COLUMN ONE : ‘Unknown Soldier’ of the Gulf : The modest trajectory of a common man--one week, he was on an assembly line, the next, on the cusp of battle. His impersonal death from a stray missile made him less hero than victim.

On a day that Steven Mason would have recognized as perfect for a deer hunt, six strangers carried him to rest. Bucking a stiff March wind, the six men, U.S. Army pallbearers, hauled his flag-draped coffin toward a hole in the cold, pliant loam. The mourners waited under a billowing canopy in the small country cemetery, hemmed in by the dense wilds that blur the state boundary between Arkansas and Missouri.

Steven Mason knew these woods intimately. They were his refuge, an enveloping and silent place where private disappointments faded away, where, with a rifle and a sack and his backwoodsman’s stealth, he was a match for most any man.

At home, in school or on the assembly line, there was no escape from the confining tedium of his hard, ordinary life. But inside any tree line, his mother remembered later, it seemed as if nothing could harm him, a thought that seemed somehow fitting later on, after he died.

Steven Mason’s death came thousands of miles away from his woods, in a land without forests. Mason, 23, an Army reservist truck driver, was one of 28 American soldiers killed Feb. 25 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when a Scud missile plunged out of the night sky and fell into a barracks where they prepared for sleep.

He died in a manner that parallels the accelerated, computer-driven pace of the Gulf conflict. He was killed--like most of America’s 124 war dead--not in direct action with the enemy, but in an impersonal, long-distance form of combat that saw soldiers succumb to rocket attacks, land mines and desert-strewn cluster bombs.

Yet unlike so many others who were eulogized and exalted as heroes in the aftermath, there is no neatness, no tidy sentimentality about Steven Mason’s death--or the unassuming life that preceded it. One week, he was a machinist on an ear-splitting assembly line. The next, he was a scared, out-of-shape reservist on the cusp of battle. The next, he was dead.

If the Gulf conflict, so unlike the nation’s past bloody wars with its meager American death toll, fails to produce an unknown soldier, Army Spec. Steven Mason might well suffice.

He is this war’s Everyman, a cog in the military machine who perished before he had the chance to contribute to the war effort. A reluctant patriot, he feared the conflict’s hellish technology yet could not fathom taking his mother’s advice to flee to Mexico. He left behind no grieving widow, no unseen child, no prospects for a bright, shining life. Even his final communications home were paltry and vague. In the end, there were only a few cartons of personal effects and a collection of guns and fishing rods to hand down to his numbed family and friends.

In Paragould, a town of 18,000 farmers and factory workers west of the Mississippi River, the few yellow ribbons still on display have begun to fray. Strangers who never knew Steven Mason are already talking about him as local history, as if he belongs to the town, a faded 19th-Century mill center that survives on soybean farms and auto accessory plants.

“I think we all want to touch greatness,” said Elinor Campfield, a retired elementary schoolteacher. “Everyone wants to say they knew him. As long as people here remember the war, they’ll remember him.”

But all that those who knew Steven Mason can make out is the modest trajectory of a common man.

“The person they’re talking about is someone else,” said Kerry Spencer, 23, the fallen soldier’s best friend. “This was an average guy. I mean, the person they talk about is somebody great and strong. If that’s what a hero is, I’m sure Steve’d want to be one. He was just a good friend. Now he’s gone.”

Condolence cards, dinner hams and donations have been left at the Mason home, a brick ranch house with an exterior as black as a scorched hearth. There were notes from congressmen, the governor and the President. Veterans called with talk of a memorial and maybe a plaque at Steven Mason’s high school. Even the United Parcel man from Jonesboro, 25 miles away, stopped by to tell the dead man’s mother “how proud he was” of her boy.

Peggye Hambrick accepted this goodwill quietly. She spurned a 21-gun salute, but had no quarrel when her surviving son, Jerald, 18, chose a military funeral. So Steve was given a silver casket and Army pallbearers. He was dressed in a parade-ground green uniform and, head still shaved, buried to a military bugler’s lonesome rendition of taps.

The whole time, Peggye Hambrick thought: “That isn’t him. His mustache is gone. His hair is wrong. It looked fine, but that’s not how I’ll remember him.”

