CHAPTER 7

Father and Son

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

ROMANS 5:3–4

“ARE THERE ANY MARINES IN THE ROOM?”

When I talk to groups, that’s one of the questions I sometimes ask. At other events, I’ll call the roll of other branches of service—the army, navy, air force, and Coast Guard. But when I mention the Marine Corps, I usually get a spirited Oorah! or two in return—sometimes more, depending on the audience. I got several on this particular evening at the Waterloo Public Library in Iowa.

“Who is the most decorated Marine in U.S. history?” I asked.

“Chesty Puller,” two or three voices called out in unison. And they are right.

Lewis “Chesty” Burwell Puller was awarded five Navy Crosses. When it comes to valor in battle, the Navy Cross is just below the Medal of Honor—and Chesty Puller was awarded five of them plus an Army Distinguished Service Cross. He tangled with Caco rebels in Haiti and mountain guerrillas in Nicaragua, leaving that nation with a 5,000-peso reward on his head. He led Marines in some of the most treacherous battles of World War II and the Korean War, rising eventually to the rank of lieutenant general. Somewhere along the line, people started calling him Chesty because of his short and stocky build. Folks insisted he looked and also growled like a bulldog.

Although the Marines in the room seemed to know, I was pretty sure there were other people in the library crowd who didn’t know anything about Chesty. The librarian had been kind enough to bring me a chair to sit in while I talked. So I set aside my cane, invited Tuesday to sit nearby, and settled down to share the incredible story of an amazing American warrior.

“Announcing ‘I want to go where the guns are,’ young Chesty dropped out of Virginia Military Academy and enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps,” I began. Across a thirty-seven-year career, Chesty was never far from the action for long. On the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal in World War II, he commanded the 1^st Battalion, 7^th Marines on an amphibious assault near the Matanikau River. But when they hit the beaches, they collided almost immediately with a massive force of Japanese infantry. The Marines were quickly cut off and surrounded. Another company of Marines tried to break through the Japanese flank and rescue Chesty’s stranded men, but the enemy resistance was too powerful. The situation was hopeless, the operation commander announced. Chesty didn’t like the sound of that. He stormed out of camp and beat a path to the beach, where he flagged down a U.S. Navy destroyer that happened to be sailing off the coast. With absolutely no authority to do so, he boarded the vessel, ordered support fire, and organized a second amphibious assault. The shelling, coupled with the second landing, punched a hole through the enemy blockade and cleared a path for the stranded Marines to escape.

That was pure Chesty. “Hit hard, hit fast, hit often,” he liked to say.

He commanded the “Frozen Chosin” in Korea’s Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Chesty and his men found themselves holed up in the town of Koto-ri, surrounded this time by ten full divisions of Chinese infantry. Heavily outnumbered and the temperature sinking below zero degrees, they broke the Chinese lines, smashed through seven enemy divisions, then stayed behind as the rear guard against a brutal Chinese onslaught so that the rest of the Marines could get the hell out of there.

If the expression applies to anyone, it applies to Chesty Puller: This was a Marine’s Marine.

When I finished telling the story of this celebrated American warrior, I put another question to the audience: “How many of you know about Chesty’s son?”

This one almost always stumps an audience. And this night wasn’t any different. I looked around and saw nothing but blank stares in Waterloo.

“He was named for his father,” I started. “And what happened to Lewis Puller Jr. is every bit as important for people to know. It’s the closest thing we have to an American Shakespearean tragedy. It’s every bit as revealing—and even more instructive—as his father’s battlefield exploits.”

This wasn’t just a lesson from history. It happens that my father knew Chesty and his son in the 1950s as he spent time between Cuba and northern Virginia. Chesty, back then, enjoyed passing many summer afternoons watching tennis matches involving his Episcopal Diocese. Tennis is often known as the gentleman’s sport, but Chesty being Chesty Puller, was taken by my dad’s super-aggressive style of play. I suppose it reminded him of his own approach on the battlefield.

