A Guyanese who rejoined the US Army years after leaving it was killed last week Thursday in Afghanistan.
According to reports in Newsday and the New York Daily News, Sergeant 1st Class Joseph A McKay died along with Spec. Mark Palmateer and Sgt 1st Class Matthew Hilton when a roadside bomb hit their convoy last Thursday. The man, who would have been 52 tomorrow, had rejoined the army after the 9/11 attacks, leaving his job as a butcher.
The men were serving with B Troop, 2nd Squadron, 101st Cavalry, based in Jamestown, N.Y., which is helping to train the Afghan Army.
The reports said that the man’s relatives on Tuesday remembered him as a calm, caring man who called home daily to enquire about his loved ones.
The man’s relatives told reporters that he joined the military since 1977, one year after his father sponsored his immigration to the United States. With the exception of a brief return to civilian life, McKay spent most of the past 31 years in the military.
“He joined because it was instrumental in getting the rest of the family here,” Army Staff Sgt. Roy Smith, one of McKay’s 16 siblings, was quoted as saying in Newsday. “He got my mom here and she got the rest of us,” he added.
And it is not just his brother who followed him into the army, as the man’s daughter, Tiffany, only returned a few months ago from her own second tour in Iraq. A nephew serves in the Marines.
“The military was his life,” said another brother, Trevor Bascom, of Hollis, who hosted Tuesday’s informal family gathering.
“He’d say ‘life’s too short for that,’“ said Waveney Hohenkirk-McLeod, a sister who lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Newton Baptiste, who described McKay as his best friend, said McKay had become concerned by rising violence in Afghanistan, and had confided that he intended to leave the service when his deployment was over. That was never to be.
According to the newspapers at least 27 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in June, the deadliest month there since the U.S. invaded to topple the Taliban in 2001. For the second consecutive month, more U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
“He called me Wednesday and said, ‘Baptiste, these boys are stepping up the action here,’“ Baptiste said. “‘They are sending me to an area that is really, really bad.’“
It was reported that McKay’s mother, Sheila Smith-Bascom, also got a call from McKay that day.
“He said, ‘When you hear from Roy, tell him to be careful. It’s rough out there,’“ Smith-Bascom told reporters.
“The last thing I said to him was ‘Joseph, be careful. Mommy loves you’“ she said.
“And he said ‘I love you too, Mommy.’ That was the last.”
McKay leaves behind a wife, a daughter and two sons.
