He was a barrel-chested young man with a ready smile, a gym buff with a fondness for rescue dogs, and the very proud father of a sandy-haired boy who had just started kindergarten, people who knew Cpl. Nathan Cirillo said.

And he was near the end of an hour’s duty standing honor guard at the foremost monument to his nation’s fallen soldiers, the granite and bronze National War Memorial in central Ottawa, when a gunman shot and fatally wounded him on Wednesday morning.

Corporal Cirillo, 25, grew up in Hamilton, the country’s steel capital, at the western tip of Lake Ontario, and served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the Canadian Army’s largest reserve regiments, whose turn it was to guard the monument this week.

That duty is done in ceremonial dress. In his regiment, with its Scottish roots, that means a kilt, Glengarry bonnet, and the red garter flashes that Corporal Cirillo playfully described as “sexy” in a photograph of himself posted on his Instagram account. Guards at the monument typically carry a rifle, but it is not kept loaded, according to reports by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.