[Mb-civic] The War Within

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The War Within

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer

 San Francisco Chronicle                   Sunday, January 29, 2006

Pike County, Ky.

BATTLE SCARS: The photo of the 'Marlboro Man' in Fallujah became a 
symbol
of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004. Now
the soldier has returned home to Kentucky,where he battles the demons of
post-traumatic stress

The photograph hit the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a
U.S. Marine in Iraq, his face smeared with blood and dirt, a cigarette
dangling from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes.

It was an instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war
photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing
the anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man."

The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an
icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.

He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a
backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on
a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on
invisible triggers.

The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

His life in Kentucky, before and after the clicking shutter, says as much
about hundreds of thousands of new American war veterans as his famous
photograph said about that one bad day in Fallujah -- a photo Miller
cannot see as an icon.

"I don't see a whole lot," he said. "I see a day I won't care to remember,
but that I'll never forget."

James Blake Miller was born in Pike County in the hills of eastern
Kentucky, where Daniel Boone is said to have walked and where moonshine 
is
still consumed. An average family here makes about $24,000; the only
decent-paying jobs are down at the coal mine.

Miller got his first name from his father, who got it from his and back
into family history. But folks called him Blake, the middle name his
parents heard on the television show "Dynasty."

His paternal grandfather was a Marine in '53; a heavy smoker, like most of
the men in the family, he died of cancer before he was 40. The man Miller
grew up calling "Papaw" was his grandmother's second husband, an Army vet
of Vietnam.

Sometimes, Papaw would get crying drunk and start telling the story about
the boy who came into the camp in Vietnam one night, and how they had to
shoot him. Then he would stop speaking, and look at the little boys
hanging on his every word. "You've had enough, Joe Lee," his wife would
say then. "It's time to go to bed."

"It wasn't that he liked to drink -- that was how he dealt with it,"
Miller said.

Miller grew up in Jonancy, a tiny hamlet 20 miles from the county seat of
Pikeville. He got his first job -- washing cars at the local auto
dealership -- at age 13, about a year after he took up smoking.

Before long, he began working in a body shop, where the owner told him the
most extraordinary thing: Miller could get his auto body repair
certification for free -- just by joining the military. A Marine recruiter
offered more: insurance, housing, college money.

"I thought, 'Well, damn, that's amazing,' " Miller said. "Hell, here I am,
18 years old -- I can have all this in the palm of my hands just by giving
them four years."

Following his grandfather's footsteps, he went infantry, and left for boot
camp in November 2002. Four months later, the war in Iraq broke out.

"Before I knew it," Miller said, "I was thrown into the mix without even
thinking about it."

Miller was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment of the 2nd
Marine Division, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C.

"Right before we got ready to leave for Iraq, I guess I was a little
nervous. I started smoking more -- I went from about a pack-and-a-half a
day to 2 1/2 packs a day," he said. "When we got to Iraq ... I was smoking
5 1/2 packs."

For a while, Iraq didn't seem all that bad. Miller and his fellow Marines
settled into a routine in Anbar province in western Iraq, setting up
hiding places among the palms and sand, and watching for the white pickups
that insurgents would use to plant bombs and fire mortars.

There also was time for candy and laughter with the Iraqi children who
came running to see the American troops. Miller felt like he was helping.

Then, on Nov. 5, 2004, in the middle of a sandstorm, the Marines got the
word that they might be heading for an assault on Fallujah -- at the time,
the capital of the Iraqi insurgency.

No American forces had gone inside the city in months. And now Miller
would be among the first. He had been a Marine for less than two years.

"It puts butterflies in my stomach right now," he said. "I don't know if
you can describe it. I don't think words can."

The days before the assault were an intense blur of training, preparation
and fear. But there was one bright spot, when Miller ran into a good
friend in the chow hall -- Demarkus Brown, a 22-year-old from Virginia.

