PFC Burt E. Miller - "Rusty"

June 6, 1948 - November 4, 1968
An Hoa Valley, Vietnam
 
Akron, OH

1st Platoon, Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division
United States Marine Corps

(The following is a story about Burt "Rusty" Miller that was originally published in Vietnam magazine)

In an unreported act of valor and sacrifice, Burt Miller died saving other Marines.

After getting his draft notice for the Army, Burt – who was also known as “Rusty” to his family – ignored his father's advice and joined the Marines, following the same path as many of his friends. The family learned about his decision one day when he walked into the kitchen with a big smile. His mother, Jean, asked “What have you done?” He answered by singing, “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.”

In the tumultuous spring of 1968, Miller eagerly shipped out for basic training at Parris Island, S.C. His parents said he never complained about the physically grueling and emotionally challenging 13-week boot camp. The 6-foot-5-inch, sandy-haired teenager always had a smile on his face – even during boot camp. His dad recalled: “The drill instructor told him early on, 'I'll wipe that off your face.' But when he was getting on the bus to leave Parris Island, the instructor said, 'Burt, give it to me one more time.'”

Miller's parents drove him hundreds of miles to South Carolina, where they proudly watched their oldest son graduate from basic training. By this time, said his dad: “He seemed very happy. He was a Marine through and through.”

Miller grew up in Manchester, Ohio, a suburb of Akron. The oldest of four children, he had an average all-American upbringing. His father drove a delivery truck while his mother looked after Rusty and his brother and two sisters. The young Miller liked the outdoors and frequently went camping or hiking. As a teenager, he could often be found working in the garage on his 1948 Chevy, listening to the Everly Brothers on the radio. His mother described him as well liked, energetic, compassionate and thoughtful. “He was amazing,” she said. “There are just so many things he did [to help others].”

Before heading to Vietnam, Miller returned home to northeast Ohio and enjoyed several weeks with friends and family. If he feared the future, he never told anyone. Miller's two sisters, Billie and Darla, recalled that the last time they saw their brother was on a warm sunny summer evening at the Akron airport. After hugging him, the Miller sisters ran up to the airport observation deck. Darla, six years younger than her brother, yelled as loud as she could, “Rusty!” He heard her yell and “turned around with a big grin and waved to us,” she recalled. Then he disappeared into the plane.

In mid-August 1968, Miller joined the battle-hardened and weary 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. Since spring the unit had been operating in the An Hoa Valley – a dense jungle some Marines considered hell on earth because of frequent guerrilla ambushes and numerous booby traps.

The Marines conducted round-the-clock patrols. These operations came at a high cost, especially for men such as hospital corpsman Mike Murphy. Murphy never wanted or expected to be fighting in the deadly jungles of Vietnam, but joined the Navy in 1965 because he didn't want to end up in a foxhole. With two years of pre-med, the lanky Florida native was picked to be a hospital corpsman and assigned to the unit that Miller would join.

During his second tour in Vietnam, after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the death toll in Murphy's unit rose throughout the spring and summer of that year. By August, when Burt Miller joined his unit as a machine-gunner, Doc Murphy had stopped wanting to become friends with the new Marines in his platoon – he had lost too many friends. But Miller got through Murphy's emotional armor. “He was always jovial,” said Murphy, “Everybody took a liking to him right away.” Somehow Miller never got a nickname from the others in his unit, he was always just Burt.

Miller came under enemy fire soon after arriving in Vietnam, as the platoon faced an almost constant threat from the enemy where it operated in the An Hoa Valley. Miller quickly proved his abilities and courage in combat. “He was a good one,” recalled Murphy, whose work as a corpsman depended on the machine-gunners to cover his path to the wounded. Miller always fearlessly protected Murphy, carrying the 23-pound M-60 at his side, firing to cover the medic. Through the intense and almost daily firefights, the two men forged a close friendship. Murphy remembered: “I was the kind of person, when the call came for 'Corpsman up!' I just went. I didn't even think. I just went. And I guess that's why Burt and I hit it off, because he was the same kind of person.

“He was too nice to be a Marine in combat,” Murphy continued. “But when it came down to it, you could count on him to be 110 percent.” Murphy remembered how Miller had kept him alive on one occasion in particular. At midmorning in the An Hoa Valley on a sweltering day in the late summer of 1968, the exhausted platoon stumbled onto an enemy staging area, the base for about 1,500 NVA soldiers. The Marines faced fire from three sides. Those who lived through the initial hail of bullets scrambled into a 6-foot deep trench that kept them alive, at least temporarily.

