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.
As with Edmunds’ death in the chaotic aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, McCollum’s strikes an especially sad chord as“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.”
“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.’”
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