In many headlines today there’s a story about a massacre “in cold blood” in the Iraq town of Haditha back in November 2005. This massacre perpetrated by Marines isn't a new story. It's the story of war. Not just this war, not just Vietnam but all wars.
We take young men and women into our military, indoctrinate them to see citizens of the countries we send them to as hostile, provide them lethal weapons, tell them their unit, their fellow Marines or soldiers are their family and send them to countries without knowledge of culture and clear reasons for fighting. How can we expect anything else to happen??
You would have to be in combat and have one of your "family" members killed to truly understand how the massacre could happen. I don't condone it but I understand it, which is sad for me. I can envision the exact scenario in my mind, unfortunately.
If you think walking away from such a scene of “cold-blooded” murder leaves no scar or problems of conscience read the following story of a Marine that spent time in Fallujah when he returned to the U.S.
We can't allow old men and women to lie to us about the situation in the world and then send our youth to kill in our name...in the name of "freedom". If we want to point the finger of responsibility at the Marines or the soldiers who've killed mercilessly we must also point the finger at ourselves.
We, who sit home and only occasionally express our outrage, are no less culpable than those who put yellow ribbons on the back end of their cars and wave flags and those we send to kill.
For most Americans the war and its effects are but a blip in their daily life. Watching football or the reality programs are the center of many of their lives.
I abhor the atrocities that our young people inflict upon innocent people but when I start pointing a finger of responsibility it will start at the White House, the Congress and the apathetic American public before it will go upon the troops. If we ask someone to kill in our name, we'd better accept some responsibility for the results.
If we oppose the policy of such endeavors as the recent polls indicate, where the hell are the outraged people in the streets? Why are we satisfied with rallies and marches when it's said the world's survival is at stake?
I also keep asking myself where the clergy and the so-called moral leaders are in these times of a culture of violence and death.
The silence coming from the pulpits of the American clergy is staggering. While the Rev. Martin Luther King led people in the streets against oppression, there is hardly a dissenting word from the churches of America today. It saddens me there's such a vacuum of leadership that when we think of the peace movement there's little or no involvement of the Judeo-Christian churches.
While I think each individual is responsible for their actions, I know in a combat situation the individuals are secondary to the whole. The military is the greatest example of mob mentality in wartime. But the true mob is the American people, pumped up by patriotic rhetoric and instilled with fear, allowing their sons and daughters to go off to such insanity.
Mothers and fathers cry and grieve every day in this world as a result of our laziness and apathy. Being nice, being polite, and being less than outraged is not acceptable.
We can't continue to allow the massacres to happen while trying to politely protest the atrocities. The men and women who sent our sons and daughters to war count on the timidity and passivity of the public to achieve goals of domination and oppression.
And their goals are being achieved. And they've redefined torture as being legal. They've redefined our freedoms and liberty as being less than free. They've redefined patriotism as being blind and ignorant compliance. And, unless we act, they’ll redefine our world as we know it.
Terry Leichner
VVAW
-----Original Message-----From: vvawnet-bounces@vvaw.org [mailto:vvawnet-bounces@vvaw.org] On Behalf Of Vietnam Veterans Against the WarSent: Friday, May 19, 2006 7:16 AMTo: vvawnet@vvaw.orgSubject: [vvawnet] Marine Is at Home, but Not at Ease: When he looks at the image that made him a wartime icon, he sees the start of his mental decline
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Marine Is at Home, but Not at Ease: When he looks at the image
that made him a wartime icon, he sees the start of his mental decline.
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 22:36:06 -0700
From: Horace W Coleman <hcoleman4@juno.com>
To: vvaw@vvaw.org
As a Marine Corps lance corporal, Blake Miller was with the 1st Marine
Battalion, 8th Regiment, during the assault on the insurgent stronghold
of Fallouja, Iraq, in November, 2004, when this picture was taken.
