JAY Army Spc. Solomon ''Kelly'' Bangayan was about to board a bus that would take him to Boston, where a flight would lead him back to the war in Iraq.

He had been home in Vermont for two weeks before Thanksgiving. The normally quiet young man was more silent than usual as he parted from his mother and stepfather. When he spoke, he spoke the words of a soldier whose trademark courage made room for fear.

"He said it was very, very dangerous. Tears came down his face and he said, I may not come back,''' Bangayan's stepfather, Victor Therrien, recalled Monday. ''He put his head down and said, I don't want to go.'''

His mother felt his pain. ''I won't forget that,'' Helen Therrien said. ''When I looked at him I said, Oh, my God, that might be the last time.'''

Bangayan, 24, died Friday when he and his fellow members of the 82nd Airborne Division were ambushed by enemy fighters using an improvised explosive, a rocket-propelled grenade and firearms. Bangayan and Spc. Marc Seiden, 26, of Brigantine, N.J., were killed. Several other soldiers in the convoy were injured.

Bangayan is the fifth soldier from Vermont, and the sixth with ties to the state, to die since the war in Iraq began in March.

He grew up in the Philippines and lived in Jay with his mother and stepfather for only a few months. He found time to embrace his young Vermont roots he cavorted like a boy in the first snow he ever saw as a 21-year-old; he shot down the slopes at Jay Peak with reckless abandon in his debut on skis; he went snowmobiling in Canaan where he used his newfound English skills to carve ''I love Vermont'' into the snow with his sled.

Then he left for the Army. He vowed that he was willing to die for his country.

"That was one of the things I respected and appreciated in him,'' Victor Therrien said. ''His dream was to come to America and join the military.''

Getting to know him

Helen Therrien left the Philippines when her son was 2 to pursue a career in health care that would lead her to the United States. Bangayan and his younger sister, Hilda, stayed behind with their grandparents.

Helen and Victor Therrien met when both were living in Concord, N.H. After they married in 1995 they decided to bring her two children to the United States. Victor Therrien, a Beecher Falls native, petitioned to bring them to the States before they turned 21. Kelly Bangayan arrived in 2000; his sister came the following year.

"I really didn't know him,'' said Helen Therrien, who through the years had spoken with her son several times over the phone. ''I was so glad when he came here. I said, I'm going to get to know my son.'''

The Therriens did get to know Bangayan. ''He was very caring, very sensitive to our needs,'' Victor Therrien said. ''He was a peacemaker and a caregiver. He was shy and quiet, but he had a heart of gold.''

Victor Therrien, who is disabled from a construction accident, said Bangayan was quick to lend a hand when a fence on their property needed mending, snow needed shoveling or the chimney needed cleaning. He was also ready for fun and adventure.

Victor Therrien remembers that first visit to Jay Peak up the road from their house. Bangayan had never skied but took to the slopes with natural flair. Later in the day his stepfather watched as Bangayan came down the hill clutching his bleeding mouth. He had crashed, and his skis knocked out one of his front teeth. Ignoring his injury, Bangayan clambered back up the hill to search in vain for the missing tooth.

"You couldn't tell him he couldn't do something,'' his stepfather said.

That showed the toughness Bangayan packed into his 5-foot-6-inch, 140-pound body. His stepfather said that if you're in the military in the Philippines it means you are somebody, and Bangayan wanted to be somebody in America. He took his courage to the military eight months after arriving in the States.

''I didn't even know him that well,'' Helen Therrien said, ''and he left for the Army.''

Prepared to die

Bangayan wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother, who works as a nurse's aide at a Morrisville nursing home. He planned to serve four years in the military to help pay his way through nursing school.

He put his risk-taking side to work in the 82nd Airborne, where he served as a paratrooper. His first duty after reporting in Iraq in March was to parachute into enemy territory under the cover of night to help pave the way for ground troops.

He told his mother and stepfather how thrilled he was to help bring freedom to a previously oppressed nation. He said women who had been concealing their faces with burkas were now removing the cloths. Children were playing unfettered in the streets of Baghdad. Bangayan even sat in the throne and swam in the pool at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

The celebration that followed Saddam's fall gave way to tension. Loyalists to the old regime continued the fight. Lawlessness ruled on the streets. Bangayan and his fellow soldiers in the 82nd Airborne had new duties. They were to go house-to-house in search of enemies and weapons.

Bangayan was due to end his tour of duty in Iraq in February. He came home for one last get-together in November, when he confided that he was afraid of what awaited him.

"He told us, What I'm doing now is very dangerous and I might not make it back, but I'm prepared to die for my country,''' said Victor Therrien, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. ''We were just so, so proud of that. He prepared us during those two weeks before he left.''

The Therriens spent the next month and a half watching the news and worrying.

"I told Helen, If we ever see any soldiers come to our door,''' Victor Therrien said, ''you know what that means.'''

Pride and remorse

It was around 8 p.m. Friday when the Therriens' dog barked. Helen Therrien went to the door. Two soldiers in uniform stood outside in the snow. They said her son was dead. Something about an ambush. Something about a head injury.

"No, no, no, it didn't happen,'' Helen Therrien said. The soldiers went to the living room, where Victor Therrien was watching television.

He heard his wife crying in another room. ''Please tell me he's just wounded,'' Victor Therrien said to the soldiers. They stood there, saying nothing.

The Therriens wouldn't believe Bangayan was dead. Gov. Jim Douglas called later that night.

"The governor is not calling if it's not true,'' Helen Therrien said.

The reality is sinking in, slowly. An Army official called the family Monday to say that Bangayan will be awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. His mother is making arrangements to bury her son in his hometown of La Union in the northern Philippines. The family might hold a memorial service for Bangayan in his adopted homeland of Vermont.

The Therriens talk of Bangayan with pride. They know he was doing what he wanted to do. They're left with that pride, and with nagging hints of remorse that he ever joined him in their briefly idyllic life together in Vermont.

"There's a part of me now,'' Victor Therrien said, ''that says I should have left him in the Philippines.''

Staff writer Adam Silverman contributed to this report.