Amid the funeral’s solemn ceremony, she found herself drawn back to a moment in 1987. Steve had wangled a pass from Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., where he was training as an Army truck driver. As their car left the base, he told her to “please stop at the first gas station.” He ran into a restroom, tore off his uniform and came out grinning in jeans and T-shirt.

It was that “country” side that Kerry Spencer and his brother, Rob, 21, knew from a decade of hunting. The week after Steve was buried, the brothers drove out to Scattered Creek, one of their haunts, a warren of white oak shading patches of sweet clover. Winter has denuded the trees and hidden trails with brittle leaves. But the two hunters had no trouble finding the isolated dells where, with Steve, they had stalked squirrel, rabbit and deer.

“I don’t think he wanted that much out of life,” said Kerry Spencer. “A Monte Carlo XS, maybe. He liked that car’s style, said it had flair. He wanted his own land, maybe 10, 20 acres for hunting. And a house.”

Then, he remembered something Steve had told him during his last, liquor-soaked, sleepless week at home before shipping out to Ft. Dix, N. J., his first stop toward the Gulf.

“The last night we were together, we were sitting there in front of the television,” Kerry Spencer said. “And he says: ‘If I make it back, this town owes me.’ I wasn’t sure if he meant a job or some kind of chance. He never said. Some ways, I wonder if he got a better pay-back from dying than he might’ve got if he lived.”

Steven Mason had not always been so resentful. He came into the world on equal footing with many northern Arkansas boys--barely middle-class, but well-provided with necessities. His mother was a nurse and his father, Glen Mason, a science teacher--a job that brought a measure of renown to the family name, renown the son did not share.

Steve inherited Glen Mason’s love for hunting, a passion handed down from fathers to sons in these parts like a birthright. When Steve was three, his father bought him a BB gun, his first weapon. An independent child, Steve graduated to a pellet gun, then to a .22 rifle.

“He never did play soldier much,” Peggye Hambrick recalled. “Cowboys and Indians, mostly. Backwoods games.”

At school he was a science fair winner, but withdrawn, with “the saddest brown eyes you ever saw,” said teacher Elinor Campfield. There were hard reasons. By junior high, his parents had separated. And in his first year of high school, his father was killed on his motorcycle, run down by a car driven by a drunken classmate of Steve’s.

The woods provided an escape. Sullen at home, he was unburdened in the forest. Steve and the Spencers swaggered like Southern gentry, with guns, chewing tobacco and Swisher Sweet Thins cigars. Sometimes, they brought a bottle of whiskey or marijuana that grows wild along the marshy banks of the St. Francis River, a Mississippi tributary.

“I think he wished he could spend his whole life back in those woods,” his mother said. Lacking college or job prospects, Steve Mason turned in June, 1987, to the Army. He was one among dozens from Paragould who enlisted over the last decade, part of a generation of jobless white kids from the Sun Belt drawn by financial hardship to the military. Along with urban blacks, Southerners now form the backbone of the nation’s volunteer fighting force.

“Either they can’t find jobs or they don’t know what else to do,” said Sgt. James Parks, an Arkansas national guardsman who acted as an Army liaison for the Mason family in the days after Steve’s death.

Pvt. Steven Mason arrived for basic training at Ft. Jackson, S.C., a likable youth with a penchant for talking big about his future. “He had problems with pushups, but he always said how he was going to be a paratrooper,” said his bunkmate, David Swoboda.

One night near the end of basic training, Swoboda recalled, the recruits, who called themselves “Mad Dogs,” sat in their humid brick barracks and talked about their plans. One man said that if he died in the line of duty, he wanted the others to hoist a drink in his honor. One by one, the other “Mad Dogs” joined in. Steve Mason chimed in with the rest.

But he never made airborne, training instead as a truck driver. He was assigned to Ft. Hunter Liggett, Calif., attached to the Army’s Combat Experimentation Battalion, a testing unit, said his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Paul Trahan.

Settling into a supply man’s numbing routine, Steve drove troop trucks, laser-carrying flatbeds, tankers brimming with fuel. It was 18 months of boredom, he told Rob Spencer. His weight problem revived. His superiors wanted him to lose 20 pounds. In April, 1990, three months before his enlistment was up, he was discharged honorably--dropped, he told his mother, because of his paunch.

