Marine immortalized in photo
Psychological effects still felt
Associated Press
The Cincinnati Post

LONG FORK - A Marine immortalized by a photo during intense fighting in Iraq last year is out of the military and back home in Kentucky, trying to start a new life.

But Blake Miller said he can't leave the horrors of war behind - though he'd like to.

A team of military psychiatrists have diagnosed Miller, 21, as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental illness characterized by symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares.

"I could tell you stories about Iraq that would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," Miller told the Lexington Herald-Leader for a story published Sunday. "And I could tell you things that were great over there. But that still wouldn't tell you what it was actually like. You had to be there and go through it to really understand."

Millions of Americans remember Miller as the "Marlboro Man" - the grubby, exhausted Marine lance corporal with a cigarette dangling from lips in a famous 2004 photograph from the battle for Fallujah. The picture has become one of the iconic images of the Iraq war.

Miller said he still smokes a little over a pack of Marlboros per day but has cut down from the five packs or more he was puffing on every day at the height of the Fallujah battle. He now lives with his new wife and her grandparents at their home in Long Fork in Pike County. They married in June.

Miller said he began experiencing sleeplessness and nightmares soon after returning from Iraq early last year.

He was sent to New Orleans last fall after Hurricane Katrina to help with the recovery effort. Part of his duty was to recover bodies.

A few days after he left the city, on board the USS Iwo Jima, a Navy ship on hurricane duty off the Gulf Coast, Miller said he must have snapped.

"I was coming out of the galley, when this sailor made a whistling noise that resembled the sound of a rocket-propelled grenade," Miller said. "You had to have heard that sound to duplicate it. I don't know why he did it. Maybe he was just poking fun at Marines. But something just triggered and I flipped out.

"They said that I grabbed him, threw him against the bulkhead and put him down on the deck, with me on top of him. But I have no recollection of it whatsoever."

Eventually, three military doctors diagnosed Miller as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The Marines, concluding that Miller could be a threat to himself or to his colleagues in any future combat situation, granted him an honorable discharge.

Miller became a civilian Nov. 10, the one-year anniversary of the date when the famous photograph from Fallujah hit the newspapers.

Now, Miller regularly sees a therapist and said he is doing well.

"The biggest reason I did this interview is because I want people to know that PTSD is not something people come down with because they're crazy," he said. "It's an anxiety disorder, where you've experienced something so traumatic that you were close to death."

Miller joined the Marines after graduating from high school in 2003 and was assigned to the infantry. He went to Iraq the next year with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines and became a part of the Marine force assembled to clear insurgents out of Fallujah.

Even now, Miller struggles to describe it.

"It's not exactly something I like to talk about. You see movies where somebody gets shot. It's nothing to see somebody get shot, that's just a movie.

"But when you see it in real life, it's completely different ... the feeling you have afterward is completely different. Even when you're being shot at, and you're returning fire ... whether you've hit anybody or not ... it's knowing that you're actually shooting at somebody. At the time you don't think about it ... but afterward, it's mind-boggling, it really is."

Miller and his wife, Jessica, are planning to build a home near her grandparents. She has completed a bachelor's degree at Pikeville College and hopes for a career in psychology. Blake said he is thinking of starting a business.

Ellie