Snow was coming down, heavy and wet, when Iggy Infantides and Terry Wright left work a couple of Wednesdays ago.

Iggy climbed into his car, Terry headed for his truck, and the two postal employees left the huge U.S. Postal Service sorting facility in Scarborough, headed for the back corner of South Portland’s Calvary Cemetery.

It was April 4, Larry Roukey’s birthday, and no storm was going to keep them from having a beer with their buddy.

The official record is too clear, too concise. Sgt. Lawrence Roukey died in Baghdad on April 26, 2004, when a booby-trapped warehouse blew up around him. He was manning a gun on a Humvee, protecting the other soldiers in his patrol.

For the past three years, Iggy and Terry have made a yearly pilgrimage to the big black headstone that marks Larry’s final resting spot. Another buddy, Jim Page, makes his own visit. This year Page, who works an earlier shift at the sorting facility, had already left his footprints in the new snow.

The four of them had worked together at the old sorting facility, three floors in the Portland Post Office, sharing long hours, the Red Sox, Foxwoods.

Larry had re-enlisted in the Army Reserves because of 9/11. “I knew how strong the military meant to him, just by the questions he asked me,” said Terry, who spent 22 years in the Air Force. “So when he decided to go back in, none of us were surprised.”

“He was all gung ho about going back,” said Iggy.

“We didn’t know he was leaving,” said Terry. “He didn’t want anyone to know. He walked out the door, and he stopped and turned around and he waved to all of us. And then, after he left, our boss told us he’s getting deployed to Iraq. And that’s the last time we ever saw him.”

Larry had been in Iraq six weeks, just three weeks past 33rd birthday. He left behind his wife, Ryann, a too-young son, Nicholas, a teenage stepdaughter, Sonja.

“I’ll never forget his birthday,” Terry said, “and I’ll never forget when he died. Some guys you meet, and you just know they’re real, good, people. You never get a chance to meet a lot of people like that in your lifetime. He’s one of them. He never said a bad word about anybody.

At Calvary Cemetery, Terry opens a Molson beer, and pours half of it on the ground. He steps back, raises the bottle in a toast, takes a taste, and passes it to Iggy, who does the same.

It’s not possible to forget, and still too painful to remember.

“It’s hard,” said Terry. “It’s still so hard.”