TRUE TO THE CORPS : After 31 Years of Service, Marine Maj. Gen. Donald E.P. Miller Still ‘Kicks the Tires and Lights the Fires’ at El Toro Air Station

The job description might read something like this: Salary up to $70,000, home provided, car and driver. Lots of travel. Respect and big staff. Outdoorsman preferred with hiking and camping skills, yet need strong leadership in indoor executive situations. Should be able to fly a variety of aircraft, including supersonic jets.

Interested parties please write to the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., office of the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Sorry, colonels and below need not apply.

The position is commanding general of one of just three Marine Corps aircraft wings. Every Marine aviator wants the job, but it usually goes to major generals, a select group of 25 officers who wear two stars.

The newest wing commander in the Marine Corps is Maj. Gen. Donald Eugene Paul Miller.

Last September, the 52-year-old Vietnam veteran was promoted from brigadier general to major general. A month later, he took over the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Miller oversees 16,000 men and women at air stations at El Toro, Tustin, Camp Pendleton and Yuma, Ariz. He is responsible for 450 aircraft that range from supersonic fighter jets to Super Stallion and Cobra helicopters. The aircraft in his wing cost more than $50 billion.

The general’s $5,900-a-month paycheck would draw snickers in most board rooms in corporate America, where chairmen, senior vice presidents and chief operating officers routinely make $200,000, $400,000 and even $500,000 a year, not to mention their stock options, supercharged retirement plans and other benefits.

Still, despite the salary gap, Miller keeps a schedule that would tax any corporate chieftain. During a “sort of typical week,” Miller held staff meetings at El Toro and traveled to night desert maneuvers at Twentynine Palms near Palm Springs. He joined other officers for a helicopter trip to a remote Mountain Warfare Training Center in the Sierra, where November temperatures were near zero and snow was already beginning to pile up.

There was a quick trip to Dallas to meet with other Marine wing commanders and flights to the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. In Orange County, during nights and weekends, Miller’s calendar was packed with official social engagements.

Miller gave two speeches during the week, one to an auditorium full of noncommissioned officers, another to the Society of American Military Engineers at the Disneyland Hotel.

Commanding generals such as Miller, who in a sense have their own air forces, travel in a variety of military aircraft. During the week Miller flew in a military executive jet, a small Cobra helicopter, a bigger CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and a tiny two-seat OV-10 airplane. A smaller, seven-passenger Beechcraft was used to shuttle Miller and other high-ranking officers to Twentynine Palms. He flies Huey helicopters, and if he makes a quick trip from California to Washington, he might fly himself in a supersonic F-4 Phantom.

It’s a demanding pace, but he loves it.

“This is the greatest job in the Marine Corps and possibly the greatest job anywhere,” Miller says. “I have a job that people would kill for, especially guys wearing wings. There aren’t that many two-star aviators.”

In the darkness at Twentynine Palms on a Friday night, a distant mountain ridgeline was fading from view.

Miller took a deep breath of the cold, clean desert air. “I’ve always said, when I get tired of this (the field), I’m getting out.”

For a reporter stunned by the cold, it was hard at first to understand exactly what the general meant. It was cold and getting colder. It was dark and getting darker. The wind was blowing and the loose, flying sand was a constant reminder that this group was in the middle of a desert.

Miller, dressed in his camouflage field uniform and a thick field jacket, stood with Major Gens. Wesley H. Rice, inspector general of the Marine Corps; Jacob W. Moore, commanding general of the 4th Marine Reserve Aircraft Wing; James J. McMonagle, commanding general of the Marine Amphibious Force 1st Marine Division, and Brig. Gen. James D. Beans, commanding general of the 5th Marine Amphibious Brigade.

The generals, surrounded by colonels and lieutenant colonels, were on hand to watch the concluding segment of a major Southern California military exercise. They were waiting for a small Marine force to take control of the airstrip at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center.

