Original press release for War and Work
An Appalachian Life, With a Detour Through Guadalcanal: Autobiography Covers Eighty Years of War, Work, Family

    It's a long way from Wyoming County, West Virginia to the South Pacific Island of Guadalcanal.
    As former Marine Gunny Sergeant T. I. Miller of Helen will tell you, it's an even longer trip back. Miller, a retired coal miner, has just finished choosing the last of fifty photographs for his autobiography, War and Work, published by iUniverse Press.  The book follows his life from a rural boyhood near Mullens through wartime service in the pivotal battles for Guadalcanal and New Britain, some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. It ends with an insider's look at life in the coal mines.
    The first third of the book tracks a Depression-era youth and his close-knit family through the first rumblings of war in Europe. Always an avid reader, Miller graduated from Mullens High School in 1939, no small feat for a restless boy from one of the most rural parts of the state, when many families couldn't put together a few dollars for books, much less shoes and clothes. Not until years later did he discover that an appreciation for learning runs in the family -- his great-great-grandfather Franklin Sizemore, scion of one of the oldest families in Wyoming County, was the first schoolteacher and first postmaster in what was then a nearly inaccessible part of Virginia. 
    As it became clear that America would not be spared the turmoil then threatening to engulf Europe Miller and three friends decided they would enlist in the Marines to fight for their country. They were to meet at the recruiting station in Charleston on Monday.
    Only Miller showed up. He enlisted anyway.
    After training at Parris Island, North Carolina he quickly worked his way up to the rank of Gunny Sergeant, becoming an expert marksman and a tough squad leader. The country boy who loved to sing as he roamed through the woods also learned the art of killing. 
    When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he suspected it wouldn't long until America's elite, all-purpose fighting force, the legendary First Marine Division, would be deployed, and he was right.
    Miller was one of the first Marines off the boat on Guadalcanal--the war's first American offensive on Japanese soil--and his service there and in other South Pacific battles occupies the middle third of his autobiography. His first-hand account of the Pacific campaign recalls some of the best reporting of the war, mixing harrowing accounts of hand to hand combat and legendary Japanese atrocities with the sort of humor that can arise only between strong men facing near-certain death with their full ration of humanity intact. 
    The infamous battles of Guadalcanal--in which four out of five Marines were killed or wounded in a matter of a few months--left Miller with many stories of bravery and patriotism, and a severe case of malaria. His recovery was long and slow, and was complicated by the tough job market he found on his return to the States.
    There wasn't much call for trained killers in peacetime.
    He reluctantly took a job in the coal mines, intending to eventually attend college if possible. But with a near-debilitating illness and a growing family, he was to remain a miner until his retirement more than three decades later. The final portion of his autobiography tracks his long, dusty career in the mines, intertwining his spiritual and physical struggles--and frequent, agonizing flashbacks--with a personal history of the mining industry's most turbulent decades, from mechanization and boom and bust cycles through labor struggles and the decline of "company" towns. At one point he brings the reader into the mines for a typical day underground, a harrowing experience for the newcomer as the roof thunders and cracks and the silty dust trickles down.
    Throughout his post-war ordeals, Miller kept writing, first on a battered Underwood typewriter and more recently on a personal computer. Short profiles of old comrades and friends. Letters to the editor. Historical fiction. Even poetry and songs. "For many years I wrote as a form of therapy, never intending to publish it. I could say things to the typewriter I could never say to another human being. When I turned 80 a couple of years ago, and my children asked yet again about putting it all together in a book, I knew it was time."
    With the same can-do attitude he brought to the Marines and the mines he began sifting through hundreds of pages of manuscript. He mastered e-mail to keep in touch with his son David, a former book editor at the University of Kentucky, who helped Miller shape the material into its final form. His son also made computer-scanned pictures of much of the memorabilia his father had amassed over the years, including historic photos, Japanese propaganda dropped on New Britain, even a half-burnt dollar bill the Marine used to light a stogie the night before landing on Guadalcanal, thinking that, with his chances of survival, he'd never live to spend it anyway.
    With a flash of ironic humor Miller adds, AI also told a guy who owed me ten bucks to forget it."
    In the 1980's Miller got in touch with a number of the Marines with whom he had served after being out of touch with them since the war. One, his old Platoon Leader Lt. Col. A.L. "Scoop" Adams, not only wrote the foreword for War and Work but also recalled the pivotal role Miller played in getting those first boats ashore. Soon after that reunion several of those Marines sat down in front of a tape recorder and the details from their conversation are sprinkled through the book, a unique gift of information from the fast-disappearing Greatest Generation.
Miller's most poignant memories include his wife and partner of more than fifty years, Recie Marshall Miller, one of the many "war brides" who personified the values for which the soldiers were fighting. "Without Recie," Miller concludes, "I would never have made it." 

    Thurman and Recie live in Helen, a small coal town in the southern tip of Raleigh County. As he nears his 83rd birthday, Miller is still writing, working on a second collection of his work with his son, David.
    War and Work, 260 pages and priced at $14.95, includes fifty black and white photos, editor's notes, several appendices, and a bibliography. It will be released June 15 by iUniverse Press of New York is available at bookstores nationwide or can be ordered from the publisher iuniverse.com, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and many other bookstores. Signed copies may be obtained directly from the author at (859) 774-0109 or gunnyti@aol.com. Excerpts are available online at http://www.kymem.org/ti.htm