Mother Gets Army Son’s Letter Written on Eve of His Death in Panama : Combat: 19-year-old left missive on his locker when told he was shipping out. He assured his mom that if he died in fight, it was for a ‘good cause.’

Julie Otto choked back tears Tuesday as she read once more the three-page letter that her son had written her shortly before he died in combat in Panama.

“It seems weird that I was just talking to you a few short hours ago, and everything was fine,” the teen-ager scrawled, writing in a script that Otto said only a mother could decipher.

Like many young soldiers, 19-year-old Army Pfc. Roy Dennis Brown Jr. drafted the letter after he was notified that his regiment would soon depart for an unknown destination. On the night of Dec. 17, he wrote that he expected his 75th Infantry Regiment to be in Panama in 48 hours.

Otto said she believed that the soldiers had drafted letters to loved ones after they learned they would be engaging in combat. “It’s kind of a last chance to write and say, ‘Hi,’ ” she said.

Brown was killed Dec. 20 during the first stage of the U.S. attack on Panama. He was one of 23 U.S. soldiers to die there.

“If you’re reading this letter, then you already know that something has happened to me,” he wrote.

The Army Ranger asked his mother to understand that there was a “reason” for his death, and a “good cause.”

His special requests were that she tell his father about him--his parents had been separated nearly since his birth--and that she take care of his cat, Michelob. He also asked Otto to tell the family and his friends that he “loved them all,” and wanted her to know that she was “the world’s greatest mom.”

The letter was hand-delivered to her on Dec. 28, the day her son was buried.

Otto said she had been told a few days before the delivery that a letter to her was found taped to Brown’s locker at Fort Benning, Ga., where he was stationed.

“As soon as they told me there was a letter taped to his locker, I was pretty sure I knew what it was,” she said.

Otto, who will attend a memorial service at Fort Benning for the soldiers who died in Panama, said the letter from her son helped her further understand his patriotism and dedication to the army.

“It was really touching,” she said in a telephone interview. “But as bad as it was for me to read it, it must have been even worse for the boys to write it.”

Otto rereads a postscript to the letter and laughs again at an amusing afterthought to her son’s weighty goodby. “ ‘The cookies you sent were great,’ ” he wrote, “ ‘Everyone in the platoon says thanks.’ ”

Breaking through her shaky voice with a fond laugh, she added steadily, “In a way, he was still just a little boy.”