03/27/08 – Jenny Eliscu – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9.
You guys remember the Marlboro Man from the Battle of Fallujah?
The iconic picture of the Iraq War, at least on the American side if you don't count the naked man on a leash in Abu Ghraib.
This picture came to symbolize the ultimate macho of starting a war and winning it even though times are tough and so forth.
The war party loved it and it's come to symbolize all that's valorous and glorious and wonderful about this war and yet the truth is much more complicated.
There's an article in the new Rolling Stone by Jenny Elliskew, the troubled homecoming of the Marlboro Marine.
It turns out that's a real man in that picture and he still exists and I don't think he quite fits the model that the war party had created for him as well as they would like.
Welcome to the show, Jenny.
Thank you, thank you.
Very interesting article here.
The man's name is James Blake Miller, right?
Yeah, yeah, he goes by Blake.
Well let's just start at the beginning here.
It starts out that the man can't stand cats and why is that?
Oh well, because one of the first times he fired his weapon in Iraq, he killed a guy who then his body lay sort of just rotting in the street for a few days and a few days later Miller saw a cat sort of, you know, just basically eating this guy's remains.
And this was from the second battle of Fallujah right after the election in 2004.
Exactly, exactly.
The second battle of Fallujah.
Yeah, I mean he was in the thick of it, you know, you sort of don't realize how awful it was based on what we get to see, especially not the representations of that photo in particular.
You know, famously the New York Post here had the picture on the cover with the headline Smokin', you know, which and I think they meant it in a way to say, you know, we're kicking ass.
Well, if you Google Marlboro Man, there are hundreds of results come up.
In fact, on a BBC report about this guy last week, they showed a picture of the men planting the flag at Iwo Jima and said, you know, this is like that, one of the iconic picture of this war.
Yeah, it really is.
Although you talk about how even the man who took the picture for the LA Times, that he was actually shocked to find out the interpretation of the picture back home in America.
Yeah, I mean he sent off, it was like the last of 11 photos that he sent to his editor that day and he was, you know, pretty shaken up himself by the whole experience.
He had been, you know, he had been a photojournalist for years and covering gangs and, you know, he'd seen his share of action on a story, but this was just the most harrowing thing he'd ever experienced and he couldn't believe when he, you know, realized that it was being, you know, the spin on it was that, like, look at how great we're doing over there when, in fact, he had just come out of this completely harrowing situation in which he was certain that he was going to die.
And, I mean, that's, you know, to me the important thing is just to, you know, there's so many elements of this story that, like, that really blew my mind and broke my heart and primarily among them is the fact that, you know, this individual, Blake Miller, is, you know, whether he represents the mass of troops returning from there or whether he just represents himself, he is, you know, a broken dude and it's just a shame that what his life has turned into.
He suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder like so many tens of thousands of other soldiers do and the government is not proactive enough in helping these men and women readjust to civilian life.
They just kind of let them drop off the face of the earth.
One thing here, and I want to get to the troop support there, but in terms of the media, there's been so much criticism, thankfully, finally now on the five-year anniversary, criticism of the reporting and the media dropping the ball on this, but the images are just as much lies as the actual stories or the omissions in the news articles.
I'm reminded of the young boy who had his arms and legs blown off and his whole family killed and he was used as the poster boy for Aren't We Generous Americans because we donated and bought this kid some plastic arms and legs and yet they quoted him a couple of years later calling down God's wrath on us all.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, though, the way these pictures can be interpreted differently in the moment when they happen than they are over time, but I think a lot of people, and I'm certain a lot of people listening now, you know, probably remember seeing that photo and not thinking, oh, what, you know, look at the valor and virility of our troops.
They remember thinking, like, this is so sad and who is this guy and I wish that he didn't have to, you know, experience this, and I know a lot of people that I spoke to, you know, also said they immediately saw the fright and the sadness and the, you know, confusion in his face from the very first time they saw that photo, but yeah, then certain media outlets, you know, obviously, you know, interpreted it the way that seemed most convenient or most in keeping with their, you know, with their agenda, however explicit or not.
Well, and I think the hype that they created around it sort of acknowledged all those things, the fear and the confusion and all that, but it had the, but he's sticking it out anyway.
Yeah, I mean, it's disturbing, too, that, you know, after he came, after he was discharged, you know, he was discharged because he was, you know, suffering from PTSD and he kind of blacked out and, you know, beat up another Marine or Navy officer, rather, and then afterward the Marines asked him if he would be a recruiter for them and go around, you know, you don't have to just be a regular recruiter, it'll be Cush, you know, he will send you around and he'll talk to people, and he was like, no way, you want me to be a recruiter now?