Lewis Jr., I explained to the library crowd in Iowa, graduated from Virginia’s prestigious College of William and Mary, then followed his father into the Marine Corps. He arrived in Vietnam in July of 1968 with the 2^nd Battalion, 1^st Marines as the commander of a rifle platoon. You can imagine what it must have been like for the young second lieutenant, arriving in the war zone as Chesty Puller’s son. Talk about big boots to fill!

During a jungle engagement with North Vietnamese regulars on October 11, Lewis tripped a “Bouncing Betty,” a booby-trapped, World War II–era howitzer round. When tripped, the makeshift land mine was designed to bounce up to hip level, before exploding. That’s exactly what happened. In the devastating blast, the young lieutenant lost his right leg at the hip, his left leg below the knee, his left hand entirely, and most of the fingers on his right hand. His body was riddled with shrapnel.

As he lay there gravely injured, drifting in and out of consciousness, he turned over command of his unit to another young officer then ordered those helping him not to frighten his pregnant wife with the terrible news. Corpsman in the field quickly patched Lewis up. He was medevacked to a military hospital in Saigon, where he lingered near death for days, his body weight plummeting to a skeletal fifty-five pounds.

Ol’ Chesty flew into Vietnam. He rushed to his only son’s bedside. There, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history looked at his boy in that hospital bed, then broke down and wept uncontrollably. He was the toughest son-of-a-gun imaginable. Yet when he looked at his son, he cried.

Doctors didn’t think Lewis Jr. had a chance. But almost miraculously, the young Marine survived. He must have inherited his father’s bulldog stamina and stubborn refusal to surrender. He was a triple-amputee, likely to spend his life in a wheelchair. But his grit and his spirit and some fine medical attention managed to keep him alive. After spending nearly two years in a hospital, he was medically discharged with a chest full of medals of his own: the Silver Star, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals, two Purple Hearts, and a Gallantry Cross from the Republic of Vietnam. He retired as a captain and, despite the battering he had taken, he bravely got on with his life.

In the early 1970s, Lewis Jr. went back to the College of William and Mary and put himself through law school. He took a job as an attorney in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He was appointed to President Gerald Ford’s clemency board. He and his wife, Toddy, who’d been together since college, had a daughter, Maggie, and a son, Lewis III. On the outside, he seemed to be making the best of things—but, as I told the library audience, the story was more complicated than that.

Lewis Jr. suffered from terrible depression. He drank far too much. He ran for Congress from his wheelchair and was beaten badly. In 1981, he checked himself into an alcohol rehab program and stayed off the booze for a while. But he continued to battle depression and relapsed several times.

That year, Lewis Puller Jr. published his autobiography, Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet.

The Waterloo librarian, who’d been sitting nearby in rapt attention, interrupted excitedly: “We have a copy of that book, if anyone wants to read it.” Several people in the audience nodded that they’d be interested. When everyone’s eyes were back on me and Tuesday, I continued.

In Fortunate Son, I explained, the son gave a gripping account of that terrible day in the jungle leading his platoon on a mission. He recounted when he stepped on the mine. “I felt as if I had been airborne forever,” he wrote. “I had no idea that the pink mist that engulfed me had been caused by the vaporization of most of my right and left legs.” In frank and vivid detail, Lewis Jr. chronicled his fight with despair and alcoholism. He spoke of his journey toward reconciliation with the nation that had sent him to war. The book, I explained, ended on a hopeful, almost triumphant note, the wounded Marine learning to deal with his profound disabilities, finally seeming at peace with himself. The following year, Fortunate Son won one of literature’s highest honors, the Pulitzer Prize.

But despite the book’s success, things were still unraveling for Lewis Puller Jr. He quit his job at Veterans Affairs. He struggled with his old addiction, alcohol, and a new one too, painkillers, to fight the lingering effects of his long-ago injuries. He separated from his wife of twenty-six years. The darkness kept closing in. On May 11, 1994, he shot himself to death at his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He was forty-eight years old.

His wife, who’d been through so much with him over the years, said the following on the night he died: “To the list of names of victims of the Vietnam War, add the name of Lewis Puller. He suffered terrible wounds that never really healed.”

