DENVER — If you spent Memorial Day at Fort Logan National Cemetery, you’d know him by the end of the day without ever having to meet him.
From dusk until dawn, family and friends visited and shared stories of Pfc. Jacob Wykstra, a 21-year-old from Thornton killed in Afghanistan in 2014.
“He was just an all-American kid,” said Andy Wykstra, Jake’s uncle.
Some spent the morning. Others spent the afternoon. Some traveled hundreds of miles.
“All the way from Iowa,” said Amber Schneider, a family friend.
Each visited the same headstone in Section L of Fort Logan. By mid-afternoon, the grass was matted and Jake Wykstra’s headstone was surrounded by flowers and covered in coins, seashells and petrified shark teeth.
Andy Wykstra said his nephew used to collect the teeth from the beach in Florida during family vacations.
“We have a whole bunch of [shark teeth] here that we bring and leave them for him every time we come visit,” he said.
One friend brought a G.I. Joe action figure to place among the flowers. More than one cracked open a beer.
“His buddies – they come up from Colorado Springs where [Jake] was stationed and they’ll sit down and have a beer with him,” said Patty Thompson, Jake’s aunt.
Thompson still remembers the boy before he was a soldier. She remembers the goofy kid with a big smile who made everyone laugh.
“Goofy is a great word,” Michelle Packer smiled, remembering her son’s good friend.
Alex Squair recalled the laughter from 7th grade.
“He would get the whole class going,” Squair said. “Not just one or two kids laughing, but he’d get the whole class.”
Christopher Bramlett thought “goofy” was a fitting description of his friend, too.
“Goofy. Yep,” he said. “Absolutely. Goofy and probably the funniest guys you’re ever going to meet.”
The young soldier carried his sense of humor overseas and shared it with buddies like Bramlett, who still laughs telling the pineapple story.
“We were just sitting in the chow hall, and out of nowhere [Jake] just goes, ‘you guys want to see how much pineapple I can fit in my mouth?!’”
Bramlett let out a laugh as he sat with his wife in front of Wykstra’s headstone.
“Jake to me was one of my best friends,” Bramlett said.
They served together in Afghanistan. They were riding in the same helicopter May 28, 2014.
“Yeah, I was in the actual crash that took his life,” Bramlett said. “Pilots clipped something and unfortunately, Jake was the only one that was killed, but everybody else was pretty seriously injured.”
It doesn’t feel like five years have passed.
“I think [Jake] left a big hole in a lot of our lives and that’s not ever going to get filled,” said J.J. Packard, Wykstra’s cousin. “Just seeing so many people come here, it makes you feel surrounded by him a little bit more.”
As the sun set on Memorial Day, more than two dozen people had stopped by Wykstra’s headstone.
Wykstra’s father would wait until Tuesday, the five-year anniversary of his son's death.
“I think [Tuesday’s] more meaningful to him,” said Patty Thompson.
On Tuesday morning, Tom Wykstra fixed the flowers beside his son’s grave that had been beaten by an overnight hailstorm. He placed a fresh pink rose on top of the headstone.
He stood up for a moment with his arms crossed and gazed down at his son's grave before kneeling to rearrange the flowers again.
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