During the opening rounds an enemy bullet hit the platoon's pointman, Richard Arruda. Just moments before, during a break for lunch, Murphy had listened to the Massachusetts native talk about his girlfriend back home. Now Arruda lay seriously wounded in a rice paddy near the trench. Murphy thought his friend was dead, but he had to make sure. As Miller laid down cover with the machine gun, Murphy scrambled out of the trench and advanced about 50 feet to help Arruda.

Initially, the NVA fired at the Americans only sporadically, so the Marines didn't know how much opposition they faced. But almost as soon as Murphy reached Arruda – who was in fact mortally wounded – the fire intensified. Bullets and grenades rained down on the besieged Americans as they huddled in the trench, but Murphy was stranded outside. “Everything erupted,”he recalled, “and I'm out there in the rice paddy with a dead man strapped to my back. I had to make it back to the trench.” It was just 50 feet away, but, said Murphy, “It may as well have been 50 miles. Burt and another machine-gunner concentrated the machine gun fire heavy enough into the tree lines that [the enemy] had to keep their heads down. And I was able to bring the body and myself back.”

It's miraculous that anyone in the platoon survived that day. About 20 minutes into the fierce fighting, almost totally surrounded, the Americans began running low on ammunition. With few choices, the platoon called in tactical air support on their own position to avoid being overrun. Within minutes, four Phantoms roared overhead, dropping a pair of 250-pound bombs and two loads of napalm. With their noses buried in the trench, many members of the platoon survived. To this day, at company reunions, the Marines who were holed up in the trench that day are respectfully known as “the survivors.” Burt Miller was a survivor, but not for long.

Miller had a strong faith, often reading the Bible he carried with him in the jungle. He frequently wrote letters home, many to his friend Sherry from high school, who had become something more than a friend once he joined the Marines. They got engaged while Miller was in Vietnam, and he told his father how much he looked forward to marrying her after his tour. He also wrote often to his family. Miller's mom said, “When the kids were in school, if I got a letter, I hung the flag out so they all knew they had a letter.”

Miller's family said he believed in the cause for which he fought. He wrote to his sister Darla that fighting in Vietnam “...was the cost of freedom. You guys should be very glad I'm over here fighting [Communists] and this war isn't going on at home.”

In his letters, Miller never mentioned to his family the daily death and suffering he witnessed, nor did he talk about the possibility of his own death. Even so, his family sensed the danger. They prayed often for him, at the dinner table each night or before bedtime. Bob Miller said: “We'd kneel down...and pray that [Rusty] would come home all right. But our prayer was always, 'Your will be done Lord, not what we want.'”

With his unit suffering increasing casualties, Miller was fast becoming one of the platoon's old-timers. At 20 years old, he looked out for all the “young guys.” Murphy said: “If one of our guys stubbed [his] toe, he was like a mother hen. He'd come up and put his hand on you and say, 'Are you OK? Are you OK?' [He was] just that kind of guy.”

The difficult jungle conditions took a toll on Miller's health. Constantly wet, cold and sleep deprived, in early October he was withdrawn from the field with pneumonia. He wrote his mother saying how glad he was to sleep on clean sheets. After a couple weeks of recuperation, Miller returned to his unit.

In late October Lima Company finally left the An Hoa Valley, but didn't go far. Helicopters dropped the unit above the valley, on a towering mountain range nicknamed Charlie Ridge. Miller's platoon had only a few small skirmishes during its first week on the ridge.

November 4, 1968 dawned like most other days during the monsoon season in Quang Nam province – very wet. However, later in the morning the sun came out, something unusual for early November. The Marines planned to hike down the steep 7,000-foot mountain range and begin searching for the enemy near a river that flowed through the valley.

By 1000 hours, with temperatures approaching 90 degrees, the company had made it about halfway down the rocky ridge The dingy, moonlike landscape had dark gray rocks and big boulders, with just a few bushes and some low grass covering parts of the steep terrain. It had been a quiet morning except for sporadic small-arms fire. The Marines spread out and descended the difficult terrain in several single-file formations. The men kept at least a 10-foot interval so an enemy detonation wouldn't wound or kill more than one. Along with another Marine, assistant machine-gunner Nick Stamos, Murphy and Miller climbed down the ridge several yards apart. Eventually they reached a 100-foot section that cut through two big boulders, and they began slowly descending a steep embankment between the huge rocks.

