Sergeant First Class Marcus Devereux, 41 years old, missing his right leg below the knee and most of the hearing in his left ear, sat on a stool on the Family Feud stage on June 18th, 2025 during a special Veterans edition taping. And when Steve Harvey asked him to share what serving his country had meant to him, Marcus looked directly at Steve and said six words into the microphone in a voice that did not shake.
Honestly, Mr. Harvey, I regret serving. The studio fell completely silent. The four other veterans on his team, men he had served with in the same unit in Kandahar province, did not flinch. They had been waiting 12 years to hear him say it out loud. Steve Harvey did not laugh. He did not redirect.
He set his cue cards down on the podium. He looked at Marcus for a long moment. And then Steve Harvey did something that the live audience would later describe as the most quietly powerful thing they had ever seen a host do. He pulled up a second stool from off stage, sat down directly across from Marcus at eye level, and said, “Brother, tell me what they did to you.
I got nowhere to be. Start at the beginning.” The Devereux team had been assembled by a veterans advocacy nonprofit called Brothers Forward, which had partnered with the Family Feud production team to put together two five-man veteran teams for a special episode airing around the 4th of July. Marcus was the team captain.
He served with four other men, all from the same unit. Staff Sergeant Diego Ramos, 43, from El Paso, Texas. Specialist Tyrone Whitfield, 39. from Detroit, Michigan. Sergeant Brandon McCready, 40, from Bangor, Maine. And Corporal Anthony Tony Petrov, 38, from Cleveland, Ohio. They had served together in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, from 2010 to 2013.
They had been a tight unit. Three deployments, 41 combat patrols. They had lost two men from their original team. A young rifleman named Cody Brennan, killed by an IED in Wardak Province in 2011. And a medic named Sergeant Ellis Coombs, who had survived three tours and shot himself in his garage in Pensacola in 2017.
The five men on the stage that day were the survivors of an eight-man brotherhood. Marcus Devereux had grown up in a town called Utah, Alabama, population 2,000 and change, where his mother Loretta worked nights at a poultry processing plant and raised three boys alone after his father, a long-haul trucker named Calvin Devereux, had a fatal heart attack in a rest stop outside of Birmingham when Marcus was 11.
Loretta was the kind of mother who kept the lights on by working 64-hour weeks and who made sure her three sons ate hot meals even when she had not eaten one herself in three days. Marcus was the oldest. He had taken on the role of second father to his younger brothers, Jamal and Ricky, by the time he was 12 years old.
He had not been a good student. He had been a quiet one. He had played football. He had worked at a tire shop on weekends starting at 14. He had graduated high school in 2003 with a 2.4 GPA and no realistic path to college. The army recruiter who came through the high school gymnasium that spring had offered Marcus the army college fund and a signing bonus of $8,000.
Marcus had signed the paperwork on a Tuesday afternoon in the school cafeteria. He had been 17 years old. His mother had cried that night and told him she was proud of him. He had shipped out for basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia 3 weeks after his 18th birthday. But nobody in that studio knew what was about to happen.
What Marcus carried onto the Family Feud stage that day was something he had been carrying for 12 years and had never said out loud to anyone. Not to his wife, not to his three children, not to the VA psychiatrist who had asked him at every 6-month appointment whether he had any thoughts of self-harm. Not to the four men on the stage beside him who had been waiting for him to say it.
The thing he carried was not about the war. The thing he carried was about what had happened after. On October 4th, 2013 in the 11th month of his third deployment on a routine patrol 3 miles outside Forward Operating Base Wilson Marcus Devereux had stepped on a pressure plate IED that had been buried under a goat path used by local children to walk to school.
The explosion had taken his right leg below the knee. It had ruptured both eardrums. It had thrown shrapnel into his lower back, his right shoulder, and his face. It had killed two civilians, a 13-year-old boy named Habib and his 10-year-old sister Farida who had been walking the same path on their way to a one-room schoolhouse a half mile away.
