Fallen O.C. Soldier, 19, Fought ‘Through Hell’ : Funeral: More than 200 mourners lay to rest an Army Ranger killed in the first wave of the Panama invasion.

Hundreds of mourners, led in prayer by a minister who urged them to “criticize the Noriegas” of the world, gathered Thursday at a military funeral for Army Pfc. Roy Dennis Brown Jr., killed in the first wave of the invasion of Panama.

Brown, 19, who would have returned to his Buena Park home on leave Thursday, was instead eulogized as an Army Ranger who fought “through hell.” Later, in a graveside ceremony that included a taps played by a bugler and seven soldiers in full dress firing three volleys into the air, Brown was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.

“As recently as Dec. 20, 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 grieving friends and relatives who packed a chapel in Anaheim.

Drake, speaking from a podium surrounded by floral arrangements a few feet from Brown’s flag-draped coffin, urged the mourners not to criticize the invasion of Panama, but the reasons why President Bush--whom he described as “Roy’s commander-in-chief”--sent U.S. forces there.

“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.

Brown was among nearly a dozen U.S. soldiers buried this week in towns scattered from Pawtucket R.I., to Greenville S.C. Two other soldiers were also buried Thursday.

In the Pennsylvania hamlet of Hallstead, hundreds of townspeople paused in their daily toils Thursday to say goodby to a fallen son, Sgt. Larry Barnard, 29, a father of three who was killed in the second day of the U.S. invasion.

And in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., a Peruvian family gathered for the funeral of Alejandro I. Manriquelozano, 30, who immigrated to Lauderhill, Fla., five years ago and had hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen.

In all, 23 military personnel died in Panama, officials said.

Brown was among the first troops assigned to attack in the Panama invasion, said Maj. Gen. Todd Graham, deputy commander of the 6th Army based at the Presidio in San Francisco. He said Brown was killed during an early-morning assault on Dec. 20 at Rio Hato, the site of a Panamanian Defense Force camp.

Graham, who attended Brown’s funeral, said 3,000 troops parachuted into the camp, a target that he said was essential to the success of the invasion.

Brown’s funeral began promptly at 11 a.m. with an emotional rendition of “America the Beautiful,” followed by a reading of the 23rd Psalm by his maternal aunt and uncle, Mimi and Bill Campbell of Darby, Mont. Mimi Campbell later eulogized Brown as a full-of-life youngster who occasionally liked to play practical jokes. She later became more serious, especially about his military service.

“Roy was really a special baby--he was quick to come into the world,” 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 later in her eulogy. “It didn’t need the icing because it was wholesome and good just as it was.”

Campbell smiled and drew occasional chuckles with tales of Brown’s mischievousness, but she choked up when she concluded her eulogy with a reading of a poem from the Army Ranger’s handbook. In part, the poem read: “They blaze the trail to victory, where next no one can tell, but should they ever be called upon, they’ll fight their way through hell.”

“Roy did that,” Campbell said.

Brown was also eulogized by John Halsey, director of the marching band at Anaheim’s Magnolia High School, where Brown played the trombone. Halsey recalled Brown as “a gangly kid (who) really wanted to become involved in the music program” and later came to look on Halsey as “more or less like an uncle or older brother.”

“He had an impish smile, sort of a--not a Dennis the Menace smile--sort of like Opie, (from the old ‘Andy Griffith Show’),” Halsey said, drawing smiles and mild laughter from friends and family. “He had a lot of funny antics, but I can’t share them all here now because some of his teachers may be here.”

The coffin was shut for the services, but it was open for a public viewing Wednesday. Brown was clad in his full-dress Army Ranger uniform, with his prized black beret tucked neatly beneath his left arm.

After the funeral service Thursday, the family was allowed a few final private moments with Brown. His casket was carried out of the funeral home by six soldiers from the Ft. Ord funeral detachment. After the coffin was placed in the hearse, Brown’s mother, Julie Otto, emerged from the chapel, clad in black, and carrying a single red rose.

A contingent of motorcycle police then led the mourners on a 20-mile trip to Brown’s grave site on a gently sloped hillside at the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in East Orange.

The short ceremony started with a reading of the “Infantrymen’s Prayer,” part of which read: “Give us courage, O Lord, in the face of danger.”

The prayer was followed by the gun salute, carried out by an honor guard that patiently stood at parade rest as the large contingent of mourners slowly filed up to the grave site. Many mourners dabbed at their eyes and others burst into tears as a lone bugler played taps.

Sgt. John Arvan, a member of Brown’s Ranger battalion who was assigned to escort the family, said conversations in the time he spent with them revealed that the family understood the importance of the mission.

“They knew what he was doing,” Jones said. “They didn’t have . . . malice. . . . They knew it was his job.”

In Hallstead, Pa., Thursday, Panama seemed light years away from the community tragedy unfolding in the rolling dairy land along the Susquehanna River, the home of Sgt. Barnard.

“If Larry ever brought anyone home, it was always someone who was hurting,” said the Rev. Keith Benjamin in his sermon. “Whether he was volunteering to mow lawns for older neighbors or offering some other help, he was the kind of guy who could not pass a person on the street if he saw that they were suffering.”

Farther south, Manriquelozano was the first Panama casualty to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Manriquelozano was a young man whose Peruvian family saw him as both breadwinner and hope for the future.

“He was the kind of guy who, if you had no shirt, he would give you his,” said his cousin, Jose Canalas of Long Island, N.Y., a hotel manager.

Under a bright winter sky, Alejandro’s father, mother and other family members looked on sadly. The family was given two American flags and two Purple Hearts by Army officials.

At the age of 25, the Peruvian immigrated to Florida, where he took a variety of jobs, including one as a kind of houseboy in Miami to Julio Iglesias, the popular singer. Iglesias sent flowers to Manriquelozano’s funeral.

He was a young man with an infectious smile, who had decided early that his dream of economic security and a better life for himself and his family lay to the north in the United States. He hoped to one day become a U.S. citizen.

Larry Barnard had no such travails.

The far reaches of northern Pennsylvania was countryside that Barnard loved deeply, his minister said, a place where as a teen-ager he would ride his horse over the ridge and into the forest to chop wood for his grandparents.

Barnard, who married his high school sweetheart, Tammy, and had three children, never dreamed of anything but the Army--”100% Army,” as one friend described him a few days after his death. He volunteered for service right out of high school and eventually became a Ranger, a high-profile job that took him to the invasion of Grenada.

Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey had visited with the Barnard family Wednesday, and President Bush sent a major general bearing condolences. But the real message was the 400 people--seemingly the entire town--who gathered in the freshly fallen snow at the United Methodist Church in Hallstead for the funeral of their friend, brother and son. When the chapel overflowed, 100 more crowded into a basement.

“Thank you all so much for coming,” were the only words Barnard’s older brother, Ray, could manage. His father, Ray Sr., simply broke into tears, clutching the folded U.S. flag presented by the military.

“His parents were always apprehensive (of his military work), but they were very aware and very proud of the fact that (the Army) was of his choosing,” said longtime family friend Trudy Zurn.

Times staff writer Jill Stewart contributed to this story