"He was driving a Humvee. He was the driver and it was at night, and they were ambushed by small-arms fire," said his aunt, Pam Colin, who was at the Mahers' home in Grayslake yesterday.

Colin said the family was told another Marine also was killed in the firefight, described as a bloody skirmish in the city where so many U.S. service members have died.

The Pentagon yesterday had not identified the second Marine, and Marine Corps Base Hawai'i at Kane'ohe Bay had no information on a second casualty.

The young Marine, who graduated from high school in 2003 and arrived in Hawai'i in February 2004, was excited to finally be leaving Iraq.

"He wanted out of that hellhole — were his words," Colin said.

Instead, Dan Maher opened his door on Thursday to a lieutenant colonel and a gunnery sergeant, who caught the Marine's father as he nearly fell to the floor, she said.

Sean Maher, a high school football player who also was on the swim and track teams, joined the Marines after he saw the invasion of Iraq on TV in March 2003, his aunt said. He reported to San Diego five months later, and trained at Camp Pendleton to become a mortarman.

"His mother did ask him if he had any doubts about (being a Marine), and she said there was silence for a moment and he told her, 'No Mom, I have none. I'm doing what I want to do.' "

For the Marine Corps base, Maher's death was still more bad news.

Besides the helicopter crash that killed 26 Marines with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, eight were killed in a suicide car-bomb attack on Oct. 30. Eleven others have been killed in Iraq — almost all in Fallujah. About 1,000 Hawai'i Marines deployed to Iraq in September.

Maher's death brings to 78 the number of service members with Hawai'i ties who have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kuwait since the Iraq war started nearly two years ago.

"It feels almost like you are surrounded by (death)," said Sarah Carter, whose husband, Lance Cpl. Joshua Carter, is with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment stationed here, but who is in Okinawa. "Every time you start to move on to a different stage of grieving, you're brought face to face with yet another death, and you start the process all over again."

The Armed Services YMCA, which created a fund for the families of Marines who died in the helicopter crash, has collected about $5,000, and has about $3,000 in a fund for wounded Marines.

Like the 1/3 Marines who died in the helicopter crash, Maher was a veteran of house-to-house fighting in Fallujah in November.

The Pentagon said 71 U.S. soldiers and Marines were killed in Fallujah, and 450 were wounded. Officials estimated more than 1,200 insurgents were killed. The Mahers knew Sean had close calls, but didn't know the details.

"We never got that from him," Colin said. "What he told me was, Aunt Pam, 'I've seen the whites, I have seen the enemies' eyes,' and that's about all we wanted to know."

She said the family is "doing as well as can be expected." Maher's older brother, Danny, 22, is in the Navy and is based in San Diego. He was being flown home by the Marines to be with family.

At Warren Township High School in Illinois, where Maher was well known, and his 16-year-old sister, Katie, is a student, counselors were called in Thursday.

Maher loved living in Hawai'i, loved to surf, and was planning on teaching his sister after stops in Kuwait and Okinawa before arriving back here, his aunt said. His parents also were planning on meeting him here.

Colin said the family has differing views on the war, "and that really hasn't been discussed, so it's really good to just leave that part of it alone."