Marcus had been conscious when the medic arrived. He had been conscious when the medevac helicopter landed. He had been conscious when they put the tourniquet on his leg. He had not been conscious when they amputated 8 hours later at a forward surgical hospital in Kandahar. He had been conscious for everything that mattered.
The two children had not been part of any briefing. They had been on a goat path. The Taliban had buried the IED four nights earlier intending to hit an American convoy that took a different route on the morning Marcus and his unit walked through. The children had been walking to school. The pressure plate had not cared who walked over it.
Marcus had stepped first. His foot had been 6 inches in front of Habib’s. If Marcus had stepped 12 inches to the right, the boy and his sister would have walked home that afternoon to their mother in a small mud-walled house. And Marcus would have walked back to FOB Wilson on two legs. 6 inches. Marcus had spent 12 years calculating those 6 inches.
He had been awarded a Purple Heart. He had been awarded a Bronze Star. He had been medically discharged in March of 2014 with a 70% disability rating and a prosthetic leg fitted at Walter Reed. He had come home to Utah, Alabama. He had moved back in with his mother for the first 6 months because he could not climb stairs, and his mother’s house was the only one without them.
He had been 28 years old. He had been told by the discharge counselor at Walter Reed that the VA was prepared to support him with everything he would need. That was the first lie. There were many. The system failed Marcus Devereaux in slow paperwork-shaped ways for the next 11 years.
The prosthetic leg he had been fitted for at Walter Reed required a specific socket that needed to be refitted as his residual limb changed shape, which it did repeatedly over the first 3 years. The VA hospital in Tuscaloosa, the closest one to Utah, did not have a prosthetist on staff. The nearest one was in Birmingham, 97 miles away. Marcus had to drive there for every fitting.
His first prosthetic leg developed a hairline crack in the socket 8 months after he came home. He filed a request for a replacement. The request was denied because it had not been 12 months since the original fitting. He filed an appeal. The appeal sat in a queue for 19 weeks. Marcus walked on a cracked prosthetic for 19 weeks.
The friction caused a pressure sore that turned into a staph infection that put him in the hospital for 11 days. He filed for hazard reimbursement. He was denied because the documentation he had submitted did not include a specific form he had not been told to submit. The PTSD diagnosis came in December of 2014.
He had been having nightmares, the same nightmare every night, the 6 in the boy and the girl, the goat path, the dust, the part where he turned his head in the dust and saw the small hand. The VA psychiatrist had prescribed sertraline and had referred him to a group therapy program at the Tuscaloosa the Marcus had attended four sessions.
He had not spoken in any of them. The group had been led by a 31-year-old social worker who had never deployed, who used phrases like trauma narrative and exposure hierarchy, and who had asked Marcus on the third session if he could share an emotion word to describe how he was feeling. Marcus had said one word, “Tired.
” He had not gone back. The VA had then tried to reduce his disability rating in 2016 from 70% to 50% citing his successful adaptation to the prosthetic. Marcus had filed an appeal. The appeal had been denied. He had filed a second appeal. He had hired a veteran’s rights attorney out of Atlanta, who had cost him $1,400 he could not afford.
The second appeal had been won, partially. His rating had been restored to 60%. He had been told the appeal had taken 28 months to resolve. He had received no back pay for the period during which he had been incorrectly rated. The attorney had not warned him about the back pay clause. He had married a woman named Latoya, a phlebotomist at the Tuscaloosa hospital in 2015.
They had three children together, a daughter named Imani, born in 2016, and twin boys named Cody and Ellis, born in 2019. The twins had been named after the two men from his unit who had died. Marcus had not told Latoya for two years that he had named them after dead men. He had told her they were just names he liked.
The lie had come easily because he had been telling versions of it for years. He had worked, when he could work, as a parts manager at an auto shop in Tuscaloosa owned by a Vietnam veteran named Earl, who had given Marcus a job in 2015 with no questions asked. The job paid $16 an hour. With his disability check, Marcus brought home about $43,000 a year.
