Its not Like TV - killing people is not an easy thing to do

The Marlboro Man

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/MNGMHGVCEV1.
DTL&hw=miller+iraq+ptsd&sn=001&sc=1000

quote:

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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.



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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?"

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I guess this bothers me so much is because i've seen these guys come back from Vietnam, I've seen what it does to people - It never is like it is in the movies.

I remember this guy who only had one ear and everyone was afraid to ask him what happened to his other ear.

He was nicest guy in the world but he had a terrible temper and when he accidently hurt somebody he would always apologize. He showed me a picture of his mother he carried in his wallet along with some article from the news paper about an award he had won. He explained that he loved his mother and he knew his mother loved him but he couldn't see her because she was afraid of him - he said, "she should be, I beat the hell out of her."

kinda makes you step back and look at how desensitized we all are to violence, from watching television and movies. my father was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder when he came back from vietnam. it really is unbelievable to see.

In 1977 when I joined the Navy, a lot of these guys came back into the military because it was the only place they could feel comfortable. It was terrible, back then everyone hated our country and you'd walk down the street, and knowing that you were in the military, someone would spit at you, call you names. It hurt my feelings, but I could not imagine what it did to those guys who came back from Vietnam, I guess they figured they deserved it. I don't know.

But now its worse - these guys are being forced to serve two and three tours and then when it has been diagnosed that they've had to much, they get rid of em. We're just using up people. It used to be that they would put them in non combatant roles.

I've been thinking about this. These people who strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up, could they be suffering from this also. So many in this part of the world have grown up with war.

We are the only species who is so destructive to our own species, it's not natural, the natural mind rebells against this and makes a body go mad.

It isn't about religion or even politics. Bush Sr. ended it, because he had been there and has seen it and knew better. But when a politician should not be allowed to start a conflict without first passing the UN test then maybe we can be sure this won't happen again. Both times we have ignored the UN, both times we were wrong. We should respect the authority of the UN.

I used to worry about my son - I wouldn't let him play with toy guns and we wouldn't watch war movies, but you know that didn't work, he'd just go to his friends house and that would be that. But when we did go to war (gulf war) it really bothered him. When he went to bed at night he would cry and we would talk, and I would reassure him that everything would be alright. After that I wasn't to worried if he played with toy guns or watched war movies. When he realized it was for real, a natural instinct took over. But the politicians use the Hollywood movies as a propaganda back drop.