By Tom deignan

JOHN McKenna was born on St. Patrick’s Day 30 years ago. He was memorialized in his native Brooklyn this past Saturday, August 26.

A childhood friend of the U.S. Marine captain, the Reverend Joseph Fonti, recalled that McKenna was playfully called a leprechaun when he was growing up. His bright red hair only made the map of Ireland on McKenna’s face seem that much more striking.

As New York City absorbs the loss of two more firefighters — one of them named Michael Reilly — it might have been easy, even wishful, to forget the deaths of McKenna and fellow Marine Michael Glover, both of whom were killed in Fallujah, Iraq on August 16.

As an Associated Press report about McKenna and Glover noted, “They were both middle class Irish Catholic kids from the city, one from Brooklyn, one from Queens. Both were born with public service in their blood.”

McKenna. Glover. Reilly. This with the fifth anniversary of September 11 looming.

It is not an exaggeration to say that, with September 11 and now the deaths of McKenna, Glover, Reilly, the end of summer will for the foreseeable future be viewed as a time of remembrance, yes, but also of utter sadness, as we look back at all those Irish American lives which ended far too swiftly.

Appropriately for these latest Irish heroes, their lives were split between the hustle and bustle of New York City’s ethnic enclaves, and the more placid precincts of the suburbs, where so many Irish Americans have moved in recent decades.

McKenna was born in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and attended Bishop Ford Catholic High School. He became a Marine in 1998, and later became a state trooper, having moved to upstate New York.

McKenna was following in a grand family tradition. His grandfather was also a Marine. An uncle was killed in World War II.

A similar tradition ran in Lance Corporal Michael D. Glover’s family, which hails from Belle Harbor, Queens, a community hit by twin tragedies in late 2001. The terrorist attacks, of course, struck the civil service Irish American community hard. A month later, a plane crash in the area left the neighborhood shaken again.

Glover’s uncle is Peter Hayden, the high-ranking FDNY official who helped command operations at the twin towers on September 11.

Glover signed up with the Marine reserves in 2004. When Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans this time last year, Glover and two other Marine buddies drove down to the region and assisted evacuees by day, while sleeping in their car at night.

Glover was living in Garden City, Long Island and was enrolled in law school when he got the call that he was needed abroad.

As fate would have it, McKenna and Glover, two Irish kids from the city’s outer boroughs, ended up serving together in Iraq.

According to reports, Glover was hit by a sniper during a routine patrol. McKenna rushed to see if he could save his comrade when he, too, was killed.

After services in his childhood Brooklyn parish, McKenna was buried in upstate Saratoga National Cemetery.

Glover’s funeral Mass was held at St. Francis de Sales in Belle Harbor, the parish into which he was baptized.

On that day this past weekend, fire trucks lined Rockaway Beach Boulevard as FDNY bagpipes filled the salty air.

Glover is survived by his mother, Margaret, his father, Dennis, a sister, Elizabeth Doherty, and grandmother, Rita McCarthy.

McKenna, also single, leaves behind his parents John and Karen.

After all this came the FDNY’s second Black Sunday in as many years, August 27, when rookie firefighter Michael C. Reilly, only on the job a few weeks, died in a Bronx blaze. Later, Lieutenant Howard Carpluck also died.

As with McKenna, Reilly split time between the big city and the suburbs.

Reilly was attracted to firefighting at an early age, serving with a volunteer company in Ramsey, New Jersey, in high school.

Also as with McKenna and Glover, Reilly felt a calling to the military, serving in Iraq as a Marine with Wing Support Squadron 472.

But, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg put it, “All he wanted to do his whole life is become a firefighter.”

As it happens, another firefighter injured in the blaze which killed Reilly has a sister-in-law named McKenna.

Of course, a family name is not the only thing these heroes, three Irish American Marines, had in common.

(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)