Christopher Cosgrove was my bumbling bunkmate in boot camp. I remember always having to help him make his bed, military style, because he could never get the hang of it. He would panic some nights, because his was inevitably the last bed unmade and he didn’t think he could take any more of the drill instructors yelling at him. They picked on us both and often, but Cosgrove had more trouble adjusting.

He was friendly, a really likable guy, but those traits don’t win you any points in boot camp. I remember being torn by his humility. Everybody cursed at him because it took him just a bit longer to accomplish things, especially when the drill instructors determined we would all pay for his so-called failures with sweat. I never felt like I did enough to defend him, and what’s worse, sometimes I joined in the taunting.

Boot camp was easier for me because I never took it too seriously. I probably cost the other recruits more push-ups, more tribulations in the sand, than Cosgrove and all the other platoon’s noted “fuck-ups” combined, but I did it with a certain charm, and I think because of this they came to see in me an airing of their own grievances. (One of our drill instructors shouted at me and the other recruits who made up the slowest-running part of the platoon as I huffed my asthmatic huffs, screaming for more and always laughing, maniacally—“See, Delgado’s probably the fucking weakest out of all you, but he’s got heart!”)

I was sitting in an office today waiting for the prior service recruiter who was helping me with my attachment to an infantry unit deploying to Afghanistan in November. I wandered around the room reading the various papers posted to the walls and came across one with a familiar picture—it was Cosgrove. The note next to his photo said he died in Iraq as part of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines. That’s the company I’m attaching to. I realized then that this is part of why my prior service recruiter said the company was in dire need of 0311s—the four-digit occupational designator for the Marine Corps rifleman—because some of theirs were killed.

Cosgrove’s is the first death I’ve heard of from the 64 men who graduated boot camp with Platoon 1065, my platoon. I’m remembering all the times I helped him, and picked on him, and talked behind his back and defended him. This was a living, breathing human being, gone. There’s nothing I can write down that can portray to you what that means.

People warned me from the beginning of this whole activation process. I told them I fully understood the ramifications of a lateral move to the infantry, that I was expecting the lifelong regrets of death and war. I felt that I needed those emotions to build on, to more fully understand the mindset of the young Americans over whom I would one day have the authority to order into conflict.

But the other day I imagined myself in a coffin with my mother at the step, and I thought, the other college-aged kids aren’t going through this tonight. And they’re not writing about roommates they lost in the war.

Kind, likable Cosgrove is dead; I’ll be taking his place. We are the replacements. War greases its cogs on the lives and principles of young men.