Wyoming troop deaths 20 years apart bookend Afghanistan war

[mahatmakanejeeves]

When news came that a 20-year-old Wyoming soldier was one of the last casualties of the two-decade-long U.S. war in Afghanistan, it arrived as a tragic bookend: A 20-year-old soldier from Wyoming was among the first to die in the same war.

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Wyoming troop deaths 20 years apart bookend Afghanistan war

By MEAD GRUVER and THOMAS PEIPERT
today

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — When news came that a 20-year-old Wyoming soldier was one of the last casualties of the two-decade-long U.S. war in Afghanistan, it arrived as a tragic bookend: A 20-year-old 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.

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