The Troubled Homecoming of the Marlboro Marine

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.”

But he was also uncommonly industrious, washing cars for a buck apiece to buy his first pickup at age twelve and, the following year, mowing lawns to raise money for the first of nine motorcycles he’s owned. His dad likes to say that Blake’s got only one speed: breakneck. When he does something, he does it all the way. At seventeen, he found religion, and went from sinner to ordained Baptist preacher in a couple of years. There is nothing Miller does with as much gusto, however, as smoking cigarettes. He started at twelve, after a neighbor gave him a butt to keep his hands warm while he waited for the school bus. Although he quit briefly during basic training, he now goes through as many as five packs a day when he’s drinking or anxious.

It was the same way with the Marines: Once he decided to enlist, no one could talk him out of it. He was only seventeen, sitting in his doctor’s office for his annual athletics physical on September 11, 2001, when he heard that terrorists had crashed a pair of airplanes into the World Trade Center. The next day he insisted his father sign him up – or else he would quit high school.

If present-day Blake came face to face with his teenage self, he’d have more than words of warning. “I’d be beating my ass with a shovel all the way through them fuckin” cornfields,” he says. “I’d ask myself, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?'”

So what was he thinking? “Get the fuck out of Kentucky,” Miller says, his lip curling in a half-smile. “It was the only way I knew to travel and see the world. 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.”

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 thirty-five percent higher than the national average, the median household income is less than $24,000 and only ten percent of county residents earn college diplomas. Miller’s friend Lita is one of the few who made it to college – she has an associate’s degree – but she’s still working the register at Bates Quick Stop, a backwoods grocery store. Business is slow – boxes of Duncan Hines cake mix collect dust on the shelf – but beer sales are brisker than ever. Behind the cashier’s counter, two handwritten signs remind customers that their accounts must be settled by the fifth of the month.

“You know Mayberry?” Lita asks, hushing her voice so she won’t be overheard by an elderly patron with one hand who goes by the name Peckerhead. “Well, you are in it.”

Miller, who, along with Bodean, likes to hang out at the store, pipes up from his chair by the door. “Hey, Maw,” he shouts, “what do you call a rabbit with a bent dick?” He pauses. “Fucks Funny!”

A set of chimes over the door jingles, and a customer walks in asking for Rolaids.

“We’ve got Tums,” Bodean says.

“What do we look like, Wal-Mart?” Lira adds, laughing good-naturedly.

Miller is slouched down in his chair, his features obstructed by his baseball cap, sunglasses and thick strawberry-blond beard, but the Rolaids guy still notices him. “I’ve seen you before,” he says. “You look familiar.” Miller stays quiet, but the customer finally figures it out. “You’re that Marlboro Man!” he says, loud enough so everyone can hear. “I knew I knowed you from somewhere!”

Miller is visibly unnerved by the attention and loathes his position as a local celebrity. He grew his beard, he says, to avoid being constantly recognized.

The door jingles again, this time in jarring disharmony with the tune being sung by a potbellied local they call Boss Hogg, who rolls in staggering drunk in the midafternoon. “I’ll be headed down the road to Buford,” croons Boss, a Vietnam vet who also not only suffers from PTSD but reminds you of its ravages with every slurred condemnation of Uncle Sam. Boss, who served several years in prison on drug charges after the war, has neither married nor had children, and spends his days trying to pickle his Vietnam memories in beer and moonshine.

“That there is the Marlboro Man,” the Rolaids guy tells Boss, showing off.

“I know!” Boss says. “That’s my friend.” He grabs a twenty-pack of beer and heads out to his truck, where his two Jack Russell terriers, Sparky and Spanky, are waiting in a basket in the front seat.

Later, when we get to Lita and Bodean’s four-bedroom house, Millerunloads some aggression in the driveway by firing off a few rounds from the revolver he packs in his cowboy boot. While Bodean and I look on, Boss insists on his own round, and, steadying himself against a car, he actually hits his mark. I ask Bodean if he thinks Blake will end up like Boss.

“Definitely not,” Bodean says. “We won’t let that happen.”

Charlie Company – 1st battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Division – had been in Iraq for five months, patrolling Anbar Province, when they got the word they would be headed to Fallujah in November 2004. “There’s some shit going on in Fallujah,” Miller’s commanding officer announced, “so we’re gonna hit the city and roll right through it.”

Miller didn’t believe it for a second. He and his fellow Marines were already coming under sniper fire every day. Fallujah, he knew, would only be worse. “Are you fuckin’ serious?” he thought. “Goddamn, no more than two weeks ago we just started getting shot at. Now you tell us we’re gonna go full fledge against guys who are running right at us, waiting to commit suicide?”