It was not enough. They had qualified for SNAP benefits in 2018. Marcus had filed the paperwork. He had then been told that his disability check counted as income for SNAP purposes, and that they exceeded the eligibility threshold by $84 a month. They were denied. They had lived in a two-bedroom rental with three children on $43,000 a year, with Marcus’s leg requiring repairs and refittings he could not afford on the timeline the VA would not cover for 7 years.
But the real story hadn’t even started yet. The thing that had been eating Marcus alive was not the leg. The thing that had been eating Marcus alive was that he had never said the names of the two children out loud. Habib Karzai, Farida Karzai. He knew their names because the army’s investigation team had documented them in the after-action report he had received 6 months after the explosion.
He had read the report once. He had memorized the names. He had folded the report and put it in a manila envelope and put the envelope in a metal toolbox in his garage and had not opened it again in 11 years. He had never said the names to his wife. He had never said them to his mother. He had never said them to the VA psychiatrist.
He had never said them to the men in his unit, even though Diego Ramos and Tyrone Whitfield had been on the patrol that day and had seen what Marcus had seen and knew the names, too. The unspoken agreement among the four surviving men of the patrol had been that they did not say the names, not out loud, not ever. What had cracked Marcus finally, 3 months before the family feud taping, was his daughter Imani.
Imani had been 9 years old. She had come home from school on March 12th, 2025, with a social studies project. The assignment had been to interview a family member about a turning point in their life. Imani had asked her daddy to be interviewed. Marcus had said yes. He had sat at the kitchen table while his daughter sat across from him with a notebook and a pencil and her serious face on.
She had asked him three questions. The first was, “Daddy, what is the most important day of your life?” Marcus had said, “The day you were born, baby.” Imani had written it down. The second question was, “What is the second most important day of your life?” Marcus had said, “The day your brothers were born.” Imani had written it down.
The third question was, “What is the day you remember the most?” Marcus had not answered for a long time. Imani had waited. She was nine. She had her father’s patience. He had said finally, “October 4th, 2013.” Imani had written it down. She had asked, “What happened that day, Daddy?” Marcus had opened his mouth.
He had closed it. He had opened it again. He had said, “I lost my leg that day, baby.” Imani had nodded. She had written it down. Then she had asked, in the small, clear voice of a 9-year-old who was still untouched by the things adults knew how to flinch from, “Did anybody else get hurt that day, Daddy?” Marcus had sat at the kitchen table and stared at his daughter, and his mouth had gone dry.
He had said, “Two children, baby.” Imani had said, “American children?” Marcus had said, “No, baby. Afghan children. A boy and a girl. They were on their way to school.” Imani had written it down. She had asked, “Did they die?” Marcus had said, “Yes.” Imani had put her pencil down. She had looked at her daddy for a long moment.
She had said something then that Marcus had carried for the next 3 months. She had said, “Daddy, do you tell anybody about them?” Marcus had said, “No, baby.” Imani had said, “Daddy, I think they want you to.” Then his 9-year-old daughter had picked up her pencil and finished her social studies project. She had not understood the size of what she had just said to her father.
Marcus had sat at the kitchen table for 40 minutes after she went to bed that night and had not been able to move. He had cried in his garage at 1:00 a.m. for the first time in 11 years. He had called Diego Ramos the next morning. Diego had picked up on the second ring. Marcus had said, “Diego, I got to say their names. I have to.
My baby My baby asked me to.” Diego had been quiet on the line for a long moment. Then Diego had said, “Brother, I if you say them, I’ll say them with you. We all will. We’ve been waiting.” The Brothers Forward nonprofit had reached out to the Family Feud production team 2 weeks later after Diego had made some calls.
The veterans episode had already been in pre-production. The five men had agreed to come on as a team. Marcus had agreed under one condition, that he be allowed to say what he needed to say on camera if the moment came. The production team had agreed with the caveat that they could not promise any specific footage would air.
