The 'Marlboro Marine' is still at war, with himself

The Marlboro Marine is back in the news. Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, 23, was honorably discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder exactly a year after Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco took an iconic picture of him (left) during a firefight in Fallujah, Iraq. Sinco wrote about his continuing relationship with Miller in November; in the latest Rolling Stone, Jenny Eliscu focuses on Miller and gives new details of his life deep in far Eastern Kentucky. The story is harrowing.

Eliscu reports, "As cigarette butts overflow in the ashtray and empty beer bottles collect around him, he silently cycles through procedures the Marine Corps drilled into his head: defend, reinforce, attack, withdraw, delay. He knows it's only seven steps to the front door, but he worries whether his truck has enough gas to make an escape. He wishes someone had told him that 'There may come a time when all that shit you learned, you might not be able to turn it off.' Since returning home from Iraq three years ago, Miller rarely sleeps more than once every few days. When he can get some sleep, he makes sure he's got a gun under his pillow. His entire life has been thrown into a strange and purposeless blend of chaos and inertia; though he doesn't do much these days besides smoke, drink beer and ride his Harley, he seems to teeter perpetually on the brink of a meltdown. Occasionally, and without provocation, Miller becomes so overwhelmed by blind rage that he imagines shooting a stranger in the kneecaps or beating a fellow bar patron to a bloody pulp."

Miller told Eliscu he was driven to enlist by the 9/11 attacks and a desire to leave Kentucky. "It was the only way I knew to travel and see the world," he said. "I just happened to pick a weird time to go. I got to travel, and it was a life-altering experience, that's for sure." Eliscu writes, "The town of Jonancy, nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains, is the kind of place that inspires thoughts of escape. Unemployment in the area is 35 percent higher than the national average, the median household income is less than $24,000 and only 10 percent of county residents earn college diplomas."

Here's the really rural angle: "Miller hasn't been to a doctor in over a year, and, like so many vets, he seems to have fallen off the government's radar. He tried the abundance of medications — antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds, mostly — that the Veterans Administration has sent him, but they only exacerbated his nightmares, jitters and apathy. And therapy is hard to get in places like Jonancy: For a while, he tried living in West Virginia to be near a PTSD specialist, but he missed his familiar surroundings and moved back home." Sinco told Eliscu, "It's hard to hang out with him sometimes. You end up driving 1,500 miles at the drop of a hat because he's in the mood to go somewhere."

Eliscu writes, "There is a heavy institutional stigma about mental-health issues in the armed forces, and since the military doesn't conduct mandatory post-deployment psych evaluations in person, vets like Miller are left to make their own health-care decisions. . . . Miller receives a monthly benefit of $2,500 in disability payments — compensation not only for his mental injuries but for an array of physical impairments including hearing loss in his right ear, shrapnel scarring and a bacterial infection in his tear ducts. He has no cartilage left in either knee, and the muscles in his feet have calcified from carrying a 200-pound pack on his back in Iraq."

He still carries burdens not measured in pounds. When he wakes up each morning, Miller told Eliscu, he asks himself, "What did I do to make me deserve another day? What have I done in my life that my buddies didn't do to make me deserve so many days?" (Read more)