Before he left, Steve told Trahan he hoped to parlay his training into a trucking career. “He said he talked to a company back East,” Trahan said. “It sounded like he had plans.”

But from his $823 monthly paycheck, Steve had saved only $1,200. Home in Paragould, he took what he could get--a night job at Monroe Auto Equipment, punching holes in shock absorbers.

Civilian tedium replaced Army routine. His nightly quota was 5,800 shock absorbers. In a cavernous hall that stank of forklift fuel, workers wadded green plugs in their ears to mute the thunderous hiss of stamping machines. Steve kept sane, he told a co-worker, by mentally replaying songs by AC/DC, his favorite heavy metal rock group. Shocks clanked by to the internal throb of “Highway to Hell” and “Those About to Rock (We Salute You).”

By day, Steve lived for the hunt. He could tell a deer’s distance by the faint scrape of antlers against tree trunks, deciphering tracks in the soft mud. Among his friends, it was Steve who bagged a deer first, a seven-point buck. He was so excited, Kerry Spencer recalled, that he tripped on his overalls, pitching face-first into a pasture as he ran to claim his kill.

The last summer was an idyll. News that a force of 100,000 Iraqi Republican Guard troops had stormed into Kuwait Aug. 2 was someone else’s concern, an item to discard like day-old baseball scores. There were more pressing matters: Squirrels were afoot at Scattered Creek. The catfish were biting in the muddy St. Francis.

It was not until November, when the first of his co-workers vanished from their jobs, called to duty, that Steve realized the gravity of the nation’s situation--and his own. He had made an eight-year commitment to the Army. As an inactive duty reservist until 1995, he could be called up any moment.

An instinctive patriot who kept a “love it or leave it” sticker pasted on his truck, he supported the buildup in Saudi Arabia. “He just thought we should go in there and get rid of Saddam,” Jerald Mason said.

But by Christmas, the growing likelihood that he, too, might have to fight clearly scared him. He took to his cramped bedroom, its walls lined with heavy metal posters, brooding under Ozzy Osbourne’s bloodshot stare. He made gloomy references to his own death. When his mother gave him a new fishing rod for Christmas, he muttered to his aunt, Rosetta Jones: “I’ll probably never get to use it.”

Notice came Jan. 20. He was at work. Jerald, home from school, saw the letter and ripped it open. Steve was to report to Ft. Eustis, Va., in a week. Jerald grew pale and paced around their small kitchen.

“What if he doesn’t get the letter?” Jerald asked. “Does he have to go?”

“They’ll find him,” Peggye Hambrick said, trembling. That night, when Steven showed up, she tried to stay calm. “You got that letter you been waiting on,” she said.

Steve cursed. There was little else to say. He sat poker-faced at the dinner table, reading the letter over. Peggye Hambrick had decided on a course of action. She wanted him to go to Mexico.

“I said: ‘You don’t have to do this. You can go down there, you can live for nothing, I’ll send you money,’ ” she recalled. “I told him that all week. And he would say: ‘Oh, Mom, be serious.’ But anybody looking at him could see he was afraid to go.”

Steve’s deepest fear was chemical weapons. He had lived with guns and bullets all his life, but lethal as they were, he told Jerald, they seemed tame compared to the rumored Iraqi stockpiles of poison gas.

In public, Steve masked his fear with bravado. At the plant, he told personnel director Harold E. Diggs that he already had one medal, his Spearhead of Logistics, awarded for truck duty. He told Diggs: “I guess I’ll have to get another.”

At home, Steve prepared like an automaton. He made Jerald his legal guardian. He bought six cans of Skoal, stuffing them in a tube sock to hide from Army inspectors. He visited with grandparents. He considered buying a flea collar to ward off desert insects, then shaved his legs instead.

He stayed up for a week. He slugged whiskey in long gulps, bleary-eyed in front of the television at Kerry Spencer’s place. Long into the morning, the two friends watched Gulf news, speaking up only to talk about old times in the woods. They talked of one last hunt. But Steven Mason was sleepwalking, slouching towards the Gulf.

“It’s like he wasn’t there,” Spencer recalled. “His head was already in Saudi, I guess.”

