EDITOR'S NOTE: Each month, the P-I remembers the servicemen and servicewomen with ties to Washington who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until recent months, the nearly seven-year-old war in Afghanistan seemed almost forgotten, eclipsed by the invasion and immersion in Iraq in March 2003. Now while U.S. combat casualties in Iraq have fallen dramatically, violence in Afghanistan has increased significantly on the strength of a resurgent Taliban and escalated fighting along the Pakistan border. For the second consecutive month, U.S. and NATO casualties there exceeded those in Iraq. The pattern is reflected in U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan who come from Washington's military bases and hometowns. To date, five have been killed there this year, but of them, four fell in the past two months. The most recent was Marine Sgt. Michael T. Washington, 20, of Tacoma, son of a Seattle firefighter, who died June 14 in Afghanistan, a victim of a roadside bomb. He was one of two casualties with local connections last month. On June 9, Spc. Thomas F. Duncan III, 21, of Rowlett, Texas, an Army Ranger and machine gunner with Fort Lewis' 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, was killed in Sinjar, Iraq, during combat but in what might have been a friendly-fire episode that the Army is investigating. The elite Ranger battalion has units serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to his parents, Duncan left behind a wife, Megan, of Kentucky. Duncan, who wore long hair before enlisting in the Army out of high school, was nicknamed "Frankie D." and was remembered by a friend who wrote about him on a memorial Web site as "one of the funnest and sweetest guys I ever met." To date, nearly 4,100 American men and women in uniform have been killed in Iraq since the war there began in March 2003, with an additional 30,000 wounded, according to Defense Department statistics. Of them, 267 had ties to Washington's towns or military bases. Meanwhile, in the past seven years of fighting in Afghanistan, nearly 530 men and women in the U.S. armed forces have died, 23 of them with Washington connections. They include the first U.S. combat fatality fighting overseas following 9/11 , Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman, 31, of Georgetown, Texas, a Fort Lewis Green Beret with the First Special Forces Group. A 13-year veteran, Chapman was killed in Afghanistan Jan. 4, 2002. He left behind a wife, Renae, and two children. In addition to Washington, other local troops killed in Afghanistan this year were a Vancouver-area native, two other Fort Lewis Rangers and a Navy officer from Bangor on his second tour to Afghanistan to help build the country's infrastructure. They were: Pvt. Andrew Jon Shields, 19, of Battle Ground, a combat medic and paratrooper with the 173rd Brigade Combat Team based in Bamberg, Germany, who was killed May 31 in Jalalabad with another soldier by a suicide car bomber. Spc. Christopher Gathercole, 21, of Santa Rosa, Calif., also a member of Fort Lewis' 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who was killed in Ghazni on Memorial Day. Navy Lt. Jeffrey A. Ammon, 37, of Orem, Utah, an Oregon State graduate and a submariner attached to Navy Region Northwest at Bangor, who was serving in Iraq as an "individual augmentee" and who died May 20 from injuries suffered when a makeshift bomb went off in the Aband District of Afghanistan. He is survived by a wife and two children. Sgt. 1st Class David L. McDowell, 30, of Ramona, Calif., also a member of Fort Lewis' 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who died April 29 in Bastion, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked using small arms fire.