A service with full military honors will be held for Sgt. Mikeal Miller, a U.S. soldier from Albany, at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Mt. Scott Funeral Home, 4205 S.E. 59th Ave., Portland. Interment will follow at Willamette National Cemetery.
My colleague David Austin spent some time with the family of Mikeal Miller, who have suffered with him for the last seven months, after he was severely wounded by shrapnel from a roadside bomb. As he lay in a coma, they made the wrenching decision last week to take him off his feeding tube and he died a few days later. Here's the story Dave wrote for today's paper.
Letting Mikeal go: a family's story
ALBANY -- For months, Rene Pool watched for any signs that her oldest son, 22-year-old Sgt. Mikeal Miller, would make it. She looked past the tubes, past the whirring life-support machines and saw only her baby boy. A series of infections during the seven months since his injury had taken their toll on his body.
In July, Miller was patrolling Baghdad when a bomb detonated under his Humvee. The blast pushed the Albany soldier against the roof, knocked off his Kevlar helmet and tossed him to the ground. A piece of shrapnel pierced his right eye and lodged in his brain.
At Bethesda Naval Hospital, his condition slowly worsened. But he was a fighter, she thought. He could make it. "It took me 72 hours of labor to have him," she said. "There was no way I was going to give him up easily."
Rene and Steve Miller were juniors at Lakeview High School when Mikeal was born on Aug. 27, 1985. Steve was on the football team and half the squad was in the hospital waiting room. "He had like 27 dads that night," says Cinda Blair, Mikeal's grandmother.
After graduation, Steve joined the Army and the family moved to Germany.
"When he was 2, his favorite word was 'No,' " Rene says of her son. "Pick up your toys. No. Let's watch a video. No. Time to go to bed. No. Everything was on Mike's timetable."
As kids, Mikeal used to herd his brothers, Kurt and Chris, around when their parents weren't home. Kurt Miller, now 19, remembers coming home from school to find that Mikeal had scored some firecrackers. The three brothers gathered in the garage and lit them.
"We couldn't point at each other because we were all doing it," Kurt says. "Mike admitted things, and he took the hit."
When Mikeal was 10, his grandfather, Ramon Blair, took him on a hunting trip. To prepare, Blair coached his grandson on the fine points. Top on the list: Keep quiet so you don't scare off any deer.
"We get down by this clearing and that boy is tugging at my pants, whispering: 'Grandpa! Grandpa!' " Ramon Blair says. He prepared to chastise the boy for making noise but saw Mikeal standing with his hands spread wide over his head and pointing at a buck with antlers.
"I looked up and sure enough there was this big one standing right there," his grandfather says. "We got him and that was Mike's buck. It was all his."
Steve and Rene divorced in 1996, and she moved to Albany with the boys. As a single mom, it was tough not having a man in the house.
Mikeal watched out for Kurt and Chris, making sure they made friends and stayed out of trouble. He spent time with his mom, being a sounding board for her. And he made sure the family stayed together.
"Whenever the football team had one of those team dinners before a game, Mike would never hesitate to come up to me and give me a hug in front of everyone," Rene recalls. "They'd ask me: 'How did you get your kid to do that?' Every day, he made sure to say I love you, to me, to his brothers. That bond with Mike was so concrete."
In his shop class, he took to crafting wooden boxes. "That was the only thing he wanted to make," Cinda Blair says. "I should know because I still have every last one of them."
He signed up early for the Army, and after his graduation in June 2003, he was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia for basic training. That November, he was sent to Korea.
The following year, his unit was sent to Iraq. He came home on leave and met Megan Erner, and the two fell in love. When he returned to the war, the family didn't fret. "I knew that he was going to be OK," Rene says. "He's always been so smart and able to take care of things."
He returned after a year and his relationship with Megan blossomed. They made plans to spend their lives together and married in September 2006. A month later, he shipped out again to Iraq.
Everyone worried because fighting in the war zone was escalating, but Rene Pool kept telling herself, "He'll be OK."
His brothers developed a routine of getting up in the morning and sending e-mails to Mikeal, each one ending with "I love you, man."
On July 7, 2007, Mikeal sent Rene an e-mail. He had one more patrol before a leave. Be careful, she told him. The next day, Mikeal's stepdad, Bud Pool, called to tell her Mikeal had been injured.
He was flown to Bethesda where doctors kept him in a medically induced coma. His right eye was gone, obliterated by the shrapnel.
He couldn't speak but his mother saw a tear roll down his cheek when she squeezed his hand. Megan kept a vigil at her husband's bedside, talking to doctors and waiting.
In August, doctors sent him to a center in California. While there, he developed the infections, so doctors ordered him back to Bethesda.
The news wasn't good. His brain was functioning at roughly 20 percent, enough to keep him breathing and to keep his heart beating. For months, Megan stayed by his side.
In early January, brother Kurt Miller, in tears, called his mother. "Mike's not going to make it," he told her. Megan had just called him, saying doctors suggested the family should start thinking about pulling Mikeal's feeding tube.
"My first reaction was, 'Over my dead body,' " Rene Pool remembers. "But he wasn't going to get better. I knew that this wasn't how he would want to live. I knew I had to start thinking about letting Mikeal go."
She flew back to Bethesda and on Jan. 18 doctors removed his feeding tubes. Nine days later, Mikeal Miller died.
In a small house in Albany, family members pack into the kitchen to remember Mikeal Miller, the husband, the son, the brother and the grandson.
Kurt Miller fingers the copy of his brother's military dog tags draped around his neck. "When you're the little brother, your older brothers are big figures to you, almost god-like," he says. "I didn't think it would come down to this."
Across the table, 4-year-old Conner Pool scoops up a picture of his brother Mikeal and gently kisses the photograph. He holds it at arm's length and stares at it for a moment.
"This is my picture," he says. "I love you, Mike."
David Austin: 503-294-5910; davidaustin@news.oregonian.com