FAMILY STARTS CAMPAIGN TO FREE SGT. MILES

Family Says He's Not A Criminal, But A Victim Of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder

On a Friday morning two weeks ago, Paul Miles sat alone in a federal
courtroom.

Wearing bright orange scrubs issued by the Angelina County jail, his
hands were shackled and placed neatly in his lap. The 22-year-old
Hallsville native wore his black hair short and neat, and he sat
upright in the high-backed brown chair.

His ramrod-straight posture and well-kempt appearance made him look
the part of the citizen-soldier his family and attorney say he is.

Serving in the National Guard in Iraq has put him where he is now, in
jail, being punished by the government he once fought for, his family
says.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives found a bomb fashioned with PVC pipe and gunpowder in
Paul's Nacogdoches apartment, last November. They also found marijuana
and psychedelic mushrooms.

After a two-week stay in a mental-health facility, Paul was arrested
and charged with six felonies, including arson, a charge connected
with the September pipe-bombing of a statue of the Virgin Mary outside
a Catholic chapel near the SFA campus.

His friends and family say the Paul who bombed the statue is not the
man who made Christian mission trips and handed out candy to Iraqi
children.

His service in Iraq scarred him deeply. Their son needs treatment for
that injury, not punishment for having been wounded.

Paul was born in Lafayette, La., when his parents lived nearby in
Breaux Bridge. His father, an engineer, moved the family often, and
they lived in Baton Rouge, Southern California and Little Rock, Ark.,
before settling in Hallsville, near Marshall in 1993.

The outgoing Paul was an Eagle Scout, and at Hallsville High School,
he joined the debate team and was a model student.

As a child, Paul made the decision to join the Army, his older sister,
Elizabeth, said, "during the Gulf War. He got really excited about
serving, and he wanted to be a part of it."

In July 2001, Paul joined the Texas Army National Guard before his
senior year of high school. He planned to graduate high school in
December, attend basic training and then spend his freshman year at
SFA.

But, on Sept. 11, 2001, "the rules changed," Paul's father, Curtis
Miles, said.

After he finished basic training, Paul, now Spc. Miles, was sent to
Umatilla, Ore., where his troop guarded the Umatilla Chemical Depot, a
U.S. Army facility that stores chemical weapons, as a part of the
anti-terrorism Operation Noble Eagle. After a year there, he returned
to East Texas and attended SFA.

On campus, he met Carl Timmons, a National Guardsman and student from
Longview, and the two became roommates.

A little more than a year after the war in Iraq began, Miles decided
to volunteer for service, a decision that greatly upset his family.

"I asked him if he was that patriotic, because I didn't think he was
that excited about the war," Elizabeth said. "He didn't really care so
much about the cause as he cared about some of his buddies who have
kids and a wife. He didn't want them to have to go over to the war
while he went to college and went to frat parties."

In August 2004, Paul mobilized with his college roommate's 56th
Brigade, 36th Infantry Division of the Texas Army National Guard, and
in January 2005, they went to Iraq. There Paul guarded checkpoints and
manned a machine gun on Humvee patrols. He was promoted from
specialist to sergeant, and he became a truck commander.

Patrolling Iraqi streets in a Humvee, Paul was a target for
insurgents, who would hide alongside the roads or perch high above the
streets on overpasses. His truck was hit many times by fire or
improvised explosive devices -- homemade bombs. Once, his family said,
the gun turret atop his truck was blown into the street, and, instead
of running for cover, he steered his disabled vehicle to another in
his convoy and fought with his brothers in arms.

Since returning from combat, he has only told his father a few
details.

During a church mission trip to Moldova -- in Eastern Europe -- his
sister, Elizabeth, first saw the scars and burns across his back.

"That's what happens when your truck gets blown up," Paul told her.
"It's nothing Purple Heartish."

While in the Middle East, Paul studied the Arabic language and culture
to better understand his mission. June 15, 2005, his troop met a group
of Iraqis in the midst of a wedding celebration. According to his
commanding officer, Paul acted as an interpreter between his troop and
the locals, diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. He played his
usual role, his parents say -- the peacemaker.

