Man on a mission

Sgt. Landon Rasmussen's proposal to his girlfriend Marcy Oakland is accepted moments after he returns home from his second tour in Iraq, April 8.

It’s very evident that Sgt. Landon Rasmussen was the right man for the job.

An Army sniper with the 4th Brigade Combat Team 1st Armored Division and a veteran of two tours in Iraq, Rasmussen knows the importance of a mission, tactical precision and stealth.

So when he dropped to one knee April 8 on the tarmac at Fort Bliss, Texas, to propose to his girlfriend Marcy Oakland, it was anything but spontaneous.

While the Redmond couple vaguely knew each other in high school it wasn’t until a little more than a year ago that they reconnected, via the social networking Web site, Facebook. Landon, 24, came home on leave in March 2009 and began dating Marcy, 24, until deployment last spring.
Long-distance romance soon led to talk of marriage but a formal proposal had to wait until Landon returned – and months of solitude gave him plenty of time to plan.

“Marcy’s been so supportive of me being in the military,” said Landon, “I knew I wanted to be in uniform if possible when I proposed.” After she sent him a handmade pillowcase for Christmas, complete with photos of the couple and the official snipers’ creed, Landon’s plan started to take place.

“I hung it above my bed in my tent in Iraq; my brothers there were pretty impressed by it,” he said. The details of the proposal came slowly. “Sitting on guard one night I had a lot of time to think and the idea popped into my head. I wanted to go all out; I didn’t want it to be any ordinary proposal.”

A soldier with a mission, Landon planned down to the tiniest detail. He called Marcy’s parents to ask for her hand and swore them to secrecy. After fruitless weeks searching for a wedding ring online, he designed his own – then drove the jeweler crazy with endless revisions and tweaks, all via e-mails with attached photos of the work in progress.
Back home, Marcy was totally unaware anything was afoot.

“Everybody was in on the secret but me,” she recalled with a laugh. “I guess whenever I left the room everyone would talk about it but I never caught them.”

Determined to propose the moment he stepped off the plane in the U.S., Landon knew he would have to get special permission from the Army.

“Typically, the soldiers coming off the plane are not allowed to come up to the crowd and the crowd is not allowed to cross the barricade,” said Landon’s mother Karil Mallory in an e-mail. “We can (only) yell and scream and welcome them home with all the cheering that is humanly possible.”

Landon said the usual procedure is for soldiers to exit the plane in formation, relinquish their weapons and enter a building for debriefing before being released to greet family.

“My dad had to get permission from the MPs for me to break formation and even then I didn’t know if I could until the last minute,” recalled Landon.
Ever the tactician, he had developed a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C to follow, to account for different obstacles.

When the plane touched down at Fort Bliss his parents sent him a text letting them know the MPs had cleared his unusual request (according to base officials, it was the first on-tarmac proposal since the unit was assigned there).

He also found out Marcy and both their families were at the front of the barricade (important placement for her to see his proposal gesture) and that his mother had the ring – finished too late to send to him in Iraq – to slip in his hand at the right moment.

He unfurled the pillowcase, where the reverse side read “Will You Marry Me Marcy Oakland?” as he walked away from the plane, smiling broadly.
Caught on film by his family and the news crew that caught wind of the proposal is Landon being halted on the tarmac by an MP who wasn’t in on the arrangement (Plan C?), and a buddy wishing him luck with a good-natured “Don’t pass out Ras.”

“I saw the news crew filming him but I thought it was just because they had interviewed his mother earlier,” said Marcy. When she saw the sign she knew, and although the special moment was caught on tape by two news crews and numerous personal cameras she never noticed them.

“All I saw was Landon,” Marcy said.

“It was definitely a team effort,” said Landon. “We’re so lucky she didn’t find out, so many people already knew.”

-- story by Leslie Pugmire Hole