She fixed diesel engines in the Marines. Now she works at a funeral home

She served. She evolved. She’s not done.

There is a sticker on Lora Rolland’s truck that reads “Woman Veteran.” She put it there herself. These days she works at Cherokee Memorial Funeral Home in Lodi, California.

Where she has been is a long list. Rolland enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18 after a recruiter saw her high aptitude test score and suggested it. She spent seven years on active duty and five more in the reserves, with stops at Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, Detroit and Fort McCoy, and she served in Operation Desert Storm. Her job was diesel mechanic, which is about as far from the recruiting poster as a Marine can get and still be holding a wrench.

Not every war story is grim. Telling the Lodi News-Sentinel about a training exercise, she owned up to an unscheduled hit on a senior officer: “It was training. But I shot up and I shot the colonel.”

She put it on the truck.

The turn in her story is quieter. Rolland now meets regularly with Warrioress League 209, a group of women veterans in Stockton. She told the paper it gives women a safe place to realize they are not the only ones carrying certain experiences home. Many women who served spent years being the only woman in the motor pool, the barracks or the room. A table full of women who get it, without explanation, is its own kind of reinforcement.

Her life now is not a second act built for a headline. It is steady work in a place families turn to on hard days, a group that meets on schedule and a sticker that says plainly who she is.

The Unranked takeaway: Rolland didn’t wait for anyone to recognize her as a veteran. She put it on the truck. If you have been the woman nobody pictured when someone said “Marine,” find your version of Warrioress League 209 and show up. You might be the one who makes somebody else feel less alone.

Know a woman veteran whose next chapter belongs in Unranked? Nominate her.