On Memorial Day, we remember fallen soldiers with symbols. Big, bright flags. Wreaths of flowers. Pictures and medals, posted everywhere. Scott and Lorna Harris have all of those tokens on display inside their Patten home to remember their son, Spc. Dustin J. Harris, who was killed last month while serving his country during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

They have all of those mementos – and they have the bear.

Lorna Harris first saw “The Land of the Free … Because of the Brave” teddy bear, with its light brown fur and its arms open wide in an embrace, in a store in the months after her son’s deployment.

She was so overwhelmed with emotion, she almost didn’t buy it.

Now, she’s so glad that she did.

When you squeeze its plush right foot, the bear plays heartwarming messages from actual military members’ families for their loved ones in the armed services to listen to. The recorded messages are all in different voices, thanking the soldiers for defending their country, telling them how much they are missed.

“I saw it in a store, and I pressed its foot and I immediately started crying,” she said earlier this week, sitting at the kitchen table with her husband. “I just left the store. I left without it.”

But she knew she had to have it. She sent Scott back to buy it, and tucked it into one of the care packages that the family shipped overseas to Dustin every few weeks.

Harris, a 2002 Katahdin High School graduate and member of the Army’s 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, had been in the country since last August. The 21-year-old was stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. On April 6, he was on foot patrol with members of the

101st Airborne Division in Bayji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, when an improvised explosive device detonated nearby.

Shortly after his death, the Harris family began receiving his belongings, keepsakes that he kept in both Alaska and Iraq.

“The bear is something that I really wanted back,” Lorna Harris said, smiling at the little bear in his camouflage jacket and dog tag, clutching a letter from home in one paw and an envelope in the other. “I was so glad to get it.”

The bear, the photos, the image of their son’s shy grin and his close-cropped military haircut – those are just some of the mementos that the family is clinging to as their first Memorial Day without Dustin approaches.

It has just been too difficult, Scott Harris said, to schedule much for Monday. They have been asked to walk in Patten’s Memorial Day parade, but they are not sure if they will do it.

For Scott, Lorna, and their 18-year-old son, Dylan, the grief remains as fresh as the memories of Dustin.

And those memories, they said recently, are plentiful.

‘He would have done it every day’

Dustin Harris was a qualified paratrooper, and he loved to jump from the sky.

“He would have done it every day,” Lorna said.

“He was just ecstatic when he called home after he made his first jump,” echoed Scott Harris, smiling as sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows of the family home. “His goal at the start [of his military service] was to be a paratrooper, and he did it.”

To his family, it was no surprise. Dustin Harris was a daredevil by nature. He was the boy who, when you took him to an amusement park, would hop onboard every ride while the rest of the family watched.

Born in Millinocket, Harris was a natural athlete who excelled at soccer in high school. After graduation, he studied diesel and heavy mechanics at Eastern Maine Technical College.

He joined the Army in July 2004 and was assigned to Fort Wainwright in February 2005, according to an Army statement. He was a motor transport operator who adjusted well to military life, despite the fact, his father said, that he tended to be clumsy.

“It was those size 13 feet,” Scott Harris said, laughing at the memory. “They sure did get in the way sometimes. Not all the time, just when he wasn’t paying attention.”

A fan of the music group Staind, Dustin was the type of person whose six-inch fish catch would triple in size when the story was told to family and friends.

Lorna Harris believes that such embellishment was going on when Dustin told his Army buddies about her “door.”

Her entire family teased her, she explained, when she found an old door at the dump and brought it home to adorn her rock garden.

“All of them were like, ‘Why did you get that old thing?'” she said.

On Wednesday, Lorna Harris sorted through several pictures of Dustin posing in front of the weather-beaten gateway with its peeling paint, smiling beneath his sunglasses in the summer sun.

She knows he told them about the door, she said, because after his death, his comrades sent home something to clue her in.

It was a gigantic picture of the door to Dustin’s room in Iraq – autographed on both sides by his friends with messages and promises that they would never forget him.

It would be difficult to forget him anyway, his mother said.

“There wasn’t one person that he met that he did not leave an impression on,” she recalled.

In letters and e-mails sent to the family, his fellow soldiers remembered him as a funny, well-mannered patriot who loved his country and his mother’s pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies.

A consummate protector, Harris would often volunteer for the more dangerous posts during convoys, the soldiers said. If something happened, they said, he would rather have it happen to him than to someone with a child or spouse.

Inside the Harris home, reminders of Dustin are everywhere, scattered among dozens of photographs of Dylan Harris posing for his high school portrait.

Dylan will graduate from Katahdin High School in a few weeks and head off to the University of Maine at Presque Isle in the fall.

Underneath a coffee table, which is decorated with the medals that Dustin won, lies a case that contains the flag that shrouded his casket on the way home from Iraq.

While serving in Iraq, Harris garnered a host of awards and medals, including a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, a Parachutist Badge and an Army Good Conduct Medal.

On the wall near the doorway is a quilt that his grandmother made, the fabric emblazoned with photos of Dustin in his Army gear in the desert.

In one of the pictures, he is surrounded by Iraqi children.

“Dustin was always very good with kids,” Lorna Harris said Wednesday.

He forged an especially tight bond with his 7-year-old cousin, Jett Troutt of Hermon. Last Christmas, Dustin sent the boy a stuffed camel named Dune, which was nestled among the flowers at his memorial service last month.

“They were like this,” Scott Harris said, holding up his hand and wrapping two fingers around each other. “They had a phenomenal bond. Dustin called him his ‘little buddy.'”

The Harris family made it a ritual to attend the Fourth of July parade in Bangor each year, and last year was no exception. Dustin was home on leave during the parade and accompanied them to watch the colorful floats and hear the resounding marching bands in his Army uniform.

“He got lots of handshakes,” Scott Harris said. “Kids and veterans would just run up to him and shake his hand and thank him for serving. We were very proud.”

While at home on leave, Dustin was the main attraction at a family picnic.

“We had between 60 and 70 friends show up, and we had a great day,” his mother recalled. “Thank God we did that.”

‘Hopefully, the last’

Memorial Day is just another painful holiday for the family, another date on the calendar that they endure without Dustin.

There have already been several.

His birthday was May 11, and Mother’s Day followed a short time later.

On his birthday, the family took a cake up to his gravesite in the Patten Cemetery and stuck a birthday balloon next to the flowers and memorabilia that other friends and family had already placed there.

One visitor left a Staind T-shirt. Another left a little bear clutching a soccer ball. Tiny U.S. flags flutter in the breeze.

On Wednesday, Scott Harris stood in front of the plot and straightened the resplendent balloon. He gently smoothed the leaves on a flower arrangement.

He doesn’t really know how to describe how hard it is for the family to go on without their “mighty paratrooper.”

Some days, Scott Harris said, are OK. Other times, they’re just not.

The wound is still so raw, especially as another holiday without him approaches.

The Harris family still sends packages to his unit overseas. Lorna and Scott are planning to go to Alaska when Dustin’s troop returns in August.

“He was the first soldier in his battalion to die,” Lorna Harris said Wednesday, briefly closing her eyes. “The first, and hopefully, the last.”