Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, 36, a 1998 Illinois Valley Central graduate, died Saturday in the Arabian Peninsula of Yemen, of wounds sustained in a raid against al-Qaida, according to a Department of Defense news release. <\/p>\n
Cody Jackson, a high school friend of Owens, said he was shocked to hear of his death but not surprised, as Owens wanted to be a SEAL from the time he was 15.<\/p>\n
“Since he was a freshman in high school, this kid decided he wanted to protect his country. He never once wavered from that. He always said he wanted to serve, and as much as this hurts, he would not have wanted it any other way,” Jackson said. “Everyone has dreams and not everyone knows what they want to do in high school, but he did. He wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Back then, he wasn’t the most fit guy in the world but he’d get up every morning and do the Navy SEAL workout because that’s what he wanted to do.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our buddy, Andy Kravetz examines a national loss from a hometown perpective; Chief Special Warfare Operator … Ryan Owens; hometown remembers hero<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70054,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/70054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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