The day of Steve’s departure, Peggye Hambrick made one last plea. On the way to the Memphis airport, they passed a billboard advertising a sunny holiday in Rio. She said: “I can get enough money. We can go there.” He waved her off glumly.

At the security gate, she stood with Jerald and Jennifer, her 11-year-old daughter, as Steve shuffled through with his duffel bag. They hugged and shut their eyes tight to ward off tears. As she walked off, she turned to see Steve standing near the X-ray machine, watching.

He called every night from Ft. Dix, N. J., his processing camp. Peggye Hambrick heard the coughs of other soldiers in line for the phone. She wondered if they were as scared as Steve. They were all kept in their street clothes, he told her, confined to the crowded barracks “so they wouldn’t run off.”

Two short letters came. In hers, Steve was reassuring: “I will probably go to Saudi Arabia, but only in the rear. I won’t see any action, so don’t worry about me, OK?” To Jerald, he wrote: “Keep your fingers crosset (sic). I could stay in the U.S.A. or go overseas. Well, I have to go.”

His last call came at 6:30 one night, two days after Valentine’s Day. His mother did most of the talking, reliving “how much I’d enjoyed him as a son. I guess it was a way of saying goodby, but I didn’t know it at the time. I told him about funny things he did when he was little, like the time we dressed him up in a big old cowboy hat and these ugly, plaid ‘70s pants. Things like that. I told him I thought he’d turned his life around.”

The next week blurred by: The ground war started. A Scud missile fell on a barracks in Dhahran. The cease-fire came and went, with still no word from Steve. With the war over, his mother was elated. She drove into Jonesboro to buy poster board and packages of balloons and streamers for his homecoming.

When she watched replays of the Scud attack, Peggye Hambrick sometimes cried--but for other people’s sons, not her own. “I could not imagine him being in a building,” she said. “I figured he was out in the desert.”

But at 8:30 that night in Dhahran, Steven Mason was somewhere in the central sleeping quarters of a newly built corrugated metal barracks. At that hour, soldiers were readying for bed, said Capt. Gregory Rich, commander of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, a Greensboro, Pa., reserve unit that specializes in water purification.

Though Army officials told Peggye Hambrick that her son had been assigned as a “filler”--a temporary replacement--with the water detachment, Gregory Rich was not familiar with Steven Mason’s name.

“At that point, truck drivers were in short supply in-country,” Rich said. “They were taking soldiers from the front and training them to become drivers. He was definitely a needed man.”

But if he was not with Rich’s unit, Steve Mason was clearly no longer with his own, Army officials told his mother. And because he had just arrived in the Gulf, Rich said, he was likely still “in orientation” and had not even begun his new assignment. “He was probably just reconning the area to get to know it,” Rich said.

No one knows whether he was awake or asleep when the Scud struck. When the missile landed, according to Rich, it shredded the barracks, raining metal roof parts and shrapnel on those inside.

Peggye Hambrick prefers to believe Steve was sleeping. On the morning of March 2, when she went to view his open coffin at Heath Funeral Parlor in downtown Paragould, she first reacted like a nurse, not a mother. Steven’s only wound was at the back of his head, she noticed. In the absence of details from the Army, she concluded he was killed by a falling object.

“He always slept on his stomach,” she said. “So I have to think something landed on him from above. I have to think he was asleep.”

That morning, she took off the white gloves the Army had placed on Steven Mason’s hands and slipped a white New Testament into his cold right fist. She put a nickel in his left pocket. He always kept the coin there, a private gesture whose meaning she had long ago forgotten.

Since then, Peggye Hambrick has driven out to her son’s grave almost every day. She talks to him, weeping, “braying like a fool. I tell him I’m proud of him. I stand there bawling--God, I must look like an idiot--and I try not to think of him in his uniform. I pretend that he’s out there in the woods.”

Some mornings, caught in the stinging, cold rain that pelts northern Arkansas in March, it has been hard to make out the simple metal plate that marks Steve Mason’s burial ground.

A headstone will soon take its place. It will be ready by summer, Peggye Hambrick hopes, a marble slab, simple and square, with just his name and his dates. And in a prominent place, somewhere where everybody can see, the head of a deer.