| Subject: Marlboro Marine |
Author:
Whitt
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Date Posted: 09:31:24 11/13/04 Sat
This pic will be famous someday. These boys grow up fast.
FALLUJAH, Iraq - The Marlboro man was angry: He has a war to fight, and he's running out of smokes.
"If you want to write something,'' he tells an intruding reporter, "tell Marlboro I'm down to four packs, and I'm here in Fallujah till who knows when. Maybe they can send some. And they can bring down the price a bit.''
Those are the unfettered sentiments of Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, 20, a country boy from Kentucky who has been thrust unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly into the role of poster boy for a war on the other side of the world from his home on the farm.
"I just don't understand what all the fuss is about,'' Miller drawls on Friday as he crouches - Marlboro firmly in place - inside an abandoned building with his platoon mates, preparing to fight insurgents holed up in yet another mosque.
"I was just smokin' a cigarette, and someone takes my picture and it all blows up.''
Miller is the young man whose gritty, war-hardened portrait appeared Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times, shot by Luis Sinco, a Los Angeles Times photographer embedded with Miller's unit, Charlie Co., 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.
In the full-frame photo, taken after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop deadly combat, Miller's camouflage war paint is smudged. He sports a bloody nick on his nose. His helmet and chin strap frame a weary expression that seems to convey the timeless fatigue of battle. And there is the cigarette, of course, drooping from the right side of his mouth in a jaunty manner that Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne would have approved of. Wispy smoke drifts off to his left.
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