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Vernal • Hundreds of Uinta Basin residents crowded an LDS stake center here Saturday to celebrate the dedicated life of a fallen Marine, and hundreds more stood with hands over hearts along the 5-mile procession route to the cemetery.

It was a total community salute to Vernal's first loss in the Afghanistan war, 21-year-old Sgt. Daniel Gurr, and it touched his family.

"Tell them thanks," David Gurr said, referring to everyone in the church and on the streets as he climbed into a Dodge Ram to follow his son's casket to the burial. "[It's] awesome. The outcry and the outpouring ... it's been overwhelming."

Gas station and church marquees from Roosevelt to Vernal heaped blessings on the young Marine shot Aug. 5 while patrolling in Afghanistan's Helmand province, and Boy Scouts stood at attention when his body rolled past the county library.

"You couldn't feel a whole lot prouder and blessed to be part of this community and support him," said Melissa Olsen, who works with Gurr's mother and sister at the local ambulance service.

Inside the Glines Stake Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gurr's friends, relatives and mentors remembered him as a dedicated leader who made time for anyone who was in need or lonely.

Friend Bo Ramsey remembered Gurr's last visit home, when he kept talking about who was left on his list to see.

"Who's that?" Ramsey recalled saying.

" 'Oh, it's my friend's grandma's uncle's sister,' " he quoted his friend.

"He loved everyone."

Gurr also was essentially a lifelong Marine recruit, waiting until he could enlist in his high school senior year and leave upon graduation in 2008. It's a sacrifice that Ramsey said all should remember and respond to.

"He literally took a bullet for everyone in this room and in this country," Ramsey said to about 700 assembled mourners. "Be proud to be an American, because that was what he was protecting. This is the only way we can pay him back."

Jared McKeachnie, who coached Gurr when he was a high school soccer captain, remembered a fierce defender who took the feet out from under much larger opponents — "He would just destroy them, flick them like a booger" — but also a caring gentleman who chose to help the weakest among his teammates.

"Step up like Daniel did," McKeachnie said, "and ask what can you do for your country."

Gov. Gary Herbert also called mourners to action, quoting the Bible and the Book of Mormon in comparing their potential service to others with his service to the nation and world.

"We need to remember," Herbert said, "but we need to remember and do."

Gurr's maternal grandfather, Michael Vanderlinden, read a matter-of-fact eulogy echoing the obituary and its list of survivors, ending with a verbal salute.

"That'll do, Daniel," he said, rapping his knuckles on the lectern. "Semper fi."

At the cemetery, fire trucks from Vernal and Naples hoisted giant American flags over the burial hill, where three directions of the horizon showed eastern Utah's tawny bluffs.

A dove whistled over the crowd and past Marines' heads as they folded flags draping Gurr's casket. The Marines presented one flag to Gurr's father, who held it primly, with one hand under and one over, and the other to his mother, Tracy Beede, who cradled and kissed it like an infant until the ceremony ended and hundreds walked away silently. —

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