LEE (AP) – The family of a Maine soldier killed in Iraq says he would have been safe on U.S. soil if his tour had not been extended.

Bill Emery said his son, Army Cpl. Blair William Emery, was supposed to come home in October. Instead, his tour was extended by another three months.

“That’s what bothers me the most right now,” Bill Emery said.

The 24-year-old soldier had been injured twice before he was killed by an improvised explosive device that detonated near his vehicle on Nov. 30 in Baqubah.

In March, he suffered a concussion and an injured hip from another IED blast, and he was hit by a bullet fragment while he was standing in his vehicle’s turret in another incident, his father told the Bangor Daily News.

Blair Emery, who is receiving a posthumous promotion to sergeant, was the second soldier from Lee to die in Iraq. In June, Sgt. Joel House, 22, was killed in a roadside bomb attack in Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad.

Bill Emery said his son always had a strong sense of right and wrong that asserted itself when the boy was only 3 or 4 years old. That’s around the time he stopped his family from picking apples from a neighbor’s tree because of a “no trespassing” sign.

“We knew the people who owned the tree, and they wouldn’t have minded. But he wouldn’t let us go,” Blair’s sister Betsy Siegfried said.

“He put up a fit,” Bill Emery said. “That was the way he was. He respected other people’s property. We didn’t get any apples that day.”

Emery served with the 571st Military Police Company, 97th Military Police Battalion, 18th Military Police Brigade of Fort Lewis, Wash.

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Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com

AP-ES-12-04-07 1054EST