Filthy and exhausted, he had just lighted a cigarette when an embedded
photographer captured this image, which transformed Miller into an icon
of the war in Iraq. He now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
(Luis Sinco / LAT)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-marlboro19may19,0,4643056.story?coll=la-home-headlines
//
/From the Los Angeles Times/
COLUMN ONE
At Home, but Not at Ease
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer
8:07 PM PDT, May 18, 2006
JONANCY, Ky. — Growing up in Jonancy Bottom, where coal trucks grind
their gears as they rumble down from the ragged green hills, Blake
Miller always believed there were only two paths for him: the coal mines
or the Marine Corps. He chose the Marines, enlisting right out of high
school.
The Marines sent him to Iraq, and then to Fallouja, where his life was
forever altered. He survived a harrowing all-night firefight in November
2004, pinned down on a rooftop by insurgents firing from a nearby house.
Filthy and exhausted, he had just lighted a Marlboro at dawn when an
embedded photographer captured an image that transformed Blake into an
icon of the Iraq war.
His detached expression in the photo seemed to signify different things
to different people — valor, despair, hope, futility, fear, courage,
disillusionment. For Blake, the photograph represents a pivotal moment
in his life: an instant when he feared he would never see another
sunrise, and when his psychological foundation began to fracture.
Blake, whose only brush with celebrity was as a star quarterback in high
school, became known as the Marlboro Man, a label he detests. That same
notoriety has carried over into his post-Iraq life, where he is an icon
of sorts for another consequence of the war — post-traumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD.
On Nov. 10, precisely one year after the photograph was flashed around
the world, Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller was medically discharged from
the Marine Corps, diagnosed with full-blown PTSD. Three years after
leaving the Kentucky hills for a career in the Corps, he was back home.
He feels adrift and tormented, dependent on his new bride, his family
and his military psychiatrist to help him make sense of all that has
befallen him.
He barely sleeps. On most mornings, Blake says, he has no good reason to
get out of bed. Often, his stomach is so upset that he can't eat. He has
nightmares and flashbacks. He admits that he's often grouchy and
temperamental. He knows he drinks and smokes too much.
"He's not the same as before," said Blake's wife, Jessica, who has known
him since grade school. "I'd never seen the anger, the irritability, the
anxiety."
Blake says he feels guilty about taking money — $2,528 in monthly
military disability checks — for doing nothing. Yet he's also frustrated
that two careers made possible by his military training, police officer
or U.S. marshal, are out of reach because law enforcement is reluctant
to hire candidates with PTSD.
So he broods, feeling restless and out of options: "I'm only 21. I'm
able-bodied as hell, yet I'm considered a liability. It's like I had all
these doorways open to me, and suddenly they all closed on me. It's like
my life is over."
At a local restaurant one night last month, Blake became enraged when he
thought a man was staring at Jessica's rear end.
"I just wanted to grab his hair and smash his head against the table,"
he said later. "I was ready to kill him." But he restrained himself, he
said.
Jessica's grandmother, Willa Fouts, whom Blake calls Mamaw, patted his
arm outside the restaurant and told him: "You've had a few episodes like
that, Blake, where you're just so quick to anger. You need to try to
calm yourself."
Jessica, who graduates this spring from Pikeville College with a
psychology degree, has persuaded her husband to undergo visualization
techniques in which she helps him confront his demons.
"It's understandable that Blake has PTSD, after all he's been through,"
she said. "Ordinary people can't comprehend what it's like to be
constantly shot at and have to kill other human beings. They need to
know what it means to send people like Blake out to fight wars. You're
going to have a lot of people breaking."
Five other members of his platoon of about three dozen have been
diagnosed with PTSD, Blake said. A dozen men from his unit were killed
in action. A Journal of the American Medical Assn. study published in
March found that more than a third of troops who served in Iraq sought
help for mental health problems within a year of returning home.
