A searing snapshot into the soul

I know that look.

The weariness, the emotional pain, the jagged memories of a recent event too large and outrageous to contemplate, flashes of horror knifing into the conscious mind.

I know that look, that terrible look; it sends chills through me.

The expression we saw on the face of Marine Lance Cpl. Blake Miller was the look of a warrior still alive who wasn’t quite sure he ought to be.

It was the thousand-mile stare of a man peering inward to that place in the soul where memory screams.

It was the perfect melding of a hurt too deep to understand and a wonder of existence too powerful to comprehend.

The image by Times staff photographer Luis Sinco of Miller’s face, republished on the front page of The Times on May 19, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, has become the tortured icon of a man at war and what war does to us.

In terms of impact, it’s the Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in World War II and David Douglas Duncan’s picture of an infantryman’s detached stare in the Korean War.

It’s the face of combat emerging from the blood and uncertainty of Iraq.

Miller’s life was on the verge of unraveling when Sinco captured the moment of despair in November 2004, narrated in the story by Times staff writer David Zucchino. A year after the photo, Miller was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and discharged from the Marines.

But the inward focus of his expression will continue throughout his life and perhaps throughout ours.

The photo could have been any number of us in any of the wars that have characterized this era of human conflict. I was photographed by a friend after a battle in Korea, and although the photo has been lost, the expression remains fixed in memory. It was the Blake Miller expression, a lost boy inside of a war-damaged man.

It’s still inside of me.

Many photographs exist that attempt to identify the horrendous clashes of men at arms, but few have affected me as much as those contained in Duncan’s “This Is War! A Photo-Narrative of the Korean War.” They mean more than most, I suppose, because I was there, I was a Marine, and because damned few others were concerned with what Harry Truman called the “police action” on the embattled Asian peninsula.

I was still in Korea when the book was published in 1951, and it was passed around to us on the front lines, from foxhole to foxhole. Duncan, an ex-Marine himself, knew what to look for, and the accuracy of his depictions both startled and saddened us.

We saw ourselves as the kid photographed during the bitter winter march from the Chosin Reservoir, and as I study the photograph today, I see Miller’s face too, smudged with dirt and sweat, young but old, staring off at the devil’s dance on the mind’s horizons.

One could easily superimpose the face of Miller over the face of the anonymous young warrior in Duncan’s book, and they would be almost the same. While there are twitches of difference in the expressions, the eyes tell us what their minds have not yet accepted, images that will grow as the years pass, more torturous because they lie just beyond reach of full visualization, like distorted pieces of a half-forgotten dream.

As Zucchino pointed out in the story that accompanied Miller’s photo, you can read what you want into the face of the young Marine who greeted the dawn of a Fallouja morning after fighting for his life throughout the night.

But I will tell you that there is an emotional collapse when the fight is over, a moment before one marches on in which only emptiness prevails, when subconscious flashes of the battle are imprinted on a soldier’s face, a reflexive condition of the vacancy that exists before the bad dreams begin.

Is what we do in war worth the horror? A Gallup survey taken in South Korea less than a year ago provides something of an answer. Almost 900 fighting-age men and women were asked whose side they’d take in a war between the U.S. and North Korea. Sixty-six percent said they would stand with the North.

This, after a war of “liberation” that killed a million people, soldiers and civilians, on both sides.

This, after a war that took the lives of countless friends, whose faces I carry with me to this very day, all these years later.

This after a war that ended where it began, at a line drawn in blood from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan.

This after a war that still smolders.

Blake Miller was looking into his own soul when that photograph was taken. And in more ways than we can ever imagine, he was looking into ours too.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.