WASHINGTON, Conn. – The town wept yesterday.

A beloved son of this Litchfield County community, Major Stephen Reich, was one of the 16 soldiers in the helicopter that was hit June 29 by a rocket-propelled grenade in the mountains of Afghanistan. The MH-47 Chinook helicopter was dispatched to bring reinforcements to a special operations team fighting a group of suspected Al Qaeda fighters. No one survived the helicopter’s fall in the mountains. It is believed Reich, 34, was at the craft’s controls when it plummeted.

The officer’s death has roiled his hometown, a picture-perfect community set in the rolling hills of western Connecticut. The town of 3,500, whose namesake stopped here for breakfast during the American Revolution, is the kind of place where life grinds to a halt when the high school has a baseball game. It’s the kind of place where people don’t just know each other’s names – they know each other’s business, and they feel each other’s pain. As one mourner, who didn’t want to give his name to a reporter, put it, “The knots are just tighter.”

The Reich family has been a pillar of the community for decades. Reich’s father, Ray, teaches at the Gunnery, a prestigious prep school, and his mother, Sue, is a nurse in the emergency room at New Milford Hospital. One of his sisters, Megan, is a nurse, and the other, AnnMarie, is an AIDS researcher at Harvard.

The family’s glow was not spared on Stephen Reich, a handsome baseball star and West Point graduate who had a winning, albeit shy, smile and who never owned a television set. A southpaw who threw hard but was known for his eerie control, he pitched for Team USA in 1993, and he flirted with professional baseball, playing briefly for a Baltimore Orioles farm team. But his loyalty belonged to his service, and he focused his attention on his military career. That, he said, was what made him happiest, and he voluntarily took four tours in Afghanistan.

Yesterday afternoon the town held a memorial service on the lawn outside Bryan Memorial Town Hall. The sun was hot, but perhaps 1,500 people turned up, and nobody left during the two-hour-long ceremony. Neighbors were invited to bring snacks to be served after the service. The plates of tea sandwiches, blondies, and chocolate chip cookies that the Reichs’ friends had lovingly prepared could barely be contained on two banquet tables, each spanning the length of the town hall’s lawn.

The crowd included clean-cut young couples, elderly ladies in patriotic blouses, and Governor Jodi Rell. The hundreds of folding chairs set up on the lawn were all put to use, and hundreds of other people watched from under the trees along the lawn’s perimeter. Reich’s young next-door neighbor Joshua Kimball, who looks like a surfer with his golden locks and rope necklace, had set up a video recorder to tape the service.

“He was always the ideal Washington boy,” the 18-year-old said of his former babysitter. “He was a star athlete, and he always did what he set out to do. Everybody looked up to him.”

“Basically he was like a god in this community,” a close family friend, Norman Cummings, who is a sports editor of a local newspaper, said. “He could have done a lot of cool things with his life. He was not going to fade into the background when he retired at 42. He was interested in politics and could have been a John McCain-like figure. You would have heard of him.”

A baseball coach at the Shepaug Valley Regional High School, Keith Lipinsky, who was a few years behind Reich at the school, recalled watching him play on his high school team.

“It was like watching Major League Baseball,” he said. “He was like the Little League idol.”

Reich could have signed with a Major League club after Shepaug but enrolled at West Point instead. He climbed fast in the Army, rising to major with a Special Operations Aviation Regiment. He received a bevy of awards, including two Bronze Stars and the senior Aviator Airborne badge. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, a third Bronze Star, and the Air Medal with Valor device.

A comrade in Afghanistan, Major Thomas Swanner, said Reich always chose the lead aircraft.

“He was the first on the ground, the first to help, the first to rescue,” Major Swanner said.

Reich was modest, keeping quiet about his military awards. He liked books, listening to Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days” on National Public Radio, hiking, and cooking for friends.

His younger sister said he came from a family where people rarely said “I love you,” and that sort of stoicism hung over the ceremony. Children were careful to wipe away their tears in a gingerly manner. Men hid their sorrows behind reflective sunglasses. “Strength” was a word used often to describe Reich, and a word that had a grip on the crowd.

Speakers came from all chapters of Reich’s life, with one notable exception: his wife of three months, Jill. She sat in the front row, looking shocked and weary. The couple met last October, when they were both walking their dogs. Reich persuaded her to go out to dinner with him and they were engaged four months later.

In an e-mail sent June 28, the day before he was killed, Reich wrote to her: “I slept hard and for a short duration last night. The greatest thing about it was I dreamt of you. We were together again in a different house which I did not recognize, but I woke up in the best of moods and surprisingly refreshed, all because I was with you. … You held me, stroked my head as I lay in your lap and took care of me.”

At the service, AnnMarie Reich spoke of her brother’s yen for adventure. One day when the family was driving to a fancy restaurant in nearby Litchfield, Reich saw a horse on the side of the road. He ran out of the car and followed it into the bushes. Minutes later, he appeared, riding it bareback.

Reich’s little sister, Megan Reich George, wept as she delivered a heart stirring speech to the crowd.

“You have to walk through the pain,” she said. “There’s no getting around it. You have to look sadness in the eye.”