Captain Miller, the latest Kollywood blockbuster from director Arun Matheswaran with Dhanush in the leading role has generated a worldwide buzz for its powerfully familiar title, named after the LTTE’s first Black Tiger. But who is the real Captain Miller?
Captain Miller
01.01.1966 - 05.07.1987
Captain Miller is the nom de guerre of Vallipuram Vasanthan, born on January 1, 1966.
An Eelam Tamil, he was born in the Jaffna peninsula and educated at Hartley College, growing up in a period when ethnic tensions flared as the Sri Lankan state routinely repressed Tamil aspirations and deadly anti-Tamil pogroms were becoming a regular occurrence.
"He was upset about these killings," said his mother, Kamalathevi Vallipuram.
A year after the deadliest of the pogroms – now known as the Black July massacres of 1983 – he joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Vasanthan went on to take the nom de guerre Miller.
He carried out the first-ever Black Tiger attack on a Sri Lankan Army garrison in Nelliyadi in the Jaffna district by driving a truck with explosives into it on July 5, 1987. At least forty Sri Lankan soldiers were killed in the attack.
“On that day, July 5 1987, we were asleep at home when that massive explosion sound startled me awake,” his mother recalled in a later interview.
“Only the next morning as the rumours slowly started circling around town, I realised that it was my son. I couldn’t cry then because the army was everywhere. I went into a room, weeping and trembling. People who had heard the news would come to the house but disperse the moment they heard the sound of a military vehicle. They would return when the vehicles disappeared.”
Photograph:Vallipuram Kamaladevi, mother of the first Black Tiger, Captain Miller. Courtesy: @StreetsOfTamilEelam
"He was loving and caring, and a reserved person, and was a brilliant student. We never knew that he was a Black Tiger,” his mother said in 2005. “He used to come home to have meals with us but never told us that he was a Black Tiger. We came to know about it only after the attack."
Since then, Black Tigers Day (or Karumpuli Naal in Tamil) is marked on July 5 in Tamil Eelam and around the world, to remember and mourn the sacrifices made by Captain Miller and the men and women who made up the elite unit.
“Of course, I am sad that my son is dead,” his mother added. “But he died for his country, didn’t he? I do feel proud when I think of that.”
In 2008 the LTTE declared that 356 Black Tigers had laid down their lives, 254 of them in sea operations since Captain Miller's attack. It is not yet known how many sacrificed their lives during the final phases of the armed conflict when tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred by Sri Lankan forces.
Statue of Captain Miller in Nelliyadi, Jaffna. 2003.
A statue was erected in Miller’s memory, but armed men, suspected to be Sri Lankan soldiers, destroyed it in 2006.
The damaged statue in 2006. Photograph TamilNet
Other memorial stones have since been destroyed by the Sri Lankan military, including the graves of all LTTE cadres.
Destroyed Miller statue in 2012. Photograph @Saygi
