Sergeant Dugan's body was flown to Ramstein Air Base, Germany, yesterday.

In Ridgeway, 70 miles northwest of Columbus, the annual choir concert yesterday at Ridgemont High School, which Sergeant Dugan attended in the mid-1970's, was dedicated to his memory. Most of the students performing were not even born when the 38-year-old soldier first joined the Army about a year after graduating from the school in 1975. But some of their parents, like Bruce and Kay LeVally, remember him as the dark-haired boy everyone called Donny.

"We were in the choir together," Mr. LeVally said. "We were in about everything together, except things that took a lot of brains. He was in those. I wasn't."

The two first became friends when they were 6, and when they grew up and started having children of their own Sergeant Dugan asked his old buddy to be the godfather of his first child. At the time of his death, Sergeant Dugan had four children from two marriages.

"We started out in first grade together and we went all the way to now," Mr. LeVally said. "We drank our first beer together. We were in Boy Scouts together. We played on the football team together."

Frank Galyk, a Logan County deputy sheriff, was one of Sergeant Dugan's closest friends in high school. Two years ago, Sergeant Dugan was back in Ridgeway and stopped in at the sheriff's department for a visit. They talked about the old days and the new days and the risks of patrolling the streets of a distant country or a darkened county road.