It wasn’t the missing appendages she was talking about.

Chesty’s son didn’t die because a land mine blew his legs off. He didn’t end it all because of the physical wounds he experienced. He didn’t put a gun to his head over missing his legs and hands. He killed himself because of the darkness that had settled inside his head. That Bouncing Betty battered his body, but post-traumatic stress disorder is what did him in.

The way Lewis Puller Jr. died—that’s the real story of the effects these wars are having on many of the men and women who’ve been asked to fight for all of us. It’s an iconic story and a real American tragedy. And yes, the way it’s ignored, misunderstood, and mischaracterized makes me furious.

What happened to the Pullers, senior and junior, is an epic drama of the modern age.

After allowing the library group to process what they’d just heard, I wanted to ask a follow-up question.

“I want you to give me what we in the military call a SWAG,” I said. “A scientific wild-ass guess.”

People chuckled at that acronym. The audience seemed game.

“Okay,” I said. “Two-point-seven million Americans have served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How many amputees do you think there are?”

The SWAGs were all over the map.

“Two hundred thousand,” someone seated to the side shouted.

“Fifty thousand.”

“Three hundred thousand.”

A woman up front must have been a math major in college. She did the long division in her head. “If it’s 20 percent of those who served, that would be 540,000. Is that about right?”

Actually, no. All the SWAGs were way, way high, as they almost always are when I ask that question to an audience.

“The correct number is about two thousand men and women,” I said. “That’s how many amputees we have from Afghanistan and Iraq. If you prefer percentages, it comes out to less than point-zero-zero-one of those who have served over there.”

I am utterly respectful of their sacrifice, which is a profound one. I wanted to make that clear. “God bless these men and women,” I said. “They have sacrificed for our country.” I have friends who are amputees. Good friends. Lots of them. All over the nation. Mary and Andrew are amputees who received dogs when I received Tuesday. But the real number, low as it might seem, is approximately two thousand from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

I know that most people expect a number much larger than that. Americans have been fed the perception that to be wounded in war is to be visibly wounded, to have a missing appendage or to be on crutches or to be suffering from some other physical disability that can be easily seen. The media feeds this misperception. So do Veterans officials and politicians and, worst of all, some of our most prominent nonprofit veteran service organizations.

Most people just assume that most of the wounds of war are the visible kind. The exact opposite is the case. The vast majority of those who are seriously affected by war have invisible scars. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men and women—make that millions—are affected with traumatic brain injuries, with anxiety, with debilitating pain, with PTSD, with a whole range of maladies that people walking down the street can’t see.

Just like me. I had walked into that Waterloo library with the aid of a cane. But the injuries that had almost buried me alive were not the physical ones. That beautiful, well-behaved golden retriever at my side wasn’t with me because of a limp or the leg pain I experienced every day.

The veteran with his leg blown off won’t hesitate to go to rehab or get fitted for a prosthetic leg. A veteran suffering from crippling anxiety will often think: “Oh, I’m not really injured. I don’t need help. Save it for my brother who walks on crutches or uses a wheelchair.”

Wrong!

And dangerous!

This narrow focus on the visibly wounded—this war-porn fixation on amputees—strongly discourages our warriors from getting emotional and mental help. And as bad as physical and visible injuries are, it’s too often true that the worst off remain as invisible as their wounds.

They suck it up. They try to deal alone. They buy into and dejectedly accept the outmoded line that if they weren’t treated at Landstuhl or Walter Reed, how bad could their injuries be? They commit suicide like Lewis Puller Jr. did.

No one ever commits suicide for just one reason. It starts with a small shadow and spreads out from there. By the end, everything is shrouded in darkness. But still I wonder whether writing his book contributed to Lewis Jr.’s suicide. Could that have been what triggered his final act of desperation?

Writing Until Tuesday was the hardest thing I’ve ever achieved in my life. I’m in a better place now. But when I think of Lewis Puller Jr. and I think of the autobiography he wrote and the difficult truths he tried to tell, I suspect the experience had to have been excruciating for him, like it was for me. Just a hell of a painful experience. He had to relive his worst experiences ever, over and over and over again.

