Marcus Lasely
“Just let it all out,” she told him. So he did. She talked him through it, and at the end of the night he looked at her and said, “We need to have kids.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I get it.”
Shanna, Marcus’ wife, flew from Maryland to Camp Pendleton to see her husband return home from Afghanistan. Later that evening, for the first time in months, Marcus was no longer with his Marines. That’s when it hit him.
Marcus knew he wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, since he was old enough to watch black-and-white war movies with his dad, a Navy man. After high school, he and a friend headed to California, because—why not. They ran out of money in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and stayed most of a year.
One day he walked into the local recruiting station and told the recruiter he wanted infantry and wanted to leave as soon as possible. Within weeks, he was at boot camp in San Diego. It was 1996.
He spent the next 12 years with LAR. In 2008, as he was about to marry Shanna, he received orders to Twentynine Palms. He’d go anywhere the Marine Corps sent him, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his new wife alone in the desert while he deployed again. He turned down orders and got out.
He took a well-paying desk job, but it didn’t last. Marcus admitted that not too many people know this story: “I don’t think my wife even knows this story.” From his desk job, he saw that Bravo Company, 4th LAR, the unit he used to train with, was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s all he needed to hear; he went to a prior-service recruiter and got back in the fight.
He took over as platoon sergeant of 3rd Platoon. “We were ready for it,” he said. “But southern Helmand Province had other plans for us.”
On January 23, 2010, a suicide bomber struck the platoon. Two Marines and a corpsman were killed, and others were badly wounded.
“You need to go see somebody”
At home, Marcus thought he was fine. He cried here and there. He carried survivor’s guilt and the what-ifs everyone who’s been through war carries. But nothing he couldn’t handle—so he thought.
One day. He was driving his mother through Silver Spring, Maryland, when another driver cut them off. Marcus put the car in park—and got out.
His mother called him by a nickname that no one but her uses, and that no one but Marcus knows to this day. “What are you doing?” she said.
Marcus paused mid-step, having heard his mother, but not looking back. She used his nickname again. The second time was enough to show his mother was serious, and he took his place back in the driver’s seat.
“You need to go see somebody.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He went to the VA and told them what was happening: the hypervigilance, the switch that had been turned on and couldn’t be turned off. He said talking about it helped. So he told his teammates about what he was going through. Their reaction—surprised.
Not Laz; Laz is solid.
He told them he wasn’t ashamed to get help, and one by one, his Marines came to him on the side and asked who he’d talked to.
6 1/2 years
4th Lar is a reservist unit, meaning Marcus would go back to work after the deployment. He'd had enough of his desk, and that's when contracting became an option. Contracting appealed to him because it was his ticket back into Afghanistan.
“This country took something away from me,” he said. “Took two Marines and a corpsman. Left me with mental scars. So, yeah, I’m going back.”
He and Shanna agreed to one year. Then one year became 6 1/2 years. The work was good, and the men were good, but the calls from home kept coming.
A fire hit the family farm and burned down a barn. He missed the birth of his twins by 18 hours. Then a call came from his brother: their mother had terminal pancreatic cancer. The night before he flew out, the older guys on his team came to his room.
“Knuckle draggers don’t always know how to talk to you emotionally,” he said.
He turned on his phone after arriving in Atlanta for a layover. His mother died while he was in the air.
From the moment he got the call about the barn, Marcus had been looking for work back home. Then the twins, his mother’s death, and in January 2017, the phone rang again. It was Shanna, crying so hard he thought it was one of their kids. Her brother took the phone from her and told Marcus that their father, Dennis Smith, had been killed in a farming accident.
To this day, people in their community know Marcus as Dennis Smith’s son-in-law. At dinner, Dennis would sometimes say to Marcus, “Are you all right with me asking what it was like over there?” “I don’t mind talking about it,” Marcus would say. And Dennis would just listen. “The coolest man in the world,” Marcus said.
While Marcus was home for the funeral, a job offer he’d been waiting on came through: a position 25 minutes from home. In June 2017, Marcus left Kabul for the last time.
He was finally home. He kept a reasonable schedule, making breakfast for his kids and being there for emergencies. But the scars remained, and every year on January 23, they reopened.
The Call
Mary-Jane McWilliams, the mother of Sgt. David Smith (who succumbed to his wounds from the suicide bombing) had stayed close to the platoon. She had helped Shanna with the twins while Marcus was contracting overseas. She wanted to sit down with him and hear exactly what happened on January 23. For a long time, he wasn’t ready.
In May 2024, Marcus found himself telling a coworker about the bombing and getting emotional. There are some guys I haven’t heard from, he thought.
The next day, his old platoon commander, Rob Kroes, texted him out of the blue. Rob had heard about a program that brought combat units back together for four days of fly fishing in Montana. He asked Marcus if he thought the guys would be interested.
“Our guys don’t want to go to Atlantic City or Vegas to reconnect,” Marcus told him. “This would be perfect.” And it was; the seats filled fast.
In Billings, the group piled into a van. Rob Kroes, the driver, turned around and asked, “When’s the last time ya’ll were together?” Some of them hadn’t seen each other since the deployment. “No kidding,” Rob said. “I couldn’t tell.”
Porch Therapy
At the lodge, Marcus roomed with Shane, who was also a friend of his family. While they unpacked, Shane told him the cancer that had started as a small spot on his heel had spread to his spine and his brain. Shane was in bad shape, but his wife told him to go; he needed it, and so would Marcus.
That night, Shane lit a cigarette and told everyone the same way he told Marcus. For the rest of the trip, he claimed the biggest plate of food, always telling everyone it was because he had cancer.
In the evenings, they sat on the porch and went back through the deployment and more. Marcus called it porch therapy, and he told the boys what he’d been carrying over the years. There was laughter, there were tears, and the men filled in the pieces some of their minds had erased or forgotten.
“Porch therapy was the best part of that trip,” he said. “Catching trout was a bonus.”
Marcus came home lighter than he’d been in years. For Shane, it was his last time with the boys.
The next summer, as Shane got worse, Marcus was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Shane, who was dying, walked him through it.
“You have no control over it,” Marcus said. “You can’t blow it up. You can’t shoot it. You can’t choke it.”
Shane died that fall, before Marcus’s surgery. Marcus refused to feel sorry for himself. Shane had been fighting for years and never skipped a beat.
Marcus’s surgery was on November 11, Veterans Day, the same date he joined the Marine Corps in 1996. This past fall, he got his third undetectable blood test.
Two summers after that porch, Marcus made the calls again, this time with one more name on the list: Mary-Jane, the first Gold Star mother Bar X had ever hosted.
One night after dinner, they gathered in the living room and gave her what she’d asked for. One by one, each man told her about that day from his perspective. Marcus thought he was all cried out—he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
She held him. Then she let out a long breath and smiled. After all these years, she said, the weight was finally off her shoulders.
Onward
Asked what advice he’d give a combat veteran on his way out of service, Marcus didn’t hesitate.
“Start networking before you leave. You’ve got buddies who’ve already made it to the other side. Talk to them. Don’t rely on the Marine Corps to do that for you.”
“Sign up for the VA, even if you don’t take anything from it. You never know what’s going to come up. And it helps the guys behind you, because they track this stuff.”
“And don’t be hard on yourself if nothing happens right away. The military taught you how to adapt. You might have to take a job that keeps you away from home for a while, or one that doesn’t pay well for a while. Don’t be discouraged. It’ll play out.”
Then he added one more thing.
“We don’t always need to hear the bottom of the barrel. The guys need to hear that it’ll be okay, that there’s opportunity. They need to hear about guys coming through it and making it through.”