Miller met Brown in infantry school, when the smiling African American
introduced himself to the white Kentucky native with a grinning, "What's
up, cracker?"

Miller quickly realized Brown didn't mean the word seriously -- didn't
mean much of anything seriously. Brown liked to party all hours and go
dancing, then call Miller to come pick him up.

"It didn't matter what you told him or how s -- ty it was," Miller said.
"He was always the one guy who had a smile on his face."

But one thing Brown took seriously was music: He loved raves and techno
music, and Miller played bluegrass on bass and guitar. Their styles
somehow harmonized, and they became close friends.

Now they were together outside Fallujah.

The night before U.S. forces went into the city, Miller gathered with his
fellow Marines and led them by memory through a passage from the Bible,
John 14:2-3.

"In my Father's house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would
have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for you,
so that where I may be, you may be also."

The assault on Fallujah began Nov. 8, 2004, when U.S. planes, using a
combination of high explosives and burning white phosphorus, hammered the
city in advance of the artillery push. Miller was under fire from the
moment he stepped out of the personnel carrier.

It lasted into Nov. 9 -- the day that, for a while, would make Miller's
face the most famous in Iraq.

As Miller remembers that day, he was on a rooftop taking fire and calling
for support on his radio - a 20-pound piece of equipment that he had to
lug around along with nine extra batteries, hundreds of extra rounds of
ammunition, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes.

As insurgent bullets from a nearby building pinged off the roof, a
horrified Miller heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. He
raised his rifle -- and barely had time to halt when he saw it was
embedded Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco.

Miller returned to his radio, guiding two tanks to his position. When they
opened fire, he said, the thunder left his body numb -- but the building
housing the attackers had collapsed. Later, he said, they would find about
40 bodies in the rubble.

"I was never so happy in all my life to take that handset away from my
head," Miller said. "I lit up a f -- cigarette."

His ear was bleeding from the sound of the tank firing -- Miller still
can't hear out of his right ear. His nose bled from a nick he took when
his rifle scope and radio got tangled up midfire. He looked at the sunrise
and wondered how many more of those he would see.

He was vaguely aware that elsewhere on the rooftop, Sinco was taking
pictures.

At a briefing the next day, Miller's gunnery sergeant walked up to him,
grinning, and said: "Would you believe you're the most famous f -- Marine
in the Marine Corps right now? Believe it or not, your ugly mug just went
all over the U.S."

The Marines wanted to pull him out of Fallujah at that point, Miller said,
not wanting the very public poster boy to die in combat. But he stayed.

He won't talk about the weeks that followed. He only mentions moments,
like still frames from a film. The day his column barely survived an
ambush, escaping through a broken door as bullets struck near their feet.
The morning he woke up to discover that a cat had taken up residence in
the open chest cavity of an Iraqi body nearby, consuming it from within.

The day he discovered that Demarkus Brown had been killed.

"When we found out, I told a couple of my buddies who were close to him,
too. We just sat around, and we didn't say much at all," Miller said. "You
didn't have the heart to cry."

But it wasn't those terrible benchmarks that affected him the most, Miller
said. It was the daily chore of war: the times he had to raise his rifle,
peer through the scope and squeeze the trigger to launch a bullet, not at
a target, not at a distant white truck, but at another human being.

"It's one thing to be shot at, and you shoot a couple rounds back, just
trying to suppress somebody else," Miller said. "It's another thing when
you see a human being shooting a round at you, knowing that you're
shooting back with the intent to kill them. You're looking through a scope
at somebody. It's totally different. You can make out a guy's eyes."

When Miller returned to America, he brought back a big duffel bag packed
with numerous letters and gifts from those who had seen his photo. It was
only later that he discovered he'd brought home some of the war, too.

None of the Marines talked much about the strain that war puts on one's
emotions, Miller said. The "wizards" -- military psychologists -- gave the
returning troops a briefing on the subject, but nobody paid much
attention. Even guys who were taking antidepressants to help them sleep
didn't think much about the long-term consequences.

