The NCOC Dismissal

This account comes from Marvin Miller himself, who told the broad outline of the story to his family before his death in 2004. He never disclosed the specific infraction. His daughter believed it involved marijuana — that he had been found in the presence of someone who was smoking it, refused to identify who, and took the consequences alone. Whether that interpretation is precisely correct is not confirmed. What is consistent with his character across every account in this archive is the refusal to give up another soldier.

During the NCO Candidate Course at Fort Benning, Georgia — approximately August through October 1970 — Marvin was accused by a captain of an infraction serious enough to warrant dismissal from the program. He was called into the Colonel's office to be informed of the outcome.

The Colonel told him two things. First, that he did not like the captain who had made the referral and did not believe him regarding Marvin's personal involvement. Second, that it did not matter — it was a captain's word against a PFC's, and the PFC was always going to lose.

Marvin was dismissed from the program.

As he left, the captain told him that he would remain a PFC and never be promoted.

On August 4, 1971, Marvin Dale Miller was promoted to Sergeant E-5 in the field in Vietnam.

He found this ironic. He said so. That he told the story at all — this man who came home and never spoke about Vietnam — suggests the irony mattered to him. The captain's prediction was wrong on both counts: the rank and the character.

The NCOC dismissal is also the event that sent Marvin to Vietnam as an E-4 rather than arriving as a newly minted Sergeant. Had he completed the course, he would have entered the war in a different unit, at a different time, in a different role. The chain of contingencies that placed him specifically in Cat Platoon, D/2-8 Cav, runs through a colonel's honest assessment, a captain's mistaken prediction, and a decision — whatever it was — not to name a name.