Waiting for his body to return to the Granite State, the family of Cpl. Edmund Vandecasteele IV remembers him as a cheerful and hardworking young man who had dreamed of being a Marine since age 12.

Vandecasteele, 22, an ammunition technician with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, died in a car crash on Aug. 1. According to authorities, Vandecasteele was sitting in the front passenger seat of a 2003 Ford Mustang when it struck a tree on Avenida Vista Montana, roughly four miles away from his base in San Clemente, at about 2:15 a.m.

“We’re going through the usual. It doesn’t seem real,” said Lisa Desrosiers, Vandecasteele’s mother. “He never chose the easy route. He pushed himself to the limit. He chose the Marine Corps over every other military branch because he thought it would be the biggest challenge. He was sad to leave boot camp.”

According to Desrosiers, Vandecasteele, a member of Salem High School’s Class of 2006, entered the Marine Corps delayed entry program before he turned 18 and trained with his recruiter every weekend in the lead up to his departure for boot camp in the September following his graduation.

He spent the next two years stationed in Okinawa, during which his reputation as “unbreakable” was cemented, Desrosiers said. Delivering medical and food supplies to other Marines in the midst of a typhoon, Vandecasteele had a small piece of glass lodged in his neck after a window blew out. A larger piece of glass, he later told his mother, hit his flak vest, leaving him unharmed.

Desrosiers said her son had not decided whether to remain in the military after his four-year enlistment was finished, but had always wanted to join the Marine Corps reconnaissance battalion more than anything else. He arrived at Camp Pendleton in April of this year.

“There are two things on his wall,” she said yesterday, motioning upstairs from where she sat in her kitchen yesterday, surrounded by friends and family. “The recon Marine poster and the American flag. That’s it. No pictures, no nothing.”

Shana Vandecasteele said the loss of her older brother had been devastating to her and the rest of the family, but she remembered him as funny, outgoing and protective of his little sister.

“I had the honor of being a freshman when he was a senior, and one day he saw me talking to a guy, came over, picked me up and threw me over his shoulder and said, ‘We’re leaving,’” she said with a laugh. “He was not shy at all. If you said ‘hi’ he would just start talking. He was always protective of me. Before he went to boot camp he went to every one of his friends and told them to look after me.”

John Bergeron was one of those friends. He and Vandecasteele grew up together in nearby Salem. He described Vandecasteele as a loyal friend, proud Marine and the one person “you could call up and rely on.”

“I don’t think anyone ever said anything negative about him,” he said.

According to Desrosiers, the family does not yet know when his body will be flown back to New Hampshire, but Douglas and Johnson Funeral Home will arrange his services.

She thanked the Marine Corps for being incredibly supportive in the days since Vandecasteele’s death.

“He loved their belief in honor and their code,” Desrosiers said. “He had just got promoted to corporal ... He was so excited he had earned the red stripes on his trousers, known as the blood stripes. It’s something you earn as a corporal. But he never got the chance to see them on his trousers.”