Murphy vividly recalled the sharp slope they reached – not quite straight down, but steep enough to prevent the men from walking down. Forced to descend in an inverted crab-walk, they crept along, feet first, with their knees bent at a 90-degree angle, backs parallel with the ground, bellies facing the sky, arms behind them and hands grabbing the rocks. They inched their way down the steep incline toward a rectangular plateau, which was surrounded on three sides by large boulders, creating a mini-fortress of rock walls at least six feet high on all four sides. This area, about 20 by 12 feet, offered a place for the men to catch their breath before continuing their descent of Charlie Ridge.

Murphy reached the plateau first, then helped the short assistant machine-gunner back to his feet. Stamos was putting his gear in order as Miller reached the plateau, about ten feet from his two friends. As Miller prepared to stand upright, Stamos stood with his back to him. Murphy turned toward Miller in time to see a hand grenade flying through the air. In what seemed like slow motion to Murphy, the grenade flew through the air and landed on Miller's chest. It rolled down to his waist where he held the bulky machine gun against his body.

“He looked at me,” said Murphy. “I looked at him. He looked down. He looked back at me. Burt might have had enough time to toss the grenade aside, yell 'Duck,' then cover up and hope for the best. He had that moment where had that choice. I know he made a choice because he looked me directly in the eye like, 'OK, now I know what to do.' It was kind of like a sendoff. He looked at me with a determined look, and he pulled the machine gun as tight as he could to himself.”

Murphy saw Miller clench the muscles in his arms, holding the gun as forcefully as he could, pinning the grenade between his gun and his body. When the grenade exploded, Murphy said, “He was holding it so firmly that neither the assistant machine-gunner nor [I] got one piece of shrapnel.”

Miller was still alive when Murphy reached him. “I took him and sat him in my lap and put my arms around him, and I think I was more upset than he was,” the corpsman recalled. “Someone had sent him a little...St. Christopher's medal. He reached over and handed it to me and said” 'Here Murphy. This hasn't done me much good. But don't worry about me, I'm going to a better place. Take care of the fellas.'” He then died in Murphy's arms.

Miller's family got the news three days later on a cold, dreary afternoon. Jean Miller greeted her 8-year old son, Blaine, at the front door as he got home from school. She didn't think twice about the black car rolling down the quiet street. Jean took her son's coat as he headed toward the bathroom. Then the knock came at the door. When Jean opened it, she saw two uniformed Marines on her doorstep. She knew instantly. Young Blaine heard her cries from the bathroom. He rushed out and immediately understood why his mother wept.

Hundreds of people crowded around the gravesite for Rusty Miller's burial. Heavy rain fell throughout the cold afternoon. His uncle told the family, “The Lord is crying.”

The sound of the three-volley rifle salute ripped through the hushed cemetery. Then the uniformed Marines folded the American flag that had draped the casket. Slowly one of them, carrying the flag, walked toward Rusty's parents. The young Marine handed Bob Miller the Stars and Stripes, saying, “This is from a grateful nation.” Nodding his head and crying, Rusty's dad took the flag, holding it close to his chest, tears streaming down his face, clutching the flag tighter, sobbing. The tears couldn't wash away his pain.

In the dark months after Miller's death, his family turned to God for support. They took solace in a letter he had sent home shortly before his death. “Mom and Dad,” he wrote, “I want you to know that I've found Christ over here.”

Knowing their son believed in Jesus offered Miller's parents some comfort and peace during their darkest hours. That doesn't mean it was easy for the family. Miller's sister Darla, 14 when he died, had thought her faith would bring him safely home. When he died, Darla said: “I was just angry – angry at God. Why would he take such a great guy from a great family? It was a real emptiness. I came to realize I can't question the will of God.

Soon after Miller's death, his mother started reading obituaries in the newspaper. Whenever she came across the name of some young man who died in Vietnam, she wrote a note to his mother, offering words of comfort and sympathy, words that could only come from someone who knew the pain.

As Miller's family tried to come to terms with his death, they still weren't certain how he died. A telegram from the Marine Corps said he had been “killed by a concealed weapon.” The Millers figured he had stepped on a land mine, although Murphy had reported to the platoon sergeant and several other Marines exactly what had happened to Miller. The incident report prepared by the platoon leader should have detailed Miller's heroism and sacrifice, but for some reason it didn't. The company commander was back in the United States when Miller got killed. Murphy thought the commander might have passed along the truth had he been with the unit on November 4. Instead, the account of Miller's sacrifice got left out of the official reports, and his family did not know the real story.

