“… People don’t want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD.”

But he does. Sometimes you can take man out of the war, but taking the war out of the man is another story. When I first saw the picture below, I knew immediately that it would be another icon of the tough guy archetype Americans embrace so enthusiastically. And it did. It even made Dan Rather dewy-eyed. Of course the reality behind the icon (as it was with the most famous Marlboro Man model) is something entirely different.

I didn’t have the heart to post about then, figuring it was pointless to joust at the windmill of an overwhelming cultural tendency. I’m posting now in hopes that at least a few people will consider what happened to their new Marlboro Man after the shutter clicked and the flash faded.

He’s quieter now — easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can’t look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers.

The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

And it runs in the family.

His paternal grandfather was a Marine in ’53; a heavy smoker, like most of the men in the family, he died of cancer before he was 40. The man Miller grew up calling “Papaw” was his grandmother’s second husband, an Army vet of Vietnam.

Sometimes, Papaw would get crying drunk and start telling the story about the boy who came into the camp in Vietnam one night, and how they had to shoot him. Then he would stop speaking, and look at the little boys hanging on his every word. “You’ve had enough, Joe Lee,” his wife would say then. “It’s time to go to bed.”

“It wasn’t that he liked to drink — that was how he dealt with it,” Miller said.

And then there’s this.

Before long, he began working in a body shop, where the owner told him the most extraordinary thing: Miller could get his auto body repair certification for free — just by joining the military. A Marine recruiter offered more: insurance, housing, college money.

“I thought, ‘Well, damn, that’s amazing,’ ” Miller said. “Hell, here I am, 18 years old — I can have all this in the palm of my hands just by giving them four years.”

Following his grandfather’s footsteps, he went infantry, and left for boot camp in November 2002. Four months later, the war in Iraq broke out.

“Before I knew it,” Miller said, “I was thrown into the mix without even thinking about it.”

Somebody should hook this guy up with the Iraq war veteran Blue Girl posted about yesterday, and send them on a speaking tour of high schools and universities.