PHILLIPS – Another American flag was added Tuesday to the many already decorating the graves of veterans at Mile Square Cemetery.

After about an hourlong service at Mt. Abram High School in Salem Township, the family and friends of Sgt. Richard Kevin Parker paid their respects and said their final goodbyes on a warm but windy mountain day.

About 350 people showed up for his funeral inside the muggy high school gymnasium.

The 26-year-old from Phillips died when two roadside bombs detonated as his convoy passed them June 13 in southern Iraq. His unit was assigned to guard convoys traveling between Iraq and Kuwait.

Parker, with a Maine National Guard unit, was the gunner aboard an armored version of the Humvee, known as the M-1114. It was his second tour of duty in Iraq, a tour he volunteered for, and he was about 20 days short of coming home when he was killed, his friend Jim Roy, who spoke at Parker’s funeral, said.

Roy said he met Parker about seven years ago and they became fast friends even though Parker was only 19 at the time and Roy was 37. The two had much in common, Roy said. “We both grew up in small Maine towns, we both loved to read, hunt, fish and work hard,” Roy said.

In an e-mail exchange on May 31, Roy asked Parker if there was anything he needed in Iraq, Roy recalled. Parker’s response:

“I don’t need anything right now as we will be coming home soon.”

Roy spoke of his friend’s beaming pride “both in mind and in body” after returning home from the war after his first tour. Roy said he sensed that in the military Parker had found his calling.

“Richard was the kind of person that was always willing to help,” Roy said. “He never waited for someone to ask him for help; he would always see the need and lift a hand to help. He would give anyone help at anytime for nothing more than the gratification he found in helping people.”

Going back to Iraq for a second tour seemed a given for Parker, Roy said.

“No one asked him to return to Iraq,” Roy said. “Not the military, not the Iraqi people, not even his fellow soldiers. But he knew there was still work to be done there, and this was Richard’s nature, he was going to help.”

Parker’s mother Dixie Flagg also eulogized her son in a statement read by National Guard Chaplain Andy Gibson. She told a story of Parker when he was 5 and how he once cut his long eyelashes with scissors because his classmates teased him for having “girl eyelashes.” Flagg wrote that her son never mentioned the teasing until she noticed, while scolding him for something else, that his eyelashes had been trimmed. She immediately forgot what it was she was scolding him for when she saw his eyelashes, she wrote.

Flagg also told of the time when he was 7 and some classmates informed him that Santa wasn’t real. He asked his mom about that.

Flagg wrote she told him, “That as long as you believe in Santa, Santa is real.” His response was, “Mama, I believe.” She said he continued to believe in Santa for three or four more years after that.

She also wrote of the time when he called her when he was 23, asking her how to make an apple pie. As she told him the recipe she soon realized that he was actually making the pie with her on the line. He told her to slow down because, “I haven’t even measured the sugar out yet.”

An hour and a half later he was still on the phone with his mother when the pie came out of the oven. The next night he called her asking how to bake tarts and again spent more than an hour on the phone. His girlfriend at the time teased him, saying Parker didn’t really want to know how to bake a pie or tarts, but what he really wanted was to talk to his mother and that made him a “mama’s boy.”

“We love you son,” Flagg wrote. “And I’m so glad that Richard became this mama’s boy.”

At the cemetery about 120 people gathered where Parker was buried with full military honors, including the playing of taps and three volleys from a military firing squad. The flag draping his casket was folded by a military honor guard and delivered to his mother. She and Parker’s father, Scott Hood, and his fiancee’, Ashley Smith, each placed a rose on the casket.

Parker was the 34th Mainer to be killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.