They all said they’d miss his big, toothy smile. Even in his official military portrait, Shinwoo Kim — nicknamed “Doughboy” — couldn’t help grinning, like someone had poked him in the stomach to make him laugh.

“He has a smile that could brighten up the room,” said his older sister Shinae, 27. “He was caring. He was hilarious. He was loyal. He was adventurous. He always had a vision about what he wanted to do.”

The news about Kim’s death on June 28 devastated his friends and family. Attacked by insurgents in Baghdad, Kim and three other soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colo., were killed by makeshift explosives.

Kim, a 23-year-old Army medic from Fullerton, Calif., was due home in January after what would have been a 15-month deployment in Iraq.

“As of right now, our emotions are like waves,” said his girlfriend Tammy Cho, 22. “It just comes and goes. Some waves are bigger than others. It’s still unbelievable.”

 

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Kim was born on Feb. 10, 1984, in South Korea. His parents moved to the U.S. in 1987, raising their three children in Southern California.

Kim’s love for family is evident on his MySpace page, a portion of which he dedicated to his mother, Kum Ok, and father, Yoo Bok, both of whom he described as his heroes.

“They made everything w/love and God,” he wrote on his page.

He attended Sunny Hills High School, where he met Cho during his senior year. She was a year younger, and they dated on and off for more than four years. After graduating in June 2002, he began a stint at Fullerton Junior College a few months later.

Despite protestations from his family and friends, Kim enlisted into the U.S. Army in January 2005, because he wanted to be independent and better himself, Cho said.

He decided to become a medic and had aspirations to be a pharmacist when he finished his military stint. According to Shinae, he wanted to help people in case he went off to war rather than cause any harm to others.

In October 2006, Kim left for Iraq for a yearlong deployment. He called and e-mailed his family and friends as much as he could. He told them that he missed them, as well as mundane things like his  new car and eating Double-Double burgers from In-N-Out with pink lemonade.

He told Cho about the time he saved the life of a fellow soldier who was injured by a roadside bomb. “Doc, you saved my life, you saved my life,” he said to Kim. It was “pretty cool to hear something like that,” Kim later relayed to Tammy. He couldn’t wait to come back home and attend University of Southern California’s pharmacy school.

“He was so excited,” Cho said. “He couldn’t wait to go to school.”