The Marines wanted to pull him out of Fallujah at that point, Miller said, not wanting the very public poster boy to die in combat. But he stayed.

After getting home, and being diagnosed with PTSD, the military wasn't done with him. They sent him to New Orleans to help with the Katrina disaster.

Finally, Miller went to a military psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Miller thought that meant he could not be deployed. But in early September, he joined a group of Marines headed to police New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"I really didn't want to go. ... There was a possibility we would be shooting people," he said. "We could be going into another (urban warfare) environment just like Iraq, except this would actually be U.S. citizens. "Here we go, Fallujah 2, right here in the states."

Then they sent him to help with Hurricane Rita, where this happened.

One day, as Miller headed for the smoke deck with a Marlboro, a passing sailor made a whistling sound just like a rocket-propelled grenade. "I don't remember grabbing him. I don't remember putting him against the bulkhead. I don't remember getting him down on the floor. I don't remember getting on top of him. I don't remember doing any of that s -- ," Miller said. "That was like the last straw."

Finally, one year after his picture appeared, he got an honorable discharge. But his life is changed. So is he.

The man who left was easygoing, quick to laugh, happy to sit in a relative's house and eat and smoke and talk. The man who came back is quick to anger, they say, and is quiet. He still smiles often but does not easily laugh.

And when he takes a seat in his adoptive grandmother's home, amid her collection of ceramic Christ figurines, it is in a chair that faces the door. Mildred Childers, who owns those figurines, sees Miller's difficulties as a crisis of faith. She still remembers Miller's call just before the assault on Fallujah, and his terrible question: "How can people go to church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?"

Many of his fellow marines from Iraq are equally bad, if not worse straits. Just like the Vietnam vets before them:

Recently, some of his Marine buddies have been calling Miller up, crying drunk, and remembering their war experiences. Just like Papaw Joe Lee used to do when Miller was a boy.

"There's a lot of Vietnam vets ... they don't heal until 30, 40 years down the road," Miller said. "People bottle it up, become angry, easily temperamental, and hell, before you know it, these are the people who are snapping on you."

Jessica interrupted. "You're already like that," she said.

Miller's views on the war have changed a bit.

There was no time for such questions in Fallujah. But now, at night, when he can't sleep, Miller thinks of the men he saw through his rifle scope, and wonders: Were they terrorists fighting against America? Or men fighting to protect their homes?

"I mean, how would we feel if they came over and started something here?" he asked. "I'm glad that I fought for my country. But looking back on it, I wouldn't do it all over again."

In 2005, 317,000 vets were treated for PTSD. How is the military going to care for these soldiers in the long-term? They are casualties of war. A piece of them died over there. The cost of Bush's war just keeps getting higher and higher.

In March, it will be three years since the U.S. invaded Iraq. 2,241 (pdf) members of our military have died and more than 15,000 troops have been wounded in action. We didn't find Osama. Saddam didn't have meaningful ties to al-Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction. We took out a tyrant and saved some Iraqis, but look what we did to our own in the process.

Enough already.