The widow of Maj. Brent Taylor, 39, a member of the Army National Guard and a mayor of a town in Utah, said it was “powerfully fitting” that he husband’s body was returned from Afghanistan to the U.S. on Nov. 6 — the same day the 2018 midterm elections were held.
“He felt so passionately about democracy, about the engagement of the regular citizens, about our need to exercise our right to vote, exercise our right to have an opinion, to choose good leaders, to get out and do our part,” Jennie Taylor told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota.
“It just seems so powerfully fitting that he would come home to American soil on that very day when elections were, when ballots were being cast on our soil shortly after he gave his life fighting for the right for other people in other nations to be able to cast their ballots on their soil,” Jennie Taylor said.
Brent Taylor, who was serving in Afghanistan as part of a yearlong leave of absence as mayor of North Ogden in Utah, was killed earlier this month in an apparent insider attack in Kabul by an Afghan serving in the country’s defense forces. The tour was his fourth deployment overseas.
The couple has seven children together, and Jennie Taylor said that she will continue to speak of their father with a “sense of pride.”
“When I talk to our children, not just now, but into the future, it will always be with a sense of pride,” Jennie Taylor said. “To be able to be a soldier’s son or a soldier’s daughter, a soldier’s wife, a soldier’s mother is an honor. There are not a lot of people willing to pick up a soldier’s uniform, and especially to go into combat. Brent wasn’t forced, he wasn’t obligated to even join the army in the first place. He was driven.”