Marcus had not cared what aired. He had only cared that he say it out loud in front of witnesses where he could not take it back. He had not told Latoya what he intended to say. The morning of the taping, June 18th, 2025, Marcus had woken up at 4:00 a.m. in his hotel room in Atlanta. He had sat in the bathroom in his boxers and his prosthetic leg propped against the wall.
And he had practiced. He had said the names out loud into the bathroom mirror for the first time in 12 years. Habib Karzai, Farida Karzai. His voice had broken on the girl’s name. He had said them again and again until he could say them without his voice breaking. Then he had taken a shower, put on his Brothers Forward team polo, and walked out to meet the other four men in the hotel lobby.
Diego had taken one look at him and had not asked. Diego had just nodded. The five of them had walked out to the rental van together. The taping had begun normally. Steve had introduced both teams. He had cracked a joke about Tony Petrov’s mustache. He had asked the standard opening question to each captain. The other team’s captain, a former Marine named Roger Vasquez, had given a heartfelt answer about pride and brotherhood and the honor of serving.
The audience had applauded. Steve had turned to Marcus. Sergeant Devereaux, tell me, what did serving this country mean to you? Marcus had been quiet for a beat. Then he had looked directly at Steve. His voice had not shaken. Honestly, Mr. Harvey, I regret serving. The studio fell completely silent. Steve Harvey did not move for a long moment.
He looked at Marcus. He looked at the four men beside Marcus, who were all standing very still, very steady, very ready. He looked at Marcus’s prosthetic leg, visible below the cut of his pants. He looked back at Marcus’s face. Then Steve Harvey, 68 years old, hosted the most quietly important 30 seconds of his career.
He set his cue cards down on the podium. He turned to a stagehand. He said, “Bring me that stool, the one off stage, right now.” The stagehand brought it. Steve placed it directly in front of Marcus. He sat down on it. He was now at Marcus’s eye level. He leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees. “Brother, tell me what they did to you.
I got nowhere to be. Start at the beginning.” Marcus looked at him. He looked at the audience for a moment. He looked back at Steve. He opened his mouth. “My name is Marcus Devereaux. I served in the 173rd Airborne in Kandahar Province from 2010 to 2013. I was a sergeant first class. I lost my leg on October 4th, 2013.
I came home in March of 2014. I want to tell you I want to tell everybody in here about what happened on October 4th, 2013 and what has happened in the 11 years since. And I want to tell you about two children. The studio fell silent again. But the real story hadn’t even started yet. Marcus told it.
He told the story of the goat path. He told about the 6 in. He told about the dust and the small hand. He told about the Medevac. He told about the leg. He told about Walter Reed. He told about coming home. He told about the cracked prosthetic and the 19-week appeal and the staff infection. He told about the disability rating reduction and the 28 months of paperwork.
He told about the snap denial and the $84. He told about Latoya and the kids and the lie about the twins’ names. He told about his garage at 1:00 a.m. and the metal toolbox and the manila envelope. He told about his daughter Imani and the social studies project. He told about the kitchen table and the three questions.
He told about what his 9-year-old had said to him. And then Marcus Devereux, sitting on a Family Feud stage in front of 200 audience members and four cameras, said the two names out loud for the first time outside of his own bathroom mirror. Habib Karzai. He was 13 years old. Farida Karzai. She was 10 years old.
They were walking to school on October 4th, 2013, and they died because I stepped on a goat path 6 in in front of them. I have never said their names out loud to my wife. I have never said their names to my mother. I have never said their names to the VA. I have never said their names to anybody except my brothers behind me, who were there, who saw, who already knew.
I am saying their names now because my 9-year-old daughter told me they wanted me to, and I think she was right. He paused. I do not regret serving this country. That was a lie. I’m sorry. I said it because I needed somebody to ask me why. I needed somebody to give me 30 seconds and a stool. What I regret is that I came home and this country let me carry two children alone for 11 years.