Sitting in the couple's spacious apartment above a furniture store
outside Pikeville, Ky., Jessica squeezed Blake's hand and told him:
"You've gone through so much, baby, that you just broke."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blake was staring at the sunrise. He was on a rooftop in Fallouja,
sucking on a Marlboro and wondering whether he would live to see Jessica
and his father and brothers again.
Luis Sinco, a Times photographer, was crouched next to the corporal,
taking cover behind a rooftop wall. There was a break in the all-night
firefight after an Abrams tank, radioed in by Blake, destroyed a house
filled with insurgents.
Sinco pressed the shutter.
He did not consider the image particularly special. It was the last shot
he filed that day.
The photo appeared Nov. 10, 2004, and was distributed worldwide by the
Associated Press. More than 100 newspapers published it. TV and cable
networks aired feature stories about the Marine's lost, distant look.
Some noted the trickle of blood on his nose — caused not by enemy fire,
but by Blake's rifle sight when it bumped his face.
Blake was unaware that Sinco had photographed him. Two days later, he
recalled, his gunnery sergeant told him: "Miller, your ugly mug is on
the front page of all the newspapers back home, Marlboro Man."
The impact of the photo didn't fully register until a three-star general
showed up in Fallouja. Blake said the general suggested moving him out
of combat for fear that morale would plummet if anything happened to the
Marines' new media star, but he refused to leave. Later, President Bush
sent him a letter and a cigar.
When Jessica saw the photo on the front page of the local paper, she had
not heard from Blake in a week.
"I was glad to know he was alive, but I couldn't stop crying," she said.
"The scared look on his face, his eyes — it tore me up."
In early January 2005, as Blake's unit prepared to leave Iraq, what
Marines call a "wizard" — a psychiatrist — gave a required "warrior
transitioning" talk about PTSD and adjusting to home life. Blake didn't
think much about it until he returned to Jonancy in late January and his
nightmares began.
He dreamed about the 40 enemy corpses that he counted after the tank
demolished the house, he said, and that he had been shot.
"He'd jump out of bed and fall to the floor," Jessica said. "I'd have to
hold him to get him to wake up, and then he'd hug me for the longest time."
Sometimes, Blake mutters Arabic phrases he learned in Iraq or grimaces
in his sleep, and Jessica will keep whispering his name until he wakes
up. Some nights, he doesn't sleep at all.
"I tend to drink a lot just to be able to sleep," Blake said. "Nothing
else puts me to sleep."
He decided last summer to see a military psychiatrist at Camp Lejeune,
N.C., where he was based. In August, he was diagnosed with PTSD. But
before he could be put on "non-deployable status," his unit was sent to
New Orleans to assist with Hurricane Katrina recovery.
While aboard a ship off the Louisiana coast, Blake was taking a
cigarette break when a petty officer made a whistling sound like an
incoming rocket-propelled grenade. Blake says he remembers nothing about
the incident, but was later told that he slammed the officer against a
bulkhead and attacked him.
By November, Blake was forced to take a medical disability discharge.
"They said they couldn't take the risk of me being a danger to myself
and others," he said.
He fears that he may have another blackout. "It's terrifying that at any
moment I could lose control and not know what I'm doing," he said. "What
if next time it's Jessica?"
This February, while smoking a cigarette and staring out Jessica's dorm
room window, Blake said, he thought he saw a dead Iraqi man on the
grass. Later, he had visions of an Iraqi father and son fishing — a
scene he'd witnessed in Iraq just before a grenade exploded nearby.
"I can't tell any more what really happened and what I dreamed," he
said. "Sometimes I feel like I'm dying."
Blake visits a Veterans Administration psychiatrist in nearby West
Virginia and speaks with him by phone several times a week. He said his
psychiatrist told him that his PTSD has to be managed; his disability
will be reevaluated in March 2007.
Meanwhile, he has slowly turned against the war. "We've done some
humanitarian aid," Blake said, "but what good have we actually done, and
what has America gained except a lot of deaths? It burns me up."
