Paul House never knows what will trigger his sorrow.

Sometimes it’s the sound of an electric guitar or one of his son’s favorite songs. It can be a snippet of conversation, the smell of a cooked meal, or the squeals of children playing. Often it’s a letter from someone who knew or served in the Army with Sgt. Joel House.

“It never goes away. I tear up every day at one point, sometimes several times a day,” House, 51, said Thursday. “We have pictures here of him, and I may look at them. I might come out of the room and come back in and look at the same picture exactly the same way I did before, and the tears start to flow.”

Usually, House’s sorrow bursts forth at private moments, but whenever it comes, House can turn to Bill Emery, or Emery’s wife, Quie. Sometimes he has the Emery family over for dinner, or he drops in on them, as they do with him. Always, he said, the others are welcome, for the two Lee families are united in a powerful way – a bond that they would not wish upon anyone else.

Both have lost sons to the Iraq war.

A Lee native, U.S. Army Sgt. Blair William Emery, 24, was killed Nov. 30, 2007, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle in Baqouba, Iraq. His death came slightly more than five months after House, 22, was killed June 23 by a bomb in Taji.

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq conflict arriving next week, both families have profoundly different feelings about the war even as they carry an equally vast portion of its burden.

“I support the troops and what they are doing,” Quie Emery said. “To say that I hated it and that it shouldn’t be like this is almost like disgracing those guys. I don’t want to do that or put down anything that my son lost his life fighting for.”

Sgt. Emery’s sister, 30-year-old Betsy Emery of Lee, just wants the war to end soon. She supports the servicemen and women, she said, but declines to comment further.

“Hopefully it can be resolved in the near future and that everybody who has been lost hasn’t been lost for nothing,” Betsy Emery said Thursday. “I don’t think bad of it or good of it. I just want a resolution.”

Paul House believes quite strongly in the U.S. mission to Iraq. He attributes part of any difference in feeling about the war between him and the Emery family to Sgt. Emery’s tour being automatically extended before he was killed.

On the day he died, Emery would have been stateside but for the extension.

“Since 9-11, I felt we had to do something. Losing 3,000 people, I could not see how we could sit back and not respond,” House said. “I do know that there are a lot of good things our soldiers have done over there. Kids are able to go to school, hospitals are open, women aren’t being raped at random like they were. This is good.

“I think for us to sit back and do nothing while these [bad] things are going on, well, we can be a very selfish people,” House added. “I hear people make comments that we shouldn’t be over there, helping them. My response to that is, what if the shoe was on the other foot and we were in their situation? What would happen?

“To pull out quickly at this point would be a huge mistake,” House said. “All the help we have given them and all the sacrifices with our soldiers being killed would be for nothing. I don’t like the war. I don’t like our soldiers dying. I wish I didn’t lose my son. But I think it’s something that’s necessary.”

Although they were not close friends, the sergeants came from Lee, which has a population of about 800, and shared the things boys share in small towns. They played baseball and soccer together, had many common friends and graduated from Lee Academy a year apart.

Hilary Emery, Blair’s sister, and Joel House’s brother Luke were in the Class of 1998 at Lee Academy. Quie graduated from Lee Academy with Paul House in 1975, House said.

The Emery and House families were friends, but not close until the sergeants were killed, Betsy Emery said. That drew them together.

“They understand what it’s like to lose a son or brother, and we do too, now,” she said. “What I was told was that he [Paul House] wanted to put Joel’s death to some good to help us get through Blair’s death. He helps us get through it, too.”

“When you’re grieving like we are, you know what each other is going through, and you can feel what the other is going through and let it pass,” Paul House said. “Or you talk about it sometimes after it happens. We talk a lot. All the time, really.”

“We either call and invite Paul or he shows up, or he calls us and tells us he has something ready to eat and invites us over,” Betsy Emery said. “Paul’s like family. We lean on each other quite a bit.”

A family friend, Leslie Severance of Lee, thinks the two boys went into the Army for the reasons many Lee lads do.

Lee is a patriotic town, Severance said. Its many veterans, which include Severance and members of both boys’ immediate families, imbue patriotism into their offspring as a matter of course. A relatively low-income community, Lee also gives its children more practical reasons to seek military life.

“I would like to use the excuse of not having money for college,” Severance said Thursday. “That’s not why I went in, but I think that has something to do with it.”

Blair Emery’s two sisters and several aunts and uncles served in the Army, while Joel House’s grandfather had a career in the Navy. House and Emery might have also seen military life the way U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Michael Leslie Severance regarded it, his father said.

“My son had his tractor-trailer [driver’s] license and was thinking of doing that,” Severance said, “when I told him, ‘You need to get out and see the rest of the world to make an honest opinion of it.’ That’s what he did. He found a whole different world out there other than Lee, Maine.”

Leslie Severance is united with the Emery and House families in another, more tragic way. He also survives a dead son. After serving two tours in Afghanistan, Sgt. Severance, 24, was murdered in San Angelo, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2005 by his wife, veterinarian Wendi Mae Davidson. She is serving a 25-year sentence.

“We are all part of a club that we don’t want to be a part of,” Severance said.

“The amazing thing is that you are talking about three very, very, very good men that were never in any trouble,” he said. “They excelled in sports, they were good in school and the connections within this community are amazing. I have known Quie since I was a little kid. My son, Frank, and Blair were best friends. Michael was best friends with Joel’s older brother, Luke.”

That, and the town’s good nature, create an enormously supportive network of friends and acquaintances that has been constant in helping the three families survive their grief, Severance said. Yet even with that and their faith, it’s a painful thing to see and endure.

“I have been into this [grieving] longer than Quie and Paul, and the sad thing is, all I can do is warn them what’s to come. I can’t do a thing about their pain because it doesn’t go away,” Severance said. “That’s basically what we do. Paul and I get together and we talk, and I try to tell them what to expect.”

Frank Severance agreed. The 24-year-old is dating Betsy Emery and was best friends with Sgt. Emery. He didn’t know Joel House as well, but played soccer with him, describing him as more quiet and inscrutable than the effervescent, prankish Emery, but also utterly dependable, like Michael Severance was.

“Frank is always here for me,” Betsy Emery said. “I don’t know how I would get through it if he weren’t here.”

Frank Severance shares his grief with Betsy by telling stories of her brother, which often come as revelations to her, she said. In that way, Severance helps keep her brother’s memory alive.

The Emerys are still very new to mourning such a close loss, Frank and Les Severance said, and they are fragile, but they are healing and finding their strength.

“Once the initial shock is finally gone, which I don’t think it is, the good times start seeping through, and you start laughing a lot more,” Frank Severance said. “The things that catch you off-guard – the little things that hit you wrong and put you in a somber place – start to fade. Then some of the memories you get will put a smile on your face. It happens. It just takes time.”

The Emery, House and Severance families planned to go to dinner last night to a favorite restaurant just outside Houlton, Les Severance said. Part of their goal is to help Bill and Quie Emery get back on their feet.

“Bill and Quie are so fresh at this, it’s a bad time for them,” Les Severance said.

Severance and House go snowshoeing, and House, a registered hunting guide, will take Severance on excursions into the woods. Paul House also hopes to have members of the Gold Star Family Support Center at Fort Hood, Texas, which helps grieving families, come to Maine this summer for an excursion in the woods.

“God above all has helped me, but knowing that I have helped others helps me, too,” Paul House said. “We want what our sons did to live on, and they would want us to be happy, so we need to continue to help others as they were helping others.

“For us, to be bitter would be wrong and in vain because our sons fought and sacrificed for our families,” House said, “so by helping others, we are continuing what they did. That’s important.”

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

794-8215