Video by Todd Weddle

A press release, terse and sterile. Names lie flat on the page, the brio and brotherhood of Marines reduced to numb statistics.

Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, a Californian, drifted from job to job before finding personal structure in the Corps.

Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, born in rural Indiana, had a sports management degree but enlisted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, a Texan, battled Hodgkin’s disease before signing on for service.

The Department of Defense joined them in an announcement, Marines killed by hostile forces in An Nasiriyah, Iraq, on March 23, 2003.

William J. Allen III felt joined to them on that day and every day after.

Mr. Allen, a Marine lance corporal from St. Joseph, got wounded in the same battle, an insurgent’s rocket-propelled grenade splitting his helmet and leaving shards of metal in his scalp. For the next year and a half, blood blisters would show up under his military haircut, and his mother would take tweezers to lift clear the tiny fragments.

A rifle shot also got him in the back, and the corpsman who got to him first had to check for signs of life, he told his mother, Mary Ellis.

Those wounds healed with time. The Marine returned to combat and eventually to the United States. But the images he retained of death — of comrades, of Iraqi women and children, of the general brutality of war — weighed on his remaining days.

The group he held most dear, the Marine Corps, trained him to kill, and he did his duty. In the end, the Marines failed William, his mother insists. They never trained him to come home, to again “be normal,” the goal to which he aspired, friends say.

When he returned from war, Mr. Allen became a frequently jailed and self-medicated shell of the gung-ho teen who volunteered at the Marine recruiting office and left for basic training a month out of Mid-Buchanan High School.

He died March 4, about six years after entering An Nasiriyah. Booze and pills caught up to his exhausted system. Emergency responders found him with no pulse on the living room floor of a friend’s St. Joseph apartment.

Presumably, the ghosts of Iraq had been there.

* * *

The 2nd Marines, headquartered at Camp Lejeune, N.C., celebrates itself as the “Follow Me Division.” The outfit dates to 1941 and needs no map to the fighting; its history includes battles in Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Saipan.

As part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2nd Marines, in which Lance Cpl. William Allen served as a member of the 2nd Assault Amphibious Battalion, became a tip-of-the-spear unit, among the first in the invasion.

Attacking from Kuwait, the Marines followed orders to secure bridges over the Euphrates River at An Nasiriyah. The city of more than 500,000 people became representative of the troubles American troops would face in the coming weeks of liberation and the coming years of occupation. It was a compact urban setting with a shadowy and dangerous enemy unreluctant to pull civilians in the way of fire.

Mr. Allen described his Iraq experience in sparing pieces when he returned. The Marine found and destroyed the letters he wrote home while deployed.

A photographer named Benjamin Lowy captured Mr. Allen looking out the top of his assault vehicle. Two years later, the image ended up on the cover of Time magazine. He never mentioned it to anyone.

Ms. Ellis believes the bottling up of memories exacerbated the post-traumatic stress he suffered. His minister, Pastor Joe Voga of New Harvest Church in Faucett, Mo., heard some of the war stories but knew of Mr. Allen’s reluctance to part with them.

“His remorse and pain came from the war experience,” the minister said. “There were things that he had to do that, to us, outside the battlefield, would be unconscionable.”

Richard S. Lowry wrote a book, “Marines in the Garden of Eden,” that chronicled the fight for control in An Nasiriyah. Ms. Ellis turns to the book to fill in gaps of her son’s war experience.

Marines in Task Force Tarawa moved through part of the city that came to be known as Ambush Alley. After limited engagement on the trek north from Kuwait, the Americans got attacked from all sides while trying to capture An Nasiriyah.

In one passage, Mr. Lowry writes: “As C206 (an amphibious tracked vehicle) moved through the final intersection, an RPG slammed into the side of the track, rocking the mammoth vehicle. In the blink of an eye, a second RPG flew in the open back and detonated, killing Sgt. Michael Bitz.”

Sgt. Bitz was one of Mr. Allen’s friends from Camp Lejeune. The lance corporal told his mother and Pastor Voga of recovering the scattered body parts of comrades.

“Ninety percent of his buddies were killed in the first 24 hours,” the minister said.

Beyond that, Mr. Allen voiced regrets for his actions. He repeatedly asked his mother not to think of him as “a monster.” He asked Pastor Voga about God’s forgiveness for the killing of innocents.

“He was having to fire on groups that included all these terrorists, and they’d bring out everybody. Women and children would be their shields,” the pastor said.

Mr. Allen’s war would take him the next 225 miles north to Baghdad. Then, he brought the war across an ocean to Missouri.

* * *

When William grew up on the farm in Agency, Mo., his family would set aside money to load up on Independence Day fireworks. Ms. Ellis remembers large gatherings turning out for the annual display.

The return of a warrior should have made the celebration on July 4, 2003, especially significant. Lance Cpl. Allen returned to the United States on June 5 and came to St. Joseph on leave.

Family members and friends gathered at his mother’s house on North 10th Street. Rockets popped overhead, and smoke clouds smelled of gunpowder.

Someone noticed William missing, then someone noticed him curled on the ground. Ms. Ellis described him as in shock. When he finally responded, it was only to cry.

The incident proved but a hint of difficult times to come. William returned from war a different person ... not surprising, but the newer self startled those who remembered his more ebullient younger demeanor.

“I never got to hear him laugh,” his mother said. “He had a beautiful laugh.”