I regret that the VA gave me a cracked leg and a denial letter and a social worker who wanted me to use emotion words. I regret that my wife thinks I just have bad dreams. I regret that I have been a ghost in my own house for a decade because nobody, not one person in any uniform or any office or any system ever sat me down at eye level on a stool and said, “Tell me what they did to you.
” I needed that. 12 years ago, I needed that. Today, you gave it to me. So, I’m going to take it. I’m going to take the stool. I’m going to say their names, and I’m going to ask my country one question. He looked into the main camera. What are you going to do for the next Marcus? Steve Harvey was crying, quiet, undramatic tears sitting on the stool across from a man he had not known 40 minutes ago.
The four men behind Marcus were all crying. Diego Ramos had his hand on Marcus’s shoulder from behind, where he had stepped forward without being asked. Tyrone Whitfield had his hand on Marcus’s other shoulder. Brandon McCreedy and Tony Petrov were behind them. The five men of the unit, the survivors of the eight, were standing together.
The studio audience was crying. Janelle, the camera operator, who had been on the stage the day Lily May Carver walked across it 3 months earlier, and had thought she had cried as hard as a person could cry on a job, was crying again. Steve did not speak for a long moment. When he did, he kept his voice quiet.
Marcus, brother, look at me. Marcus looked at him. Let me tell you something. 35 years ago, I was sleeping in a 1976 Ford Tempo. I had nobody. I had nothing. I had two little girls I could not get to. Nobody helped me. Nobody asked me what was wrong. I made a promise to God, if he got me out of that car, I would spend the rest of my life being the person nobody had been for me.
I have kept that promise as best I could. But Marcus, I want you to hear me. I was never you. I was lonely. I was broke. I was scared. I was never carrying two children. I was never carrying a war. I was never carrying what this country did not carry for me after asking me to carry it for them. You are a different kind of carry, brother.
And what you just did on this stage, what you just did is bigger than anything that has ever happened on this show. You just gave permission to every veteran in this country who is sitting in a garage at 1:00 a.m. with a toolbox and a manila envelope. you just told them they can put it down. You just told them somebody is willing to sit on a stool.
Marcus nodded. He could not speak. But Steve wasn’t done. He pulled out his phone. He sat on the stool. He dialed. Speakerphone. The call connected on the second ring. General Lloyd Austin’s office. This is Steve Harvey. I need to speak to the general. Tell him it’s about a soldier. A pause. A different voice came on.
Steve, it’s Lloyd. General, I got a sergeant first class on my stage in Atlanta. Marcus Devereux, 173rd Airborne, Kandahar, 2010 to 2013. He just told a story this country needs to hear. He told it on a Family Feud stage because nobody in 12 years sat him down at a VA and asked him the right question. I am calling you because I want you to hear this story.
I want the VA to hear this story. I want Congress to hear this story. And I want you to tell me what we are going to do for the next Marcus. The line was quiet for a moment. Steve, put him on the line. Steve handed Marcus the phone. Marcus held it. He said, “Sir.” Then he said, “Sergeant First Class Marcus Devereux, sir.” The voice on the other end said, “Sergeant, I heard most of it walking down the hall.
I am going to hear the rest. I’m going to get a team to your house in Tuscaloosa next week. You are going to have a proper care coordinator. You are going to have the prosthetic care you need. You are going to have a clinician who has been down range. And son, I want you to know something. Hamid Karzai and Farida Karzai are now in the official record of the United States Department of Defense as casualties associated with the patrol of October 4th, 2013.
They have been since 2013, but I want you to know that as of right now, this minute, on this call, I am directing my staff to draft a formal letter from this office to be sent to the surviving family of those two children in Kandahar province acknowledging their loss on behalf of a country that has been carrying their names alongside yours for 11 years.
You did not carry them alone, Sergeant. We carried them with you. Badly. We carried them badly. But we carried them. And we are going to do better.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
