Officer Shot Down Over Iraq Is Eulogized by Fiance : Funeral: First Lt. Laura Ashley Piper, a 1992 Air Force Academy graduate, is buried near the chapel where she was baptized.

First Lt. Laura Ashley Piper, whose helicopter was mistakenly shot down over Iraq, was buried Saturday near the same Air Force chapel where she was baptized 25 years ago.

The pews were lined with Air Force cadets in somber blue. They stood proudly during the posting of the colors, as the flags were placed by marching cadets, and again when the casket, covered with a U.S. flag, was guided in.

“Laura’s a modest person, she’d be taken aback by all this,” said Piper’s fiance, Lt. Dan Murray.

The cadets sat stiff-necked, eyes forward, until Murray began sharing his recollections of Piper. As he remembered the woman who he said loved to giggle, who talked with her hands in constant motion, repeatedly broke her nose playing rugby and always lost her term papers to computers, the dignity of her comrades gave way to grief and tears.

Murray saw his fiancee days before her death while the couple vacationed in Egypt.

“When we kissed goodby . . . she was happier than I’ve ever seen her,” Murray said. “She knew she was loved, she was happy and she was off on another adventure.”

Piper was one of 26 people, including 15 Americans, who died April 14 when two U.S. jets mistakenly fired on two helicopters carrying a United Nations relief mission.

Piper, an air operations intelligence analyst stationed in Ramstein, Germany, was on a temporary assignment in Turkey. She was helping with a mission to rebuild Kurdish villages destroyed by Iraqi troops.

Piper was in the fourth grade when she read in the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the Air Force Academy, her father’s alma mater, was about to begin admitting women. She decided then to go, her mother, Joan, recalled.

Piper graduated in 1992. She was a model cadet: fluent in German and Russian, a champion rugby player and a champion shot putter for the school’s track-and-field team.

She always kept in touch with her family, sending postcards to her 10-year-old brother, Sean. Her parents had planned to visit her in Germany this summer.

Joan Piper remembered her daughter as someone who loved her life, loved her country and loved the Air Force.

Her mother recalled her own wedding, a renewal of vows and Laura’s baptism, all in the Air Force Academy chapel.

At the campus cemetery, four F-16 fighter jets flew overhead. Then one of the planes in the Missing Man Formation broke from the others and flew straight up toward the heavens in a tribute to a fallen comrade.