“After tonight,” I told the people at the library. “I hope you’ll think of Lewis Puller Jr. and his invisible wounds. Maybe one day our country will learn something from him.”

The military today has slowly become more open-minded. There are public service announcements and barracks pep talks warning about the seriousness of PTSD. Politicians weave the term into their speeches. But still, the false narrative of how we define a wounded warrior is everywhere.

That’s one of the reasons we were in Iowa that night and why we’d be in another town the day after and many others in the weeks after that. The enduring lack of consistent and proper diagnosis has left us with a genuine pandemic of untreated mental illness—at the very least, it has severely exacerbated the problem. And the misinformation does not stop. The wild stereotypes of PTSD sufferers. The notion of who gets injured in war is skewed completely wrong. The treatments that need to be funded aren’t. The rehabilitation that works needs to be expanded while failed methods of treatment need to be eliminated.

I battle PTSD, just as many, many others do. But I’m not a Hollywood PTSD victim. I’m not John Goodman in The Big Lebowski waving a .45, getting into fights with German neo-Nazis, constantly ready to blow. Few of us are. But that caricature of hair-trigger eruption is now a widely accepted archetype of veterans with PTSD. It’s an insultingly exaggerated, cartoonish way to portray sufferers of a serious condition. These are not the classic symptoms of PTSD. So, yes, I cringe every time another crazed-vet character turns up on yet another TV, movie, or video screen. I can’t say there’s never been a veteran like that. But I can say that cartoon is contradicted by the reality of PTSD. Those dim-witted portrayals are not remotely the truth. Real PTSD sufferers are far more likely to be introverted, depressed, and detached than violent or out of control.

Just look at the fund-raising juggernaut that is the Wounded Warrior Project. Launched in 2003 with a mission of sending socks and backpacks to service members deployed abroad, the group rode the visibly wounded narrative to $372 million in revenues in 2015. Its TV ads, with amputees as constant poster children, are blasted across national TV.

Representatives know the truth, but choose easy emotion over the complex realities of war. Imagine the good the Wounded Warrior Project might have done if they used all those donations and all that publicity to focus on the wounds that warriors really have.

How deep does this misconception go?

Here’s a telling comparison: When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall was completed in 1983, there were 58,191 names etched in the stone. By Memorial Day 2015, the number had risen to 58,307. New names are inscribed as military personnel who were wounded in Vietnam between 1957 and 1975 die of their wounds.

The visible, physical kind.

What most people don’t know—and there is no wall to memorialize this—is that two to three times that number of Vietnam veterans have committed suicide. Of course, it’s not a tragedy that belongs to just those who fought in Vietnam. It’s the untold story of millions of America’s sons and daughters who have served in conflicts from World War II to today and have killed themselves by their own hands.

The struggle is to see that by the time someone gets around to building a wall for Afghanistan and Iraq vets, this terrible phenomenon has changed. But it’s far from any sort of certainty. Only for the past few years have top military officials even been willing to acknowledge the pandemic of military and veteran suicides. In early 2013, the official website of the U.S. Department of Defense published a sobering statistic: The number of military suicides in the previous year had exceeded the total of those killed in battle—an average of nearly one a day.

A month after the first statistic was published came an even more startling number from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: Suicides among military veterans were running at 22 a day—one every 65 minutes, about 8,000 a year.

For combat veterans, there’s a deadly combination. They have the motivation. They have the methods. They avoid seeking help.

“Listen,” I told the folks in Waterloo that night, “these are men and women who were at one point in their lives the toughest our country had. Right? Before Iraq and Afghanistan, they fought in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. Before there was anything classified as post-traumatic stress disorder, they came home ‘shell-shocked.’ They suffered from ‘soldier’s heart’ and ‘battle fatigue.’ Before PTSD was a diagnosis, they were just screwed.”

I continued. “Well,” I said, “if the toughest that our nation has have fallen victim to trauma, to anguish, to mental pain, so can any of you.”