COMBAT IN PANAMA : Young Men Who Died: Views Through Tearful Eyes : Casualties: As their flag-draped bodies return, families and friends of men killed in Panama action remember them as high achievers and full of dedication.

Twenty-five-year-old Navy Lt. (j.g.) John Patrick Connors, a member of the elite SEALS unit, was not only among the first to volunteer to go to Panama this week to help topple the regime of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega.

He was also among the first to die there.

Alongside him was Chief Petty Officer Donald Lewis McFaul, a Navy SEAL trained in San Diego. Both were among four specially trained SEALS killed in a fire-fight at a Panama City airport.

One by one, the individual stories of America’s dead in Panama are emerging, often in tearful recollections of family and friends. Connors’ and McFaul’s bodies were in the first flight landing at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday.

Until they opened their festively decorated door in this middle-income neighborhood on Bates Road here Wednesday night, Joan and Joseph Connors thought the youngest of their five children was still at Walter Reed Medical Center Hospital outside Washington recovering from a tropical skin disease he picked up while on duty in Brazil.

Instead they learned from the Navy officers who had come to their home that John would be among the first of four sailors returned in flag-draped coffins from Panama.

“I thought he was still in the hospital,” Connors’ uncle and namesake, John Connors, said. “But he had volunteered to go to Panama.”

While most of Connors’ family remained in seclusion, friends said it was a terrible shock to learn about the fate of the quiet, athletic Connors, a high school honor student and track star who was comfortable in four languages.

But they said it came as no surprise to learn that even from his hospital bed, Connors had volunteered to lead his special operations unit in the U.S. assault on the Noriega regime.

Navy officials declined to reveal precisely what Connors’ unit, known as Special Warfare Group Two, was doing in Panama.

But other reports said that Connors and three others in his SEALS unit died in an attempt to secure Paitilla Airport in Panama City, where Noriega kept an airplane.

“He was fearless,” said Walter Towner Jr., Connors’ resident adviser at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Even as a college freshman, his friends said, John Connors had aspired to join the SEALS, the Navy sea, air and land team that often engages in underwater demolition and reconnaissance work. He enlisted in the Navy in May, 1987, soon after he earned his degree in chemical engineering at Worcester Poly.

“He knew exactly what he was doing,” said John Sheehan, a friend from Connors’ days at Boston College High School. “He made a choice to go to Panama.”

The 32-year-old McFaul joined the service in San Diego and served out of the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado between 1977 and 1984. His death came just three weeks before his wife, Patricia, is due to give birth to their first child in Norfolk, Va., where he was based. It also came at a time when he was hoping to win a promotion and begin a new stage in his career where he spent less time in the field and more time behind a desk.

McFaul was raised in Bend, Ore., where he attended high school. He was active in football and was one of four top runners in the cross-country team, which earned a second place in district competition his senior year.

“He was just a normal, good kid,” said social studies teacher Ken Cooper. “I remember him as a good student who would take part in discussions in my classes.”

One of seven children, McFaul joined the Navy and quickly adapted to its strict routine and life of discipline, his family members said. They said he also enjoyed his work as part of the elite SEALS program, whose members are modern-day commandos skilled in multi-disciplinary acts of warfare.

McFaul’s relatives said he took extensive Spanish classes in Monterey, Calif., and participated in several guerrilla-training missions in Latin America. They said he also had been assigned to the Philippines in addition to his work in San Diego. The family fully expected that he eventually would see combat in Latin America.

“He knew the dangers,” said Michael McFaul, a brother living in Seattle. “He was expecting a child soon, and he still knew he was going down there to assassinate Noriega.

“In a situation like that, you can only expect it’s going to be damn dangerous. And he was one of the first guys in there, and that’s the worst position to be in.”

His mother, Shirley Lee of Sedro Woolley, Wash., said that while he was a tall man with large muscles and expertly trained as a SEAL in hand-to-hand combat, he was not the “Rambo-type person.”

“He had the muscles, but he didn’t flaunt it,” she said. “Sometimes he’d hug you and then squeeze you too tight.”

The ending is all the more sad, Michael McFaul said, because Donald was due for a promotion soon and was hoping to spend more time at home with his wife and new baby.

“In his life,” Michael said, “things were just starting to change.”

Among other stories was that of infantryman William D. Gibbs, 22, who is survived by his wife, Kimberly, who is six months pregnant; his mother, Charlotte, who lives in Arkansas, and his father Patrick, of Modesto. He was sent to Panama from Ft. Ord near Monterey in October for what was to be a three-month tour.

On Friday, Patrick Gibbs, 50, said he had been trying without success to determine how his only child died, but feared that he may have to wait until his son’s buddies return from Central America.

“I think maybe the military should let me know,” said Gibbs, a surveyor for CalTrans.

The elder Gibbs said that his son “even liked boot camp” and looked forward to going to Panama. At the time he left, the father noted, he did not realize the United States was “going to get into something like this.”

“I feel like our leaders have more information than I do, and I support their decision,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs said his son enlisted out of high school, looking for adventure. The younger Gibbs reenlisted for another three years but had been thinking about leaving at the end of the stint this summer.

He hoped for a job in security or as a correctional officer, and that pleased his father. “A dad is always trying to get a son into something more stable,” the elder Gibbs said. Gibbs’ widow declined to discuss the matter, an Army spokesmen said.

Serrano reported from San Diego and Mehren from Arlington. Times staff writers Dan Morain in Monterey and Darrell Dawsey in Los Angeles contributed to this story.