MILO – He was halfway through a 12-mile forced march, his feet so bloody with blisters that his commanding officer wanted him to stop.

But U.S. Army Spc. William Charles Koelsch III wouldn’t hear of it.

“‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t quit. I won’t quit,'” Lt. Joseph Hardigree recalled Koelsch as saying to his captain. “‘I am going to go on.'”

That indomitable spirit and toughness, as well as his goofy grin, were recalled Thursday during services at Lary Funeral Home on Thursday for the 23-year-old Koelsch. Burial with full military honors followed at Evergreen Cemetery. About 200 people attended, including friends and relatives from California, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia.

A Milo native, Koelsch was killed when a truck in which he was a passenger flipped over during a training exercise near Slagle, La., on April 9. A member of the Headquarters Company of the 1st Airborne Battalion, 509th Infantry Unit, he was stationed at nearby Fort Polk.

To hear his friends and family tell it, Koelsch was an irrepressible optimist whose quick humor and constant desire to please masked a fierce desire to improve himself as a soldier.

Brownville Community Church Pastor Darren L. Morgan said Koelsch fulfilled a lifelong desire when he became an Airborne trooper – and he worked extraordinarily hard at it, too.

Koelsch joined the Army “not so much to escape Milo as to see the world and such exotic places as Fort Polk, Louisiana,” Morgan said wryly during the memorial service.

Relatively short in stature, Koelsch had to work extra hard, and lost a fair amount of weight, as he transformed himself into an Airborne soldier. Koelsch was a transportation specialist, or truck driver, who took pride in being from Maine even as he joked about Mainer eccentricities, Morgan said.

“I was once told, ‘You can’t get there from here,’ but I found my way,” Koelsch wrote in his MySpace profile.

His comrades, Hardigree said, looked at Koelsch as a passionate solider who seemed to take on a personal mission – to make his fellow soldiers laugh – atop the one he was assigned.

Koelsch (pronounced Keltch) was the same way as a youngster, recalled his cousin, Bob Thomas, who journeyed from Tom’s River, N.J., for the service.

“He just had this goofy smile on his face all the time,” Thomas said.

Hardigree, a native of a small Georgia town, said he could relate to the wide-eyed wonder with which Koelsch seemed to regard new things, and to his desire to master them.

Over the last few weeks, Koelsch had been shadowing Hardigree to learn more about soldiering. Hardigree recalled spending a day teaching Koelsch to tie mountaineering knots and then seeing the next morning that Koelsch had bought himself a British Special Air Service handbook to learn how the Brits fix ropes.

“He was a great soldier and a better person,” Hardigree said. “His heart was absolutely huge. I told him a few weeks ago, ‘If every soldier in this Army had as big a heart as you, we wouldn’t have any problems.’ He epitomized selfless service.”

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BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY NICK SAMBIDES JR.

Family members grieve as Brownville Community Church Pastor Darren L. Morgan performs burial rites over the flag-draped coffin of U.S. Army Spc. William Charles Koelsch III at Evergreen Cemetery in Milo on Thursday.