Just because the photo had become so iconic.
Yeah, yeah, he could be very useful in getting the next wave of 16 and 17-year-olds thinking ahead toward military life.
Yeah, well, I mean, he certainly won't be now, you know, he's not shy about expressing his, you know, his changed opinion on this war.
Well, and he did tell you outright that he's opposed to this war, then?
Yes, yes.
He's, you know, it's interesting to look back at, you know, Luis Cinco, the photographer who took the photo, has documented some of the developments in Blake's life over the course of the past couple of years and wrote a really great story at the end of last year for the LA Times just talking about their friendship, you know, the friendship between them that had developed since they returned home, and, you know, at that time Blake was gradually edging toward saying that he thought his opinion on the war had changed, and at this point he's just out and out opposed to it, he just thinks it's a sham.
Well, let's talk about, well, let's try to get to know this guy.
How much time did you spend with him?
I was with him for three days.
And you had talked to him before that, or?
Yeah, you know, I had to, you know, through the course of finding him and some phone conversations in advance, you know, it's straight, and, you know, once I had met with him I started speaking to him fairly regularly and I still talk to him every few days or so to check in.
Now, I guess, you know, one of the major parts of the story is what they now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yeah.
I played a clip of George Carlin earlier explaining how it used to be called shell shock, and it sounded like something that maybe someone could use some help with, whereas PTSD is just another acronym.
But tell us a little bit about how this guy lives his life now dealing with this post-traumatic stress disorder.
Well, he returned home to Joe Nancy, Kentucky, which is his hometown, and a very tiny town has fewer than 300 residents.
And he lives in a trailer behind his dad's house, his dad, you know, being the person primarily who raised him.
And he, you know, he collects disability from the government, but he's not, you know, he's not able to work at all.
And he mostly spends his time, you know, riding his motorcycle and hanging out with his, you know, his buddies of his in this motorcycle club called the Highwaymen, just sort of not really doing anything.
It's really kind of disturbing how purposeless his life is.
You know, I mentioned in the story that it's like it's a strange blend of like chaos and inertia because he seems a lot of the time like he might snap, but he also just is kind of motionless most of the time, except when, you know, except for smoking.
Well, you know, when he talks about his purposelessness, he talks about how you quote him in the article as talking about how he doesn't look even at tomorrow.
He's not worried about the rent.
He's not worried about anything.
He doesn't want to think about anything except trying to lie to himself all day in order to convince himself to see if he can just get one half hour out of the day where he can make himself believe that that stuff didn't really happen to him, that he didn't really do the things that he did.
Yeah.
I mean, even and even more so than that, I mean, you know, from the from pretty much the moment he returned home, even before he was discharged, he started telling himself that just that he wasn't there.
It's not even like trying to eliminate the specific memories.
It's just he doesn't even want to remember that he ever went to Iraq.
Oh, not even just the Battle of Fallujah, but Iraq at all.
Yeah, no, he just, you know, he says he tells himself over and over again, I was I was I was never in Iraq.
It didn't happen.
Mm hmm.
And now some of the symptoms of the PTSD that you described going along with this is insomnia.
And I forget if it was in your article or in on the BBC report that I watched from last week where they said he goes four or five days in a row without sleep.
Yeah.
And the persistent recollections, this is the part of the PTSD that, you know, seems obviously to be the most damaging thing where, you know, I'm no doctor or anything like that.
But from what I understand, most of us, you know, we have bad things that happen in our lives and they get easier to deal with in time.
And yet for someone with PTSD, it's not the case.
In fact, it's often the other way around, that the longer the more time goes on, the more they just can't get the images out of their head and absolutely cannot live their life around that fact.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just it's it's sort of, you know, if you can if you've never experienced, you know, something traumatic enough that it hung around with you for for a while after.
I mean, the best comparison is that it's like, you know, it's like a flashback.
You know, it's it's really it feels very real to him in the moment when he's, you know, sort of returning in his mind to some, you know, some traumatic thing that happened over there and and it's he's just constantly he's like on heightened alert constantly.
It's called hypervigilance, where, you know, as I mentioned the story, he he always counts how many steps there are to the nearest exit.
He knows, like all routes of escape in case he's in danger or he's suspicious of everyone he meets.
He's he's just freaked out all the time.
I mean, for lack of a for lack of a more elegant description, he's just constantly freaked out.
