to say I absolutely hated her for the news that she brought to me, and I know she has a very hard job to do, but I didn't want to see her ever again," Lyles said. "And she kept coming and coming because she has to take care of paperwork."
Lyles said the lengths to which Kash went to ease her grief won her over.
"Now I can say she is my good friend. We e-mail, we call each other," she said.
When a Marine is laid out for a funeral, the casualty officer performs a final check to make sure the Marine's appearance is precise as only a fellow Marine can do - the buttons of the jacket in line with the belt buckle, the collar arched exactly. But the circumstances of Haerter's death posed a particular challenge.
He had been killed by an explosion while protecting more than 30 other Marines from a truck bomber - for which he was given the military's third-highest award for heroism, the Silver Star. The blast disfigured his face, which a mortician reconstructed.
Making a hard decision
"I didn't want to see if Jordan didn't look like himself anymore," Lyles said. "So Amber went in to view his body and took photographs with her so that I wouldn't have to, and I trusted her to make a decision.
"She had never seen him while he was alive, so it had to have been a hard thing to do," Lyles said. "But we were able to have an open casket."
Last Aug. 6, Kash's phone rang again.
A short while later, she appeared at the Farmingdale doorstep of Bob and Janet Argentine. Fighting back her own emotions, she told them their son, Lance Cpl. James D. Argentine, 22, had been killed in Afghanistan.
The Argentines describe themselves as private people living in a Farmingdale community that was eager to do anything it could to ease their grief. The outpouring was so great that lines formed for the four viewings that were scheduled at a local funeral home.
Both Bob and Janet Argentine said they felt pressured by the details of planning such a public memorial to their son.
"She broke the process into little pieces I could handle, so I wouldn't be overwhelmed, " Janet Argentine said of Kash. "She had a good sense of what could wait for another day."
Bob Argentine said Kash had a way of watching out for him amid the swirl of activity - visitors to greet, decisions to be made, papers to sign.
"She would ask me if I needed anything, and I would say I was OK," Bob Argentine said. "But she kept an eye on me and I appreciated that. I knew she was there and that I could go to her."
Kash's devotion to the memory of their son has not been lost on the Argentines. "I want to have a great big bear hug with her and to tell her we love her," Bob Argentine said.
Quiet moments at graves
From time to time, Kash has slipped away from her office, climbed into her pickup truck, and driven off to spend quiet moments at the graves of the three men.
On one visit, on a dreary March afternoon, she knelt to adjust a tiny flag that fluttered near Argentine's tombstone at Long Island National Cemetery, Pinelawn. She stood silently and saluted, her arm bending with slow precision toward the brim of her hat and back again. Then she turned to walk from the rows of white tombstones, swiping her white-gloved hand at the corner of her eye.