The Marine balked at all confined spaces. When he entered a room, he scanned all around him, noting every person there, always wary.

Home for Christmas leave that first year, he erupted at a tavern, turning violent and speaking in German, a language he studied when in the Marines.

The man who liked everything military when growing up, whose school papers focused on his love of country and sense of duty, went AWOL. When the Marines caught up with him, they put him in the brig at Camp Lejeune. Eventually, the Corps parted ways with Lance Cpl. Allen, giving him an other-than-honorable discharge.

His pre-war love of the outdoors blurred into years with too much time spent behind bars and in courtrooms.

On July 28, 2005, in an apartment on North Eighth Street, St. Joseph police responded to a domestic disturbance and arrested Mr. Allen. In his pants pocket were four pills wrapped in cellophane. They were Diazepam, an anti-anxiety drug, and not of his prescription. Buchanan County charged him with a Class C felony.

(A dismissive note on the probable cause statement surely stung the veteran: “The defendant has previously been a deserter from the military service.”)

On Sept. 22, the same week he appeared on the cover of Time, he pleaded guilty to the drug charge.

Though getting a suspended imposition of sentence, his legal difficulties continued. The next month, the county charged Mr. Allen with falsely representing himself as a law enforcement officer.

Buchanan County records show that in a two-year span beginning in July 2005, he spent 167 days in the county jail. He kept blowing the provisions of his probation, quitting jobs at McDonald’s and Denny’s and associating with other drug offenders, among other things.

Those who knew Mr. Allen recognized the slow self-destruction. James Dye had been a friend since grade school and remembered William as a straight-arrow in his younger years. That changed after his return from Iraq.

“I asked him: ‘Why the vodka? Why so much vodka?’” Mr. Dye said. “He said, ‘I can’t stop seeing death.’”

In June 2007, his probation officer, Steve Noyes, reported to Judge Dan Kellogg of the Circuit Court that Mr. Allen reported to the Community Supervision Center with a nearly empty bottle of vodka in his possession.

He wanted to get caught, Pastor Voga said. The minister drove Mr. Allen to a probation and parole meeting once and could smell the alcohol.

“I think he intentionally blew it every single time,” he said. “He couldn’t cope.”

The veteran absconded on June 4, 2007, then ended up in a bar fight. Authorities jailed him and turned him loose the same day so he could have surgery for a broken jaw.

On July 19, with the legal system’s patience exhausted, Judge Kellogg signed an order committing Mr. Allen to the state Department of Corrections. At the Western Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center on Faraon Street, he became number 1135568.

* * *

Ms. Ellis said Iraq drained the joy from her son. Still, some post-war moments suggest an attempt at normalcy.

On Aug. 31, 2003, he married a childhood friend at Sparta United Methodist Church near Faucett, Mo. He and Andrea had a daughter, Trinity Nicole Allen, on Sept. 24, 2004. A day after their daughter’s second birthday, Andrea filed for divorce.

Court documents showed the assets as a 1991 Oldsmobile Cutlass, worth $576, and $47 in a checking account. A Buchanan County Circuit Judge Randall Jackson presided over the dissolution in March 2007.

The divorce decree said Andrea was “struck in the face on several occasions” by her husband. The judge granted full custody of Trinity to Ms. Allen.

In a pencil-written pleading from prison on Aug. 14, 2007, Mr. Allen wrote to Judge Jackson: “I want to be with my daughter and be a part of her life.”

Later that year, Mr. Allen met his minister for a tearful session at a St. Joseph coffee shop. Pastor Voga told him about God’s gift of forgiveness and plan for salvation. In January 2008, at the Agency Baptist Church, the clergyman immersed William in the cleansing waters of baptism.

“That was one of the few times I ever saw him smile, right after he came up out of the water,” Pastor Voga said.

* * *

Mary Ellis cries easily these days. She saw a son come home from combat only to watch as he died at war with himself.

In back of the tears, though, she carries a resolve to set things right with William. She blames the Marine Corps for not helping her son when his problems arose after the war. She faults the service for being slow to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder, for not seeing its impact on the young people sent to fight on foreign soil.

It irks her that the Marines sent no representative to William’s funeral, just as it pains her that his separation status from the Corps prevented him from being buried with full honors in a military cemetery.

If he cherished service to the Marines and fought for his country, and got sick in the process, then William should not have been abandoned, she said. The veteran’s mother considers him a casualty of war and wants his other-than-honorable dismissal overturned.

“They will honor my son,” she said.

She remembers the worst days, William’s 22-pills-a-day stay in the mental health unit at Heartland Health beginning last year.

She visited four days a week, and the two often played cards or did word search games. He remained coherent while heavily medicated, though he sent her away early some days when he recognized a dark mood’s approach.

The mother never left those sessions without crying on her drive home.

As Christmas approached last year, William sent his mother a card. The handwritten note read in part, “I wish you a happy and loving Christmas and pray God keeps watch over you. You’re the best present ever, that and your love.”

Ms. Ellis buried her son in his Marine dress blues and had a flag for his coffin. In her eulogy, she called him “my guiding light, my hero.”

His grave, on a hillside in Agency Cemetery, has no headstone yet and betrays nothing of his life as a loving son, a wounded liberator and a magazine-cover Marine.

Nor does it hint at the trauma that tortured a young man until his last days.

Here on this slope, the Marine remains at peace, the ghosts of a war far removed.

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com. Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.