I posted a photo of the “Marlboro Marine” as my Twitter avatar last week. The photo is of James Blake Miller, taken taken by Luis Sinco, of the Los Angeles Times, during the Siege of Fallujah. In the photo, Miller’s face is covered with filth and fatigue, with a thousand mile stare only hinting of the horrors he has just witnessed.
I make no secret of my Army service on my Twitter account, but neither do I advertise it in my profile. I rotate my avatar to suit my mood, and usually I simply post a picture of my ugly face.
I chose the Avatar, not as a bragadocious attempt of self aggrandizement of my own Army service. In fact, while I have technically served in a war zone, the amount of actual war action I’ve seen is rather pathetically sparse, and too embarrassingly minimal to mention. I chose the avatar to honor the soldiers who serve on the front lines of the CENTCOM war theater.
The unintended consequence of displaying this avatar was that many among my Twitter audience chose to identify me as a self-congratulatory war-veteran tough guy. So in order to more precisely illustrate my point of honoring our soldiers, I then switched my avatar to a photo of a different soldier, whom the camera caught as he was obviously grieving the emotional loss of war. Incidentally, he was a black soldier, and then when the Tweet topic switched to the subject of race relations in America, I was accused of intentionally masquerading my white race to that of a black man. You can’t win trying to please everyone.