"What the hell are those people going to do once they get out? They ride
it out until they get an honorable discharge, and then they're never
diagnosed with anything," Miller said. "How the hell are you going to do
anything for them after that? And that's how so many of these guys are
ending up on the damn streets."

Miller dismissed the early signs, too. When he and his buddies reacted to
a truck backfire by dropping into a combat stance and raising imaginary
rifles, well, that was to be expected. And when his wife, Jessica -- the
childhood sweetheart whom Miller had married in June -- told him he was
tightening his arm around her neck in the night, that was strange, but he
figured it would pass. So would the nightmares he began to have about
Iraq, things that had happened, things that hadn't.

Then one day, while visiting his wife at her college dorm in Pikeville,
Miller looked out the window and clearly saw the body of an Iraqi sprawled
out on the sidewalk. He turned away.

"I said, 'Look, honey, I just got to get out of here.' I couldn't even
tell her at the time what had happened," he said. "(I thought), 'Well,
that's it. That's my little spaz I'm supposed to have that the
psychiatrists were talking about ... I'm glad I got it out of the way."

But he hadn't. Jessica, a psychology student, tried to help with a
visualization technique. But when he looked inside himself, Miller found a
kind of demonic door guarded by a twisted figure in a black cloak. Under
the cloak's hood, he spotted the snarling face of the teufelhund, a Marine
Corps icon -- the devil dog.

"So I come out again, without closing the door," he said. "After all this
happened, my nightmares started getting a lot f -- ing worse."

Finally, Miller went to a military psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with
signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Miller thought that meant he
could not be deployed. But in early September, he joined a group of
Marines headed to police New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"I really didn't want to go. ... There was a possibility we would be
shooting people," he said. "We could be going into another (urban warfare)
environment just like Iraq, except this would actually be U.S. citizens.

"Here we go, Fallujah 2, right here in the states."

Not long after they arrived, as Hurricane Rita bore down on them, the
Marines were packed into the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima to wait out
the storm offshore. And one day, as Miller headed for the smoke deck with
a Marlboro, a passing sailor made a whistling sound just like a
rocket-propelled grenade.

"I don't remember grabbing him. I don't remember putting him against the
bulkhead. I don't remember getting him down on the floor. I don't remember
getting on top of him. I don't remember doing any of that s -- ," Miller
said. "That was like the last straw."

On Nov. 10, 2005 -- the Marine Corps' 230th birthday and one year to the
day after the Marlboro Man picture appeared in the Los Angeles Times,
Miller was honorably discharged after a medical review. His military
career was over.

Miller returned to eastern Kentucky, the place he had spent years trying
to escape. He wanted the familiarity and safety of the people and land
he'd known since birth.

"Maybe it made me think twice about what I had lost," he said. "What I was
really missing."

In a way, though, his family is still missing Blake Miller -- the Miller
who left Kentucky for Iraq a couple of years ago.

The man who left was easygoing, quick to laugh, happy to sit in a
relative's house and eat and smoke and talk. The man who came back is
quick to anger, they say, and is quiet. He still smiles often but does not
easily laugh.

And when he takes a seat in his adoptive grandmother's home, amid her
collection of ceramic Christ figurines, it is in a chair that faces the
door.

Mildred Childers, who owns those figurines, sees Miller's difficulties as
a crisis of faith. She still remembers Miller's call just before the
assault on Fallujah, and his terrible question: "How can people go to
church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?"

"He was raised where that's one of the Ten Commandments, do not kill," she
said. "I think it's hard for a soldier to go to war and have that embedded
in them from small children up, and you go over there and you've got to do
it to stay alive."

Recently, some of his Marine buddies have been calling Miller up, crying
drunk, and remembering their war experiences. Just like Papaw Joe Lee used
to do when Miller was a boy.