In the weeks after Miller's death, Murphy had become emotionally unstable. “It was the straw that broke the camel's back.” he said. “I really became a bad corpsman. I was more interested in taking lives than saving them. I just didn't care anymore.”

Five weeks after Miller died, Murphy was seriously wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. He spent several months in a coma, but survived. Today, Murphy is permanently disabled with fragments in his left wrist and hand plus constant pain in his left knee.

Murphy returned to the United States in the summer of 1969, as many Americans turned their backs on Vietnam veterans. He unsuccessfully tried to find his friend's parents. He knew Burt came from Ohio and his last name was Miller, but the name was too common. Even if the Veteran's Administration had located Miller's parents, strict privacy rules prevented Murphy from getting that information.

As years passed, Burt Miller's family kept him alive in their memories. Jean and Bob Miller often talked about their son, sharing reminiscences of his life. Rusty's sister Billie recalled that her parents “never made us forget him.”

A couple years after Rusty's death, Billie set the table for dinner, almost instinctively putting out six places. Her mother asked, “Why are there six plates?” Billie thought to herself, because there are six people in this family. Without Burt, however, there were only five. Before Billie could answer her mother's question, they both realized why she put out six plates and started crying.

Despite the tears, the family held on to their good memories, laughing whenever someone brought up a funny story involving their son. In later years the grandkids heard so much about Rusty that all 10 felt they knew him. But the family never completely got over their loss. They just learned to live with the pain. Bob Miller said “There's a hole in this family that was left when he left, and it will never be filled.”

Through the decades, Murphy carried a huge burden of guilt – knowing that another man had died saving his life. Whenever he visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, he always went first to Burt Miller's name, etched in stone as a permanent tribute to his fallen friend. Several years ago Murphy left the St. Christopher medal at the wall below Burt's name. “His sacrifice enabled me to be here,” said Murphy. “It was just total dedication to your fellow man. I have never seen anything comparable to it.”

Murphy thought he might never fulfill his mission to meet the parents of his fallen friend. Then in the spring of 2002, a Web site called The Wall (www.thewall-usa.com) began allowing people to post comments about the men and women who died in Vietnam. Just before Memorial Day, Murphy's wife, Barbara, found a message posted by a man who played high school football with Miller. She quickly sent an e-mail explaining why her husband wanted to find Miller's family. It wasn't long before the Murphys heard that the Miller family was eager to talk. Even though it was late on a Tuesday night when he got that message, Murphy immediately picked up the phone.

Bob and Jean Miller spent an hour that first night talking with Murphy, hearing how their son died. “Learning this,” said his mom, “just makes me more proud. That he was still thinking of someone else, that really made me more proud.”

Her daughters weren't surprised to learn that their brother had given his life for others. Darla said, “I'm so grateful that Mike never gave up trying to tell us.”

Although the Millers were grateful to hear how Rusty really died, it didn't make the following years easy. Billie said it “made me miss him all over again.” Reflecting that the family had gone through the grieving process a second time, she added, “It brought Rusty back to life.”

Rusty's dad struggled to deal with the revelations and face the pain again. We were very much glad that [Murphy] found us.” Nevertheless, said Bob Miller: “We miss him dearly. It'll be that way until we join him.”

For Billie, too, there were many sleepless nights after hearing from Murphy. It has been...hard,” she said, but “I would not have traded this...for anything.” Apparently hearing Rusty's last words – about going to a better place – brought the family some relief. “Nothing we could have heard would create more peace and comfort,” said Billie.

The Millers tried to help Murphy relieve some of his guilt. Rusty's mom said: “We did not want him to feel one bit guilty, because it was the Lord leading. If the Lord had wanted [Rusty] to throw that grenade, he would've done it.”

With the Millers' consent, Murphy started a review process in the fall of 2002 to have Burt Miller considered for a military decoration. But Murphy and the Millers agreed that medals were not important. “A drawer full of medals...won’t bring him back,” observed Rusty's father.

Burt Miller is gone forever, but now, 36 years after he died, his family has more peace and comfort. “Now I know why he had to die,” said his sister Darla. “He died saving other people.”

– By Patrick Sammon

BURT "RUSTY" MILLER BENCH DEDICATION - NOVEMBER 4, 2011