200 Grieve in Orange County for Soldier, 19

Led in prayer by a Baptist minister who urged them to “criticize the Noriegas,” hundreds of mourners gathered Thursday at a funeral for Army Pfc. Roy Dennis Brown Jr., killed last week in the early stages of the conflict in Panama.

Brown, 19, who would have returned to his Buena Park home on New Year’s leave Thursday, was instead eulogized as an Army Ranger who fought “through hell.” In a graveside ceremony, Brown was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.

“As recently as December the 20th (when Brown died), your freedom and my freedom was protected by the blood of this, our brother in Christ,” the Rev. Wiley Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, told more than 200 friends and relatives who packed the Pierce Brothers Daly-Bartel-Spencer Chapel in Anaheim.

Drake urged the mourners not to criticize the invasion of Panama that was ordered by President Bush--whom Drake called “Roy’s commander in chief”--but to blame the reasons why it was necessary.

“If we are quick to criticize, if we’re quick to ask why, let us criticize the Noriegas, let us criticize the drug lords, as Roy did and would, let us criticize those that would end our freedoms and let us criticize those that would poison our young people,” Drake said.

Other speakers remembered not the soldier, but the young Orange County man they knew.

“He had an impish smile, sort of a . . . not a Dennis the Menace smile, sort of like Opie (a character on the old ‘Andy Griffith Show’),” said John Halsey, band director at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, where Brown once played trombone. “He had a lot of funny antics, but I can’t share them all here now because some of his teachers may be here.”

Brown’s maternal aunt and uncle, Mimi and Bill Campbell of Darby, Mont., also recalled their nephew as a youngster who was full of life and was given to occasional practical jokes.

“Roy was really a special baby--he was quick to come into the world,” Mimi Campbell said. “It was a short 8 1/2-minute delivery, as if he was in a hurry to do what he had to do. More than 70 years he packed into 19 years of life.

“I look at Roy’s life like an unfrosted cake,” she said. “It didn’t need the icing because it was wholesome and good just as it was.”

Although Halsey and the Campbells occasionally smiled while recalling memories of the young man, they all fought back tears as they concluded their eulogies.

After the service, a police motorcycle escort led the mourners in a long funeral procession to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in east Orange.

At the hillside grave site, with a backdrop of mountains crowned by gray skies, a time-honored military ceremony was enacted when a seven-member honor guard fired three volleys, and a lone bugler played taps.

Six soldiers then folded the flag that draped Brown’s coffin and handed it to his mother, Julie Otto. The ceremony concluded with Maj. Gen. Todd Graham, deputy commander of the 6th Army based at the Presidio in San Francisco, handing Otto her son’s Purple Heart.