And, you know, it's not, you know, it's not nothing.
That's the other thing, too, is that you have to realize, I think, that like, oh, well, yeah, sure.
You know, people suffer traumatic events or, you know, PTSD is an extremely common, you know, mental health issue in the civilian population as well.
You know, it's it's it's very common, but the kinds of things, you know, that these guys and gals have had to experience are, you know, we can't begin to imagine and it kind of makes you start to wonder how it's possible for anyone to come back and not suffer from PTSD.
That's the you know, that by the end of a couple of months of reporting the story, that's the conclusion I came to is how, you know, if it's only a third of of these people who are serving over there who suffer from PTSD, like, man, I'm surprised it's not two thirds.
You almost have to be just kind of, you know, oblivious to not come back and be completely destroyed by it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when you talk about his hyper vigilance, I want to read here from I guess it's just the third paragraph.
You talk about his favorite spot in his trailer behind his father's house is on the floor behind the easy chair.
And then you write from here, Miller can anticipate any possible threat.
Keep an eye on all avenues of approach an enemy might take a cigarette butts overflow in the ashtray and empty beer bottles collect around him.
He silently cycles through procedures.
The Marine Corps drilled into his head, defend, reinforce, attack, withdraw, delay.
He knows it's only seven steps to the front door, but he worries whether his truck has enough gas to make an escape.
He wishes someone had told him that, quote, there may come a time when all the shit you learned, you might not be able to turn it off.
That is that's pretty shocking.
The idea of somebody sitting in their own house in the in a small town in Kentucky where there ain't a terrorist or a communist or a dangerous person for miles that's threatening this guy.
And he's got to live as though he's in a battle every day of his life now.
Yeah.
No, I mean, he is his mind has been warped, you know.
And the other thing, too, that I think for a lot of a lot of returning vets is it's not just the PTSD, it's the survivor's guilt.
And I know that for for Miller, that's a big thing is, you know, if you do have a good day or a good half hour or, you know, then you feel bad about it because, you know, you have no right to be alive when your buddies are dead.
So, you know, that I think makes it even harder for them to climb out of this.
And PTSD is treatable.
And, you know, it's just that it's just that the military doesn't isn't proactive enough about offering treatment to these guys and girls.
And they, you know, that's don't they don't necessarily know what's happening to them.
They don't necessarily know that they're suffering in a way that can be treated, you know, and they and the Survivors Guild compounds it because they think, well, I deserve to be suffering.
So I'm you know, so I'm not going to get help.
Well, the military has no incentive to seek these guys out and really try to help them because then they have to admit what a problem this is when you take a decent human being and put him in a situation where he's killing people unmasked.
You know, humans don't usually deal with that kind of thing very well.
Yeah.
And it's just institutional like institutional problems with it.
I mean, even Bob Filner, who I spoke to for the story, who's the the chairman of the House Veterans Committee, you know, he says, you know, he's heard stories of guys and filling out that, you know, it's time to be your service is done.
You're done being deployed.
They're sending you back home and they give you a questionnaire to fill out that ask things like, have you been having nightmares or difficulty sleeping or, you know, are you feeling suicidal?
It's basically a checklist that you have to fill out before you get sent home.
And you know, if you check, yes, for some of these things, the person overseeing the administration of this questionnaire, you know, may even advise you to go back and and do it over, because if you want to get a job in law enforcement, when you get back home or, you know, in another government job, you know, that that's going to be noticed and you're and you're not going to be qualified.
So it is it is definitely an institutionalized problem.
Yeah.
I mean, just showing up and trying to fill out the paperwork in order to get through all this.
Because as you say, too, here's a guy who can snap at any moment and you want him to fill out 50 pages of paperwork.
He's just going to turn around and leave if he doesn't go nuts and start hurting people inside the place.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, you know, what?
Yeah.
I mean, this is a guy who pays extra to not have voicemail on his phone because he doesn't want messages, you know?
Yeah.
But, you know, he's I do want to emphasize that as much as the there have been numerous stories, you know, The New York Times did an entire series of stories about vets who had committed violent crimes of some kind as a result of mental health injuries that they were suffering, whether PTSD or traumatic brain injury or something else entirely.
I certainly wouldn't want listeners to think that, you know, OK, well, if you meet Blake Miller in a dark alley, he's going to kick your ass because, you know, the that's that's major.
That's a major point is that these men and women, they're not crazy there.
They're not dangerous, per se, in the way that a dangerous criminal with no conscience is dangerous.
