Final Farewell To Navy SEAL

Neil Roberts spent the Gulf War in Guam, far from the action, working as an aviation technician. It was then, a friend recalls, that Roberts vowed to become a Navy SEAL.

That fateful decision led to Roberts' death a decade later - but apparently the 32-year-old husband and father would not have wanted it any other way.

"I consider myself blessed with the best things a man could ever hope for," he wrote in a letter to his wife, to be read only in event of his death in Afghanistan.

"I loved being a SEAL. If I died doing something for the Teams, then I died doing what made me happy. Very few people have the luxury of that."

Roberts, of Woodland, Calif., died a week ago after U.S. helicopters assaulting al-Qaida and Taliban fighters were hit by enemy fire in eastern Afghanistan. He fell to the ground as his stricken chopper, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, veered up and away toward safer ground, officials said.

The petty officer 1st class apparently survived the fall and was shot on the ground. Whether he was taken away to be killed, was already dead when taken away or wounded when taken and died later remains unclear.

On Monday, Roberts' comrades at SEALs Special Warfare Group Two in Little Creek, Va., memorialized him, while California Gov. Gray Davis ordered the flag at the state Capitol lowered in his honor, saying, "Neil Roberts made the supreme sacrifice for our freedoms." SEAL Master Chief Patrick D. Ellis, who served with Roberts in Europe, cited his "professionalism, humor and keen sense of duty."

His family, grieving privately, released a statement: "He made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that everyone who calls himself or herself an American truly has all the privileges of living in the greatest country in the world."

On Tuesday, he will be buried in York, Pa., near the family of his wife.

Growing up in the farm fields of Yolo County, Calif., Roberts was the quiet child in a family of 12 children, according to those who knew him. He graduated from high school in 1987 and left home at 18 to join the Navy.

His neighbors in Virginia remember a curly redhead who took pictures of his son, and who eternally tinkered with the black pickup truck parked in the front yard with a flat tire.

Laurie Lomeli, of Lemoore, Calif., remembers Roberts as part of a small knot of friends in the 1980s, all new in the Navy and living far from home in Guam. She recalled his hunger to join the SEALs, the elite fighting force known for its rigorous physical and mental conditioning.

"We were really proud of Neil when he went through with it and made it," said the 35-year-old Lomeli, who last saw Roberts in 1995.

Military cameras recorded Roberts' last moments and Lomeli saw news of his death on television Wednesday while getting her children ready for school.

Crying, she pulled out her scrapbooks and showed pictures of Roberts holding her son, 12, who was a toddler then in Guam.

"I told him, 'You were in the arms of a hero,' " she said.