In the distance came the faint whopping sound of helicopters. In came the Cobras, low and fast, their turboshaft engines sounding vengeful. Automatic rifle fire echoed in the darkness as big CH-46 helicopters landed on the desert airstrip to unload troops. The Sea Knights kept their long rotor blades spinning in case the enemy overran their position. More shots rang out. The Cobra attack helicopters buzzed the ground like menacing mosquitoes.

All the activity seemed to set the stage for the arrival of two big CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters. The 100-m.p.h. winds churned up by the Stallions’ giant rotor blades seemed to pick up part of the desert and methodically spread it around. The huge copters landed on the aluminum runway and dropped their ramps. Out came a procession of jeeps, .50-caliber machine guns mounted on their backs.

The view, through night-vision goggles that turn the darkness into a greenish daylight, was surreal.

Off to the side, the generals and their entourage turned their backs to the flying sand. Those who didn’t lean into the wind, anticipating the rush of sand and air, were knocked to the ground by the mighty blasts from the Stallion rotors. But suddenly the CH-53Es were gone, departing almost as quickly as they had arrived and leaving behind the kind of quiet and calm that follows a tornado.

The runway lights at the airfield were turned on--a signal that the invading force had taken the airstrip. A big, four-engine KC-130 Hercules transport plane circled and landed with a roar as it reversed its engines and taxied to a remote part of the airstrip where the helicopters approached for refueling. The Marines were loaded back onto the CH-46s and flew back to the ships they had left just hours before off the California coast.

“This is a life-and-death situation, coming in here on night-vision goggles with 18 Marines in the belly,” Miller said of the helicopter pilots. “If he makes a mistake he knows he kills all of those guys. You’re talking about the best of the best. That’s tough flying and very demanding flying. First they come off a ship at sea, and that in itself is scary as hell, and then fly out across the desert and land at an airfield. Am I proud to be a Marine? You’re damn right. Because the kids that are in the Marine Corps today, this country doesn’t have any better, literally there aren’t any better.”

The son of Swiss immigrants, Miller, articulate and soft spoken, does not necessarily fit the John Wayne Marine image. His favorite actor is not Wayne or Ronald Reagan, the commander in chief, but Paul Newman. His favorite politician is Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), a Marine and the first American to orbit the earth. The years he spent in the nation’s capital made him a Washington Redskins fan who still hopes to attend one more Sunday home game. Although he did his undergraduate work at the University of Maryland and earned a master’s degree at USC, this native of Morrill, Kan., favors the University of Nebraska in college football.

Miller joined the Navy as an enlisted man in 1956 and went to flight school, where he decided to be a Marine pilot rather than a Navy aviator, a decision he said he has never regretted.

Thirty-one years and 17 moves later, Miller is a major general. He and his wife, Dixie, figured that during their 28 years of marriage they have been separated for a total of six years while Miller was either overseas or fighting in the Vietnam War. Now they sometimes take long morning walks through the base, using the time together “just to talk.” They have a daughter, Deborah, who is a second lieutenant in the Air Force.

Miller has been in and out of the El Toro aircraft wing most of his military career. He first walked onto the Orange County air station in 1958 as a cocky young fighter pilot who used to “kick the tires and light the fires.”

Later, because of the increased use of helicopters in Vietnam, Miller was persuaded to switch from jets to helicopters.

On his daughter’s first birthday in 1965, Miller was en route to the first of two tours of duty in Vietnam. As a pilot of an old CH-37 transport helicopter, Miller took a bullet in the arm while delivering cargo at a place called Arizona Territory, about eight miles south of Da Nang.

“It wasn’t exciting,” Miller said when asked what it felt like to be wounded. “It made your heart pump fast. I’ve got to tell you at that point I realized that this game was for real.”

That wound brought him a Purple Heart. It is worn with his other medals, which include the Silver Star, the combat Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and Combat Action Ribbon.

After stints as an executive officer and squadron commander in the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing in Japan, Miller, then a colonel, returned to El Toro in June 1983 as chief of staff of the 3rd Aircraft Wing.