But there you know, there are legitimate examples of people, Miller included, you know, going into sort of a almost a fugue state and committing acts, certainly more violent than what he would if he were, you know, in his full mind.
And well, and you talk about the event that got him kicked out of the army, the fight on the ship or got him kicked out of the Marines.
Yeah.
He didn't even remember it happening.
Apparently, a guy whistled and it sounded like a bomb coming in.
The next thing he knew, he was somewhere else waking up.
Yeah.
Basically.
And and he talks about sitting in the bar and thinking to himself, well, I could reach across and break this bottle and cut that guy's throat.
And then I, I believe the term I don't have it right in front of me, but I believe the term he used was, oh, and then I kind of snap out of it like, whoa, what if he doesn't snap out of it?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's it's I certainly learned, you know, in spending time with him to not be worried about that kind of thing.
But, you know, it's certainly possible.
And anyone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder could, you know, behave in much the same way.
But like I say, I think it's important for people to realize that, you know, that these men and women, you know, are the vets from this war.
They really just want to be treated, not like pariahs and the hypocrisy of the the constant admonition that we support our, you know, we must support our troops.
And if you're opposed to the war, then you don't support the troops and the hypocrisy that the government and the military are not supporting these men and women when they get back home is, you know, is really disturbing.
But I also think that, you know, unlike the Vietnam War, you know, I think it's important that we realize that these men and women didn't ask to be put in as like messed up a situation as they were put into.
You know, they didn't really know what they were signing up for.
And we have to treat them with compassion and not, you know, like they're freaky, crazy, you know, broken vets.
Now, getting back specifically to Blake Miller here, you make it pretty clear in your article that he was really headed down a bad path until he made a friendship or I don't know if it was an old friendship.
He rekindled with this couple and they take real good care of him and he seems to be doing a lot better lately.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lita and Lita and Bodine, he just met them recently and actually through this this motorcycle club that he rides with, which Bodine belongs to as well, and mostly Lita, who, you know, they're old enough to be his his parents and Lita suffers from PTSD from just some relationship, you know, really bad, abusive relationship stuff she went through.
And so she and Blake, you know, they you know, they have a meeting of the minds on that.
They really understand each other.
And it's you know, they offer comfort and kind of parental thing that that he wasn't otherwise getting.
And he can go to their house at any time and hang out and talk about it or not talk about it or, you know, just drink beers and, you know, play music and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, I'm really glad that this article not just has been written, but that you got it in Rolling Stone, where hopefully young people will read it and and realize that war is not all honor and glory and all those wonderful things.
It's actually, well, people killing each other.
And it's not OK.
It's not fun.
It's not the kind of thing that is just going to make a man out of you and give you a little bit of discipline.
It's hell on earth.
That's what they said back during the Civil War.
War is hell.
They were men who were in the middle of one who said that they really knew what they were talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the most, you know, one of the most impactful things that Miller said to me was, you know, that, you know, when you're raised, it's drilled into your head every day.
There shall not kill.
There shall not kill.
And then they tell you, well, if you don't kill him, he'll kill you.
It doesn't it doesn't make it OK.
You can't just, you know, kill another person and and feel OK about it after.
Yeah.
And as Blake Miller says here, looking back on it, I wouldn't do it all over again.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, everybody, that's Jenny Ellis.
She's a contributing editor, a music critic at Rolling Stone.
She's the author of the book Schools That Rock, and she hosts the show Left of Center on Sirius Satellite Radio.
Thanks very much for coming.
Thanks for having me.
I don't like words that hide the truth.
I don't like words that conceal reality.
I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language.
And American English is loaded with euphemisms because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.
Americans have trouble facing the truth.
So they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.
And it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.
I'll give you an example of that.
There's a condition in combat.
Most people know about it.
It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum can't take any more input.
But the nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap.
In the First World War, that condition was called shell shock.
Simple, honest, direct language, two syllables, shell shock.
Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
That was 70 years ago.
Then a whole generation went by, and the Second World War came along, and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue.
Four syllables now.
Takes a little longer to say.
Doesn't seem to hurt as much.
Fatigue is a nicer word than shock.
Shell shock.
Battle fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea in 1950.
Madison Avenue was riding high by that time.
And the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion.
Hey, we're up to eight syllables now.
And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase.
It's totally sterile now.
Operational exhaustion.
Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then of course came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about 16 or 17 years.
And thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen.
And the pain is completely buried under jargon.
Post-traumatic stress disorder.
I'll bet you if we'd have still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.
I'll bet you that.