His toughest battle

Guardsman returns home from Iraq to face a new enemy: terminal cancer

Tall and pale, Massachusetts Army National Guardsman Scott Miller stood at attention while a succession of officers bestowed upon him his new rank of sergeant, delivered solemn speeches, and congratulated him on his promotion from specialist. Then he sat down in a hospital chair, exhausted and dry-lipped, and prepared for his next round of chemotherapy.

Just over two months ago Miller - a military police officer who lives in Newton, N.H. - was manning an M240 Bravo machine gun in the turret of a Humvee that patrolled Baghdad's treacherous streets.

But in February he was diagnosed with a rare and terminal form of colon cancer and was told that he had only months to live. What comes next, the 34-year-old said, is more challenging than anything he has encountered during his deployment to Iraq.

Miller, who joined the National Guard in 2000, was due for promotion to sergeant and would have received it in Iraq, if not for his illness. Instead, he was promoted in a stuffy room packed with fellow Guard members and medical personnel minutes before he received a round of chemotherapy at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Throughout the ceremony, an IV snaked up his camouflage uniform and under his collar, pumping pretreatment and antinausea medications into his blood.

"His mission right now is to beat this cancer," said Sergeant Major Bill Davidson, who served with Miller in Pakistan and Uzbekistan in 2002 and who attended the ceremony yesterday.

Until February, Miller was serving in Iraq with the Reading-based 972d Military Police Company of the 211th Military Police Battalion, which is based in Lexington. Then, his left leg suddenly became swollen, and he was sent to an American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, to be treated for what turned out to be a blood clot.

During routine tests in Landstuhl, doctors found that Miller's enzymes were elevated, and they sent him for further tests at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

A week after he left Iraq, Walter Reed doctors told Miller he had terminal colon cancer.

"It's an aggressive tumor," said Nadine Jackson, the oncology fellow at Dana-Farber who is treating Miller. "It has metastasized. At this stage it's inoperable."

Doctors at Walter Reed said Miller had about four months to live. Jackson refused to make predictions about Miller's future, saying there was too little research about Miller's rare type of cancer, extrapulmonary small-cell carcinoma, to make a prognosis.

Miller said that he suffers only mild abdominal discomfort, but that the chemotherapy exhausts him.

"The nausea isn't bad for me; It's just feeling tired and sleeping a little bit more," he said, then smiled, adding, "Which may be not such a bad thing."

He and his wife, Alex, are leaving for a week in Hawaii Monday. When he returns, he will undergo more chemotherapy, Jackson said.

"It's challenging, but I'm an Army wife," said Alex, who married Miller last June, a month before he left home for Iraq. "The doctors say what he has is terminal, but we're hoping for a miracle."

Miracle was a word uttered yesterday by civilians and servicemen alike.

"All of us are praying for a miracle," said Major General Joseph Carter, adjutant general of the Massachusetts National Guard, after he attached the stripes to Miller's fatigues.

Alex Miller stood by her husband's side throughout the promotion ceremony.

"He's wanted this for a while," she said, later, with a smile. "It means a lot to him. He's one of those good guys who'd do anything for anybody. We need more of these in this world."

With that, her smile was gone, her voice starting to break, as she added, "Anybody who knows him is blessed."