PARAGOULD, Ark. -- 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, 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 arch over farmland for miles in all directions, blurring 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, on the assembly line, there was no escape from the 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 fitting later on, after he died.

Steven Mason's death came thousands of miles away from his woods, in a land without forests. Private Mason, 23, an Army Reserve 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 were preparing for sleep.

He died in a manner that parallels the accelerated, computer-driven pace of the gulf conflict, 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 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 Private 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 fails to produce an unknown soldier, Private 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 left on display have begun to fray. Strangers who never knew Private Mason are already talking about him as local history, as if he belongs to the town, a faded 19th century milling center that now 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 Private Mason can make out is the modest trajectory of a common man.

"The person they're talking about is someone else," Kerry Spencer, 23, the fallen soldier's best friend, said. "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. There were notes from congressmen, the governor and the president. Veterans called with talk of a memorial and maybe a plaque at Private Mason's high school.

Peggye Hambrick accepted this good will quietly. She spurned a gun salute but had no quarrel when her surviving son, Jerald, 18, chose a military funeral. So Private Mason was given a silver casket carried by 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, Mrs. 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. Private Mason had wangled a pass from Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where he was training. As their car left the base, he pleaded with her to 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 Private Mason was buried, the brothers drove out to Scattered Creek, a warren of white oak shading patches of sweet clover. Winter has denuded the trees and covered familiar trails with brittle leaves. But the two hunters had no trouble finding the isolated dells where, as a trio, they 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 Private Mason had told him during his last, liquor-soaked, sleepless week at home before shipping out.

"The last night we were together, we were sitting there in front of the television," Mr. 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 payback 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 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 but not to Steven.

He inherited his father's love for hunting, a passion handed down from fathers to sons in these parts like a birthright.

At school, he was a science fair winner. But he was withdrawn, with "the saddest brown eyes you ever saw," said Ms. Campfield, the retired elementary teacher. There were good 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 Steven's.

The woods provided an escape. Sullen at home, he was unburdened in the forest. He and the Spencers swaggered like gentry there, with guns, chewing tobacco and Swisher Sweet Thins cigars.

"I think he wished he could spend his whole life back in those woods," his mother said.

Lacking college or job prospects, he turned in June 1987 to the Army. He was 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.

He arrived for basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., a likable youth with a penchant for talking big about his future. "He had problems with push-ups, but he always said how he was going to be a paratrooper," said a bunkmate, David Swoboda.

But he never made airborne, training instead as a truck driver. He was assigned to Fort Hunter Liggett in California, attached to the Army's Combat Experimentation Battalion, a testing unit.

Settling into a supply man's numbing routine, he drove trucks. 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.

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. He kept sane, he told a co-worker, by mentally replaying songs by AC/DC, his favorite heavy-metal rock group.

By day, he lived for the hunt.

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

Notice came Jan. 20. He was at work.

That night, when her son showed up, Mrs. Hambrick tried to stay calm. "You got that letter you been waiting on," she said.

He was to report in a week. He cursed. There was little else to say. He sat poker-faced at the dinner table, reading the letter over.

Mrs. 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."

Later, he called every night from Fort Dix, N.J., his processing camp. Two short letters came. In hers, Private Mason 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 said: "Keep your fingers crossed."

His last call came 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 goodbye, but I didn't know it at the time. "

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

When she watched replays of the missile attack, Peggye Hambrick sometimes cried -- but for other people's sons. "I could not imagine him being in a building," she said. "I figured he was out in the desert."

But that night in Dhahran, Private Mason was somewhere in the central sleeping quarters of a newly built corrugated metal barracks.

No one knows whether he was awake or asleep when the Scud struck. The missile shredded the barracks, raining metal roof parts and shrapnel on those inside.

Since his burial, 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 Private Mason's burial ground.

A headstone soon will take its place. It will be ready by summer, Mrs. 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.