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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Army Corporal Andrew C. Wilfahrt was born in 1990, in Minnesota, to parents Lori and Jeff Wilfahrt.

He grew up in Rosemount, Minnesota, graduated from Rosemount High School and was gentle, fun-loving, outgoing, kind and musically gifted with an unusual capacity for recognizing numerical patterns as well as word palindromes. The wife of his cousin remembered how Andrew’s whole family seemed musically talented, but how Andrew was the gifted one, seemingly able to choose any instrument and quickly learn to play it without instruction. A neighbor remembered how Andrew’s piano melodies would waft out of windows and fill the neighborhood.

His mother remembered how “he would often spot a series of numbers and say, 'Well, if you add up your birthday, and your birthday, it equals this.' or, 'All of our birthday dates combined equals our home address.’ Just odd things like that. I think he was very learned without going to traditional college. He read a lot and loved plays. He really loved music, that was his passion. He composed music. He was a classical musician but not trained. He was self-taught. He spent many hours doing things like this and pursuing his own education.

He had spent many years after high school going from job to job, wondering what he should do with himself. He moved home when he was about 24. He lived with us for five years, and I think he tried to grow up. He really turned out to be an interesting, wonderful young man, but I think he still sought something else. He was looking for a purpose, a life of meaning. I think he missed the camaraderie of a group of people that would be working together toward something.”

Andrew joined the Army in January of 2009. Upon hearing about his decision, his mother said she was “speechless. I thought, 'How on earth did you come to this?' He was kind of a peace activist and he hated war, and there was nothing in his life that indicated that he would ever be interested in the military.”

He was also openly gay and the military at that time operated under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law. Andrew knew he would have to go back into the closet of secrecy, but came to terms with that before enlisting. In a communication from Afghanistan, however, he told his family “nobody cares. Everybody knows, nobody cares. Even the really conservative, religious types don’t care either.”

When he joined the Army he told his family that he “needed structure and discipline.” But his mother remembered, “it was kind of funny, because that was always something he kind of rebelled at. He didn't like structure; he did not really like authority when he was a younger teenager and young man. But I think he needed to know what he was going to do when he got up every morning and he didn't have to hide that from himself. I think that was part of it. I think he really ended up really loving being with a group of people every day and working together toward something. I think he made some pretty tight connections when he was there with people, and I think that's what he got out of it.

After basic and advanced training Andrew was assigned to the 3rd platoon, of the 552nd Military Police Company, of the 728th Battalion, of the 8th Military Police Brigade headquartered in Hawaii. In July of 2009 his unit was deployed to Afghanistan.

On February 27th, 2011, at age 31, Andrew Charles Wilfahrt died of injuries sustained from a remotely activated improvised explosive device near Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was the second known gay service member to be lost in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

He was survived by parents Lori and Jeff Wilfahrt, sister Martha and brother Peter and many other friends and family members.

A celebration of Andrews’s life took place on March 4, 2011 at the Fort Snelling Officers Club and burial occurred the next day at Fort Snelling National Cemetery with full military honors and a line of 154 flags held in place by Patriot Guard Riders.