He was off to Washington in 1984 to become a one-star brigadier general and the director of public affairs for the Marine Corps. Getting the first star is like starting all over again as a lieutenant, Miller said, because “you’re thrown out of the colonels’ network”; “senior generals don’t talk to junior generals” and “you just kind of go with the flow. Keep your nose clean, keep your mouth shut, keep your ears open, and things are fine.”

Although he had hoped to get his first star as an assistant wing commander, “It wasn’t in the cards,” Miller said, adding now that he learned some important lessons as head of public affairs under former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. P.X. Kelley.

The Washington experience has made Miller a kind of preacher who spreads the Marine gospel at every opportunity.

“What I have tried to articulate to people is we are not really a bunch of village idiots. We don’t have any officers any more who don’t have a college education,” he said.

“I think maybe we made the mistake of not being very open or forthcoming with the media and saying come and take a look at us. Go talk to some of these young men and women, both junior enlisted Marines and the young officers who are flying these $20-million machines. What you are going to find is a pretty articulate, pretty well-educated, pretty dedicated young man or woman. They don’t come in here to learn to be hired killers, that’s not what we do.”

According to enlisted and commissioned officers, Miller is a popular leader, a commander who enjoys listening. “I don’t think you are going to find anyone out there who is going to say anything bad about him,” one enlisted man advised a reporter.

Secretary of the Navy James H. Webb characterized Miller as a bright, energetic and capable leader.

Retired Marine 1st Sgt. Jimmie Howard of San Diego first met Miller, then a major, at the White House, where Howard was receiving the Medal of Honor from President Lyndon B. Johnson for his bravery in Vietnam.

The two have been friends for nearly two decades.

“He can deal with the enlisted man, whether a corporal or a master sergeant, generals, Presidents and just plain people,” Howard said. “He seems to have the knack to strike up an immediate rapport with people.

“Don’t get me wrong--he is still military but at the same time can make you feel at ease. He’s one of a kind, a communicator. . . . It’s something you don’t learn, something you’re born with. He can be stepping on your toes and make you think he’s shining your shoes.”

It was midafternoon Saturday as the Sea Knights made their way through the Sierra from Bishop to the Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center, about 17 miles above Bridgeport. The sun reflected brightly off the snow-covered mountain peaks, but the afternoon shadows had already shaded the valleys.

Miller and the other generals riding in the rear of the noisy helicopter zipped up their field jackets and put on their gloves. The temperature dropped quickly as the helicopter climbed to the camp, 7,000 feet above sea level.

The warfare center would be the last overnight stop on the three-day trip that took Miller from the Pacific Coast at Camp Pendleton to the desert at Twentynine Palms and into the Sierra.

Before the exercise was over, Miller would stand at a dark observation point in sub-freezing temperatures for more than two hours above snow-covered Pickel Meadows.

“I was cold as hell,” Miller would say later. “But when you see it all come together it is worth the wait.”

At a meeting where he spoke to his senior enlisted officers, Miller, standing high above the seats on the auditorium stage, cut short his remarks and opened the session to all questions, “the hard ones, the easy ones, the pertinent ones and the impertinent.”

“You are the leaders,” his voice echoed through the auditorium. “You are what this corps is all about. Without you we can’t do business. What can I do to (improve) your lot in life and more importantly the young Marines who work for you?”

Miller made a point by relaying a conversation he had with Marine Corps Commandant Alfred M. Gray during a recent trip by Gray to California.

Miller quoted Gray as saying, “You know, I won the lottery to become the next commandant of the Marine Corps. There were those at headquarters and elsewhere within the corps who said that I wasn’t smart enough and I hadn’t spent enough time at headquarters Marine Corps, and that I was too short, too fat and too ugly, etc., etc.

“But I am the commandant of the Marine Corps and goddamn it, I am going to make a difference in the next four years.”

Miller paused and looked out over the group of Marines:

“I appreciate that,” he said of Gray. “I understand where he is coming from.”