Justin James Cupples, the son of Don and Kathleen Cupples of Las Cruces, was near the end of a six-month tour of duty as a Ranger in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment when he was fatally wounded by a roadside bomb on Sept. 4 in southern Afghanistan, the Las Cruces Sun-News reported.

Cupples, who held dual U.S. and Irish citizenship, was planning to visit his parents in Las Cruces when his tour ended, the Sun-News said.

Instead, the body of the 117th British Army soldier was repatriated on Sept. 13 and was buried in a military cemetery in Vilnius, Lithuania, the city where he married his wife, Vilma, in 2006, the Sun-News said.

His parents returned on Tuesday to Las Cruces, where they've lived since 2005, the paper reported.

Justin Cupples was born in 1979 in Portsmouth, Va., in the same hospital as his father, a career U.S. Navy officer who now works for the White Sands Test Facility, the Sun-News said.

Justin Cupples joined the Navy himself after graduating from Pensacola Catholic High School in Florida, and after serving four years, he moved to his mother's family home in County Cavan, Ireland.

In 2006, he married his Lithuanian wife, and in early 2007 he joined the British Army, the Sun-News said.

His mother told the Sun-News that her son had started working on a law degree and planned to finish when he left the military and had plenned to live in Lithuania, where his wife has worked as a Russian-Lithuanian translator.