AJACKSON HOLE, WYO. s clouds moved in to erase the Tetons on Saturday, two yellow school buses rolled into a Jackson Hole ranch carrying 60 young Marines fresh in from Camp Pendleton, Calif., to honor the “dumbest smart kid they had ever met.”

Twenty-year-old Lance Cpl. Rylee Mccollum, who grew up in nearby rural Bondurant and was a wrestling standout at Jackson Hole High School, was one of 13 military servicemembers who died in a suicide bomb blast while pulling civilians to safety at Hamid Karzai International Airport in late August.

The name Rylee is emblazoned in red, white and blue on a sofa-sized rock that looks down on High School Road, a pair of bright orange wrestling shoes hanging over the makeshift shrine by their laces.

“He was my only son,” said Jim Mccollum, a poet and wrestling coach who raised Rylee

and his three sisters as a single dad. As he spoke, he paused to clear his throat, seeming to gain strength when he turned his body to the snowy mountain range that circles Jackson’s Gill Ranch. A Kleenex box passed along the front row.

A little farther back in the tent set up for the funeral, rows of Marines from Rylee’s 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment set their jaws and wiped their eyes.

“To the 2/1,” Mccollum said. “When I found out how many of you were coming, I was blown away.”

A death ‘not in vain’

On Aug. 26, despite warnings of a brewing attack from the State Department just the day before, Rylee and dozens of other Marines from the 2/1 kept Abbey Gate open an hour later than scheduled, pulling desperate people to safety. Two other gates had been closed due to the possible attack, according a New York Times report.

Mccollum and the 2/1 were called in from Jordan just a week before the blast to establish security at the airport.

At 5:48 p.m., a man wearing a hidden 25-pound bomb waited until it was his turn to be frisked before he detonated the device. Rylee and eight other Marines — an Army soldier and a Navy corpsman — died, marking the deadliest day in a decade for American forces in Afghanistan. Twenty military were wounded, and at least 150 Afghan civilians died in the blast and following sniper fire.

Lance Cpl. Jack Zimmerman was shot in the shoulder but picked up his weapon and fired back, killing one of the shooters. He was one of the first to speak at Rylee’s service, immortalizing his friend as the person who kept him going when he wanted to quit.

“I never told you I looked up to you,” Zimmerman said.

Rylee’s company commander, Capt. Geoff Ball, said he personally knew 15 Afghan nationals who made it through the wire just moments before the blast.

“The efforts that your brother and his comrades made were not in vain,” Ball wrote earlier in a Facebook post.

A widow and her newborn

Rylee married in February and was expecting his first child when he was killed. Levi Rylee Rose was born Sept. 13, three weeks after he was killed, leaving his widow, Gigi Mccollum, to raise the child. The young widow sobbed as a blue-suited Marine played taps on a silver bugle and another placed a traditionally folded flag into her lap, where Levi lay quietly folded in blankets, oblivious to the sadness around her.

Online fundraising sites have raised nearly a million dollars, in part for the baby’s education.

Gigi has been surrounded by family since her husband’s death.

“It’s unimaginable,” said her uncle Johnny Miller, who drove to Wyoming for the funeral from Los Osos, Calif.

“It’s the ultimate sacrifice,” said her aunt Joy Miller. “We appreciate their service so much.”

Tragedy mixed with ‘blessings’

It’s a massive undertaking to round up a military funeral, especially in a place like Jackson, where the closest military installation, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, is nearly a seven hour drive away, including a stretch through Bridger-teton National Forest.

There were unplanned hiccups as friends and family came from across the county to pay their respects. Jim Mccollum’s best friend sat in an airport agonizing over fivehour delays before his flight was canceled. Almost immediately, a private pilot from Idaho flew through gathering snow clouds to get him to the funeral within an hour of the start.

Another private pilot flew Rylee’s childhood friend, Eli Stone, from Camp Pendleton to Driggs, Wyo., and then personally drove him to Jackson’s downtown 49er Inn to join the contingent dubbed “Rylee Rollcall.”

Saturday morning, the hotel breakfast area buzzed with the chatter of exhausted aunts, uncles and cousins, a surrogate mom and a sister as they ate Raisin Bran and oranges and kept fidgety children from falling out of wooden high chairs.

Funeral coordinator Nickie Ehrlich held up a stack of 60 hotel keys reserved for the Marines headed for the service.

“The only way you can look at a tragedy like this is to look for the blessings that come within it. All these people in this room I did not know two months ago,” said Ehrlich, a Jackson native who now lives in Cheraw, Colo.

“God has put everyone where they need to be when they need to be here.”

A Marine in the making

Despite the fact that it’s the least populated state, Wyoming stands out as being one of the most patriotic in the U.S., having experienced several high-profile military deaths from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Chance Phelps, a 19-year-old who was killed battling insurgents in Iraq and became the subject of an HBO movie called “Taking Chance” starring Kevin Bacon, spent his early childhood in Dubois.

With Rylee Mccollum’s death Aug. 26, Wyoming owns a sad bragging right. It’s home to young men who were among both the American military’s final and first deaths of the Afghanistan War.

Army Ranger Spc. Jonn Edmunds of Cheyenne was one of the first two combat casualties when his Blackhawk helicopter crashed in Pakistan Oct. 19, 2001, two weeks after the start of the war.

It’s a subject not lost on aging veterans who attended Mccollum’s funeral.

“Wyoming is full of small towns with very long main streets,” said Don “Ding” Dailey, a Marine who had stopped outside of the 49er Inn to polish his already-shiny black shoes. “We’ve got more antelope than people, so when we lose somebody, it hits home.”

Mccollum’s best childhood friend, Sam Klyn, said Wyoming kids are raised with a sense of duty.

“We’re fearless. We’re different. Rylee throughout his whole life — that’s all he thought about was going into the military,” said Klyn, 21. “This cold? It’s the best. It creates warriors.”

The 1,000-person crowd at Mccollum’s funeral drew in a breath as Klyn took the microphone and gave them some personal news.

“I’m signing up for the Marines in January,” asserted Klyn, as a recruiter looked on. He told The Gazette that Rylee went to the front lines knowing the stakes were high.

“You know, I’m going to follow in his footsteps because I love him so much.”