Wyoming troop deaths 20 years apart bookend Afghanistan war
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — When news came that a 20-year-old Wyoming soldier was one of the last casualties of the twodecade-long U.S. war in Afghanistan, it arrived as a tragic bookend: A 20-yearold soldier from Wyoming was among the first to die in the same war.
Army Ranger Spc. Jonn Edmunds, of Cheyenne, was one of the war’s first two casualties when a Black Hawk helicopter on a search-and-rescue mission crashed in Pakistan on Oct. 19, 2001.
Last month, the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, of Bondurant just outside Jackson, got word he was among 13 U.S. soldiers killed in a suicide bombing Aug. 26 at the Kabul airport.
Edmunds and McCollum were both killed on their first deployments. In between, almost 2,500 U.S. troops died in the Afghanistan war, most with far less attention than the two Wyoming men got.
As with Edmunds’ death in the chaotic aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, McCollum’s strikes an especially sad chord as Americans struggle to process what good — if any — has come from their nation’s longest war.
“That was a totally senseless death,” Edmunds’ father, Donn Edmunds, said of McCollum. “Seeing the other people losing their loved ones, all that does is bring back bad memories for my family.”
A 25-year U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam, Edmunds remembers how two officers knocked on his door on the outskirts of Cheyenne before sunrise on Oct. 20, 2001, bringing word of his son’s death.
“I looked out the window, I saw them standing there and all I could think was ‘Oh my God, I know what they’re here for.’ I’ve done notifications so I knew,” said Edmunds, who as a military police officer participated in telling relatives of loved ones’ deaths. He got choked up and quiet while looking at a display of his son’s medals and the folded American flag presented to him and other families of fallen soldiers.
“They came in and gave us the ‘Regret to inform you’ speech. My wife had been up by then, and I watched her melt into this carpet right here on the floor,” Edmunds recalled. “And they asked, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ and we said, ‘No, just let us absorb this, and we have to be able to accept this.’”
Wyoming is the least populated state and one that values tradition: rodeo and county fairs in summer, elk hunting in fall, calving season in spring and military service.
Jonn Edmunds and his friends grew up playing with water guns, then laser tag in the family’s big yard. Eventually the honors student moved up to paintball, Donn Edmunds recalled.
“We used to have the guys from the Air Force come out here. And they’d knock on the door and say, ‘Can Jonn come out and play paintball with us?’” he said.
On the opposite side of Cheyenne, F.E. Warren Air Force Base has overseen nuclear missiles in silos beneath the Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska plains since the 1960s. Each July, the city hosts its massive Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo festival but Cheyenne has always been a military town at heart.
Like Edmunds, McCollum seemed born with soldiering in his blood.
He grew up in the Jackson Hole area, a region of rugged, forested mountains and big-time outdoors culture on the other side of Wyoming from Cheyenne. Even as a toddler, McCollum played with toy rifles, pretending he was a soldier or hunter, relatives said.
As a high school wrestler, he distinguished himself by training intensely.
On Friday, hundreds of people lined the streets of Jackson to honor McCollum as his remains returned home from Afghanistan. Many people drove from surrounding towns, some multiple hours away, to pay their respects, and law enforcement saluted as the hearse passed by.