The Troubled Homecoming Of The Marlboro Marine

Because he has a hard time staying in one place for very long, Miller rarely spends the night at his trailer, crashing wherever his aimless driving — on the back of his 2006 Harley-Davidson Softail Standard or in the cab of his forest-green pickup truck — takes him. "It's hard to hang out with him sometimes," says Luis Sinco, the photojournalist who snapped the iconic picture of Miller and who has since become his close friend. "You end up driving 1,500 miles at the drop of a hat because he's in the mood to go somewhere."

Miller's recklessness behind the wheel is typical of his ambivalence about his mortality: During our first drive together, in the midst of a drenching nighttime storm, he navigated winding Kentucky mountain back roads while wearing sunglasses, at one point steering with his knees as he opened a bottle of beer with a pocketknife. The only place Miller feels comfortable these days is at the home of his friends Lita Holbrook and Jeff "Bodean" Hall in nearby Wheelwright. The couple keep a spare pistol around the house he can take to bed, so he makes a habit of heading up the mountains to see them every few days.

"I'm not caged inside my mind when I'm at Lita and Bodean's," Miller says. "It's like I actually forget. Normal is only as normal as the people you're around, and for the first time since I came home, I've met people that make me feel normal." Lita also suffers from PTSD — the result, she says, of an emotionally damaging relationship she escaped before she shacked up with Bodean. To Miller, whose own mother has long been absent from his life, Lita is "Small Maw," and she lavishes him with the unconditional love and concern that he clearly craves.

Wherever he finds himself, though, Miller counts his time in days. "I don't worry about tomorrow unless I wake up," he tells me one night in his trailer. "I have no goals, long-term or short-term. I don't worry about paying the bills. I don't worry if I'm gonna have money to eat tomorrow. I don't worry about fuckin' nothin'. As long as I keep telling myself I wasn't there — if I can believe that for thirty minutes out of the day just by telling myself over and over and over, 'I wasn't there. It didn't happen' — that thirty minutes is worth it."

Blake always wanted to be a Marine. His grandfather, James Clint Miller, served in the Corps in '53. Clint died before Blake was born, but the family always told the junior Miller that he was exactly like his grandpa in almost every way. Standing in his trailer, Miller takes two group portraits from the wall and hands them to me. One is a photo of Clint's Marine Corps graduating class, the other of Blake's. "Look, he looks just like me," Miller says. "You oughta see my face cleaned up. I'm him made over."

Like Grandpa Clint, who was discharged after he decked an officer, Blake has always seemed to find ways to get himself in trouble. As a kid, he was quick to join in if a friend wanted to set fire to a neighbor's tree or vandalize a car. By thirteen, he had started experimenting with gunpowder. "I didn't need the Internet to tell me how to make a fuckin' bomb," he says. "I was gonna figure it out myself, no matter what. I got in trouble, and I stayed in fuckin' trouble."