Jessica, who sports an "I Love My Marine" sticker on her car, says she
and Blake are behind the troops though they no longer support the war.
The war seems far away in Pike County, a rural region where the median
annual household income is $24,000, far below the $42,000 national
average, and where people still brew moonshine and grow marijuana. The
Hatfields and McCoys fought their notorious feuds here.
Jonancy, just outside Pikeville and about 115 miles east of Lexington,
was named after Blake's great-great-grandparents, Joe and Nancy Miller.
Blake grew up in a hollow called Jonancy Bottom, in a one-story house
next to a creek, where the carcasses of old cars and motorcycles litter
the rear yard. His father, James, a mechanic who sells the parts, keeps
a faded yellow ribbon on the front door, not to be removed until the
last U.S. troops leave Iraq.
Blake is restless and talkative, a boyish young man who speaks with a
Kentucky twang. He will discuss Iraq only with Jessica, said Jessica's
grandfather, Hursel Fouts, known as Papaw.
"I don't think he should keep it bottled up, but I don't try to force
him to talk about what happened over there," Fouts said. His
brother-in-law, Hargis Fleming, a Vietnam veteran, opened up to Blake
about his wartime experiences after refusing to discuss them with anyone
for more than 30 years, Fouts said. Blake seemed buoyed by the encounter.
Blake's military service is literally written on his body; his unit's
motto, "Angels of Death," is tattooed on his right forearm. He had a
life-sized cigarette tattooed on his left forearm last year.
For Hillbilly Days, an annual street festival late last month in
Pikeville (pop. 6,304), Blake shaved his scruffy beard and got a
military "high and tight" haircut. He agreed to help at a Marine Corps
recruiting booth at the festival. Just putting on his Marine fatigue
pants and boots for the first time since his discharge brought back more
memories, and he tried to tamp them down.
He was so worried that the Marlboro Man photo would dominate the
recruiting booth that he begged the recruiters not to display it. He
also persuaded them to remove a large version of the photo that had hung
in the recruiting station in downtown Pikeville.
"I can't stand to look at it anymore," he said. Even so, he says the
photo has provided him a platform to try to educate others about PTSD.
At the festival, Blake's mood brightened as he chatted with the
recruiters. Wearing a Marine T-shirt with the message "Pain is Weakness
Leaving the Body," he was cheerful and animated. He playfully harangued
young men, challenging them to a pull-up contest.
Though he has turned against the war, he said, he often wishes that he
was back in the Corps and with his buddies. He still recommends the
Corps to potential recruits, but advises them that it's a job, not a way
of life. He recommends noncombat positions.
"In order to do your job in combat, you have to lock up your emotions,"
he said. "Basically, you're turning people into killers."
The three-day festival passed pleasantly. Blake worked the booth a few
hours a day, then took long strolls with Jessica. He smoked heavily — he
says he smoked up to six packs a day in Iraq and is down to a pack a
day — and in the evenings they shared cold Coronas with limes, an
unimaginable luxury in Iraq.
They discussed their visualization sessions, particularly one in which
Blake panicked after he visualized a hooded cloak hiding the
/teufelhund/ — the devil dog — a Marine Corps emblem.
"I want you to do it again, but I don't think you trust me enough,"
Jessica told him.
"I'd trust you with my life, baby," he said, "but I'm just not quite ready."
They talked of their upcoming June wedding. They were married by a
magistrate in June 2005, but want a formal ceremony. Blake plans to wear
his Marine dress blues.
They passed a sound stage, where Blake's former high school rock band
was performing.
The lead singer, Kevin Prater, spotted Blake and introduced him to the
crowd.
"He's one of the greatest people in the country," Prater said, inviting
Blake to perform. "He sacrificed for freedom for all of us."
Blake climbed on the stage and grabbed a guitar. He and the band
launched into a Merle Haggard song. With a Marine Corps cap perched on
his freshly shaved head and a Marlboro between his lips, he seemed
pleased and nearly at peace, at least for one night.
--
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