For his initiative, he was awarded the Army Commendation
Medal.

When Paul returned shortly before Christmas 2005, his family saw a
change. He became irritable and distracted, and the formerly laid-back
Paul snapped at his sister for chewing gum too loudly.

Immediately upon Paul's return, his family said they saw signs of
post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental illness that often affects
soldiers after exposure to widespread violence. When he arrived at
Fort Hood, that December, his parents went to visit him.

With Paul at the wheel, they drove through nearby Killeen. At the
sight of a highway overpass, he gunned the engine and quickly changed
lanes, an elusive maneuver he would use on the streets of Iraq. It
frightened his family. His father yelled, "Paul, what are you doing?"

"Oh," Paul said, calming and slowing down. "I don't have to do that
anymore."

He returned to SFA, where he studied business and tried to resume his
life. Paul visited a group home for those with mental retardation in
Shreveport, La. where he had volunteered before. He spent two weeks
with his sister and parents on a mission trip in Moldova, teaching
English. Photos of the trip portray him sitting and talking to
children and dancing with the locals in traditional Moldovan dress.

But his sister said he had trouble sleeping. Her brother, who had once
been the life of the party, was now distant and remote.

Back at SFA in the fall, Paul shared a ground-floor apartment with
Timmons at Lakewood Village -- apartment No. 132. Few of their
neighbors knew their names and knew very little about them.

Paul began to express strange views in Satanism, and he began drinking
heavily. He wouldn't talk about his war experiences, and he didn't say
much about his struggles in school and life. He floundered in school
and applied to transfer to Kilgore College.

Paul drove home to Hallsville almost every weekend, his parents said,
but he seemed distant.

According to police reports, he had begun growing marijuana and
psychedelic mushrooms in his apartment, but his family said he didn't
have a history of drugs. He and Timmons began making pipe bombs using
3- and 4-inch diameter PVC pipe and muzzleloader propellant --
"oversized firecrackers," Paul's father said.

Late Saturday night, Sept. 16, 2006, Paul, along with Timmons and a
mutual friend, John Tyler Vaughn, 20, of The Woodlands, decided to
test one of Timmons' homemade bombs on the SFA campus, according to
police records. On East College Street, in the garden between St.
Mary's Catholic Chapel and the Catholic Student Center, they found a
4-foot plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. They taped the bomb to its
face, lit a 15-minute fuse and ran to the SFA Forestry Building a block east.

The explosion sounded like a "diesel being dropped off a skyscraper,"
Timmons told police. Students who attended the center wondered why
someone would want to destroy a symbol of their faith.

In October, Paul hanged a stray orange-and-white kitten in his
apartment, Timmons said, and after it did not die, he beat it to
death. He kept the body in their freezer for a few days and hung the
kitten from a flagpole at the SFA Military Science Building on East
College Street.

About two months after the statue vandalism, Timmons appeared at the
SFA police department at 1 a.m. Nov. 20. A sergeant met him in the
lobby, and he told the officer that Paul had assaulted him at their
apartment. Because they lived off campus, the officer notified the
Nacogdoches Police Department to take the report. While waiting for an
NPD officer, Timmons told the sergeant that Paul had been violent
since returning from Iraq. He feared what Paul might do, and he said
Paul had spoken of "shooting kids at the high school and placing a
bomb at the high school," according to an SFA police report.

Paul denies ever making threats against students.

At 4 a.m., an NPD officer, Charlotte Hines, went to the apartment on
Lakewood Drive to speak to Paul. Paul made rambling, incoherent
statements, and before being transported to Nacogdoches Memorial
Hospital, Paul asked if he could empty his pockets. When he opened the
apartment door, Hines saw pipes and gunpowder, what she believed could
be bomb-making materials.

At 5:30 a.m., residents in the other 15 apartments that comprise
apartment 132's rectangular brick building were told to leave their
homes until experts deemed the area safe. Officers cordoned off the
area with tape and blockades, and neighbors stood in the parking lot,
unaware of what was happening.

Officers immediately notified explosives experts at Fort Hood, and
federal investigators with the ATFE in Tyler. At about 10:45 a.m.,
said NPD information officer Sgt. Greg Sowell, officers obtained a
search warrant, and the ATFE agents called off the Army experts, who
were en route.