"There's a lot of Vietnam vets ... they don't heal until 30, 40 years down
the road," Miller said. "People bottle it up, become angry, easily
temperamental, and hell, before you know it, these are the people who are
snapping on you."

Jessica interrupted. "You're already like that," she said.

She recalled her own first glimpse of the Marlboro Man -- an image seen
through tears of relief that he was alive, and misery at how worn he
looked.

"Some people thought it was sexy, and we thought, 'Oh, my God, he's in the
middle of a war, close to death.' We just couldn't understand how some
people could look at it like that," she said. "But I guess for some people
it was glory, like patriotism."

She looked at her quiet husband through the smoke drifting from his right
hand.

"But when it comes out and there's actually a personality behind that
picture, and that personality, he has to deal with all the war, and all
he's done, people don't want to know how hard it actually is," she said.

"This is the dark side of the reality of war. ... People don't want to
know the Marlboro Man has PTSD."

Miller stood outside his father's home in Jonancy, looking over the beaten
mobile homes, the rows of corn, potatoes and cabbage. For a change, he
wasn't smoking - he's down to a pack-and-a-half a day.

"There ain't a goddamn thing around here," he said. "My whole life, all I
did was watch my old man bust his ass."

It was why he joined the Marines -- why part of him wishes he could go
back.

"My whole life, all I've ever known is working on cars, doing body work,
cutting grass, manual labor, you know? It was something different," he
said. "You always hear those commercials -- it's not just a job, it's an
adventure. It was, you know?"

On the other hand, Miller isn't sure he'd want to go back to combat -- nor
sure he'd ever let any kid of his enlist. He has mixed feelings about the
oversize copy of the Marlboro Man picture proudly displayed in the lobby
of the Marine recruiting station in Pikeville.

Some of his relatives and friends are against the war; others see it as a
fight against terrorism.

Miller himself seems torn -- proud of the troops fighting for freedom, but
wondering whether there was a peaceful way, to find terrorists in Iraq
without invading.

There was no time for such questions in Fallujah. But now, at night, when
he can't sleep, Miller thinks of the men he saw through his rifle scope,
and wonders: Were they terrorists fighting against America? Or men
fighting to protect their homes?

"I mean, how would we feel if they came over and started something here?"
he asked. "I'm glad that I fought for my country. But looking back on it,
I wouldn't do it all over again."

It helps, sometimes, to talk about it -- last week, Miller did what he
hopes other veterans do: He had his first visit with a Veterans
Administration counselor.

"I've got my whole life ahead of me," he said. "I'm too young to lay down
and quit; too young to let anything beat me."

Down the road, Miller hopes to start a business. For now, he is waiting
for his disability benefits to kick in. Maybe then, he and Jessica can
afford the big wedding they had always wanted. She already has her white
wedding dress. He still intends to wear his Marine Corps blues.

Veterans and stress

Post-traumatic stress disorder is an ailment resulting from exposure to an
experience involving direct or indirect threat of serious injury or death.
Symptoms include recurrent thoughts of a traumatic event, reduced
involvement in work or outside interests, hyper alertness, anxiety and
irritability.

About 317,000 veterans diagnosed with the disorder were treated at
Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers and clinics in fiscal year
2005. Nearly 19,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were seen
for the disorder in veterans' medical centers and Vet Centers from fiscal
year 2002 to 2005.

A recent study of soldiers and Marines who had served in Iraq and
Afghanistan found that about 17 percent met criteria for post-traumatic
stress disorder, depression, or generalized anxiety disorder. Of those
whose responses were positive for a mental disorder, 40 percent or fewer
actually received help while on active duty.

For more information, contact your local veterans facility, call (877)
222-VETS or visit one of the following Web sites:

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder: www.ncptsd.va.gov/

San Francisco Chronicle Guide for Returning Veterans:
www.sfgate.com/returningvets/

Sources: Department of Veterans Affairs, New England Journal of Medicine

E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard at sfchronicle.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/MNGMHGVCEV1.DT
L

______________________________________________


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