[Steve doesn't need to ask something stupid, like Was he important to you? It's obvious he was - because this isn't the first person Sledge has know that's been killed, not if he's been gone for as long as Steve suspects he has.]

I'm sorry. [Which doesn't fix it any more than crying does, no, but he really does mean it.] He must have been a pretty great guy. Good COs are hard to come by. Good men can be, sometimes, too, and snipers don't differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones.

Did it just happen?

[Because that would, in the modern vernacular, suck. But it's also what he suspects might be the case.]