Once inside the apartment's living room, three NPD officers and
several ATFE agents found PVC pipe, gun powder, cannon fuses and
shrapnel material -- glass and nails -- according to police reports.
Timmons gave officers a key to unlock Paul's closet, which he had
secured with a padlock. In it they found a drug-production operation
consisting of a high-powered light, 13 marijuana plants and 19
psilocybin mushrooms. Agents also found a completed pipe bomb.

Later that afternoon, officers arrested Timmons at an SFA residence
hall and charged him with four felonies.

Doctors at Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital quickly transferred Paul to
Brentwood Hospital, a psychiatric center in Shreveport. That day Dr.
Gregory Seal examined him in a "rambling and paranoid state,"
according to his evaluation. Paul told Seal that he never intended to
harm anyone.

Seal diagnosed Paul with bipolar disorder without psychotic features
and said his episode had been severe. He wrote that Paul was not
dangerous or psychotic, and he planned to treat him with intensive
therapy and medication. At Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital, Paul tested
negative for illegal drugs.

Through treatment, Paul improved.

"It was as if an evil spirit had turned him ... scary," Elizabeth
said. "But through the love and support that our church has given us,
he's changed a lot. Plus, he's on medication for the disease. His
heart is warm and loving again."

The Miles family kept NPD officers informed of their son's treatment,
telling them that Brentwood doctors planned to release Paul Dec. 5.

On Dec. 4, Caddo Parish sheriff's deputies obtained a warrant to
arrest Paul at the hospital. According to his attorney, a hospital
administrator would not allow deputies past the lobby. Paul walked out
to turn himself in.

He spent four days in Caddo Parish Correctional Center in Shreveport
until he was extradited to Nacogdoches County Dec. 9.

The Miles family recently hired James Volberding, a Tyler attorney and
officer in the U.S. Army Reserve Judge Advocate General Corps, the
judicial arm of the U.S. armed forces.

A former prosecutor, Volberding is a slight man with blond hair and
wire-rimmed glasses.

Volberding has filed motions with a federal court to release Paul so
he can be evaluated by a mental-health professional experienced with
post traumatic stress disorder.

"His parents are quite proud of his Iraq service, but frustrated that
the government which he served so well in Iraq and gave him awards now
seeks to prosecute him as a common criminal, rather than treating him
as a war hero," Volberding said.

Since his hearing in federal court, Paul has been held in Lufkin's
Angelina County jail, near the area's federal courthouse.

On that Friday two weeks ago, Carl Timmons appeared in federal court,
looking thin, with wispy brown hair and a pale complexion, after five
months in jail. He pleaded guilty to possession of an unregistered
firearm before the U.S. attorney's office ever indicted him. His
attorney, Tim James of Nacogdoches, said Timmons has been cooperative,
since the investigation began. Timmons will be sentenced within the
next two months, James said.

After Timmons was led away, bailiffs escorted Paul into the courtroom,
where he sat alone until his parents, Curtis and Sheri, walked through
the tall wooden doors. Curtis, a tall, broad man with gray hair, wore
a charcoal suit with thin pin stripes.

Sheri could barely contain her joy at the sight of her son, even if he
was confined to chains. A tall woman with auburn hair and bright eyes,
she rushed to the bannister separating her son from the audience
benches and began to ask her son, "How are you?"

The judge saw her elation, and he invited Curtis and Sheri Miles to
sit beside their boy throughout the hearing, during which the judge
would decide whether to allow a doctor to evaluate Paul. Volberding
wanted a psychologist with experience in diagnosing post-traumatic
stress disorder to evaluate Paul, but, because he is a federal inmate,
a government prison doctor probably will, the attorney said.

In a perfect world, Curtis said his son would never have to fight a
war -- no one would. But in our fallen world, he said, the best
outcome of the case would be the government realizing that Paul's
crimes were caused by his service and then releasing him for treatment.

At the federal hearing, Judge Earl S. Hines granted Paul the
competency hearing Volberding had hoped for -- the Miles family's
first victory in five months.