The marines who fought in the Pacific during World War II had much to fear, for the fighting was often lethal and barbaric. Yet because they were marines, with an intense feeling of identity, and were caught up in that mysterious group trance known as esprit de corps, they really did assume that they were invincible. Some of this hubris came from their brutal and very efficient training, but a great deal of their deepest confidence flowed from their leaders. Their officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, were arguably the best in the world, and of these leaders no marine commanded more admiration than a colonel with a beguilingly menacing countenance and a pouter-pigeon strut named Lewis Burwell Puller.
Puller—the father of the author of Fortunate Son, a dark and corrosive autobiography—was nicknamed Chesty for the aggressive thrust of his carriage; he was and still is a legend, an embodiment of the Marines in the same way that Babe Ruth embodies baseball or that Yeats stands for Irish poetry.
A native of the Virginia Tidewater, Puller was born at the end of the last century, close enough to the Civil War to be haunted by it and to be mesmerized by its Confederate heroes and victims. Like many of the high-level marine officers, disproportionately Southern by origin, who helped defeat the Japanese, Puller learned his infantry tactics while chasing and being chased by the guerrilla forces of Augusto Sandino in the Nicaraguan jungles; his spectacular exploits there won him two Navy Crosses.
During World War II, the last truly just war fought by Americans, Puller was awarded the Navy Cross two more times for gallantry under fire, at Guadalcanal and at Cape Gloucester, and his legend blossomed. Stories about him abounded. Respected extravagantly, he was also greatly feared, especially by very junior officers. It was rumored that he literally devoured second lieutenants; after all, at the gruesome battle of Peleliu, a derelict shavetail was summoned into Chesty Puller's tent and never a shred of him was seen again—he plainly had been eaten.
Puller exhibited little tact, especially with the press. In the aftermath of the deadly Guadalcanal campaign, an asinine journalist inquired, “Colonel, could you tell the American people what it is you're fighting for?” Puller replied, “Six hundred and forty-nine dollars a month.” His fairness and concern for his troops were celebrated and were never so evident as during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War, when as a regimental commander he led a rearguard action of such tactical mastery that it manifestly saved countless American lives; this feat won him a fifth Navy Cross and promotion to brigadier general.
As Burke Davis portrays him in his fine 1982 biography, Marine!, Chesty Puller, despite the glory he gained in the mechanized setting of modern warfare, was a God-fearing fighting man of the old school, cast in the mold of Lee and Jackson, both of whom he idolized. Amid the most foulmouthed body of men in Christendom he was, if not prudish, restrained in speech. Some of the letters he wrote to his wife from various exotic hellholes are poignant, old-fashioned utterances that touch on the horrors of war but speak of a longing for repose in tones of spiritual anguish reminiscent of Stonewall Jackson. After he retired to his Tidewater village, nearly two decades before his death in 1971, he was proud when his only son, born when he was nearing fifty, went off as a second lieutenant to combat duty in Vietnam. That twenty-year-old man, his namesake—the “fortunate son” of this bitter though redemptive narrative—became one of the most grievously mutilated combatants to survive the ordeal of Vietnam.
The catastrophe happened on a blazing October day in 1968, when Lewis Puller, Jr., was leading his platoon on a routine patrol through an especially sinister area of the countryside nicknamed the Riviera, a strip of rice paddies and wooded hills bordering the South China Sea. Mr. Puller had served in the combat zone for less than three months, but his activity had been intensely concentrated and appallingly violent. He had seen marines wounded and killed, had engaged in fierce firefights, had been exposed to booby traps; during an attack on a local village one of his men had inadvertently blown off the arm of an eight-year-old girl.
Mr. Puller is a gripping writer when he describes the heat and exhaustion, the physical brutalization, the incessant anxiety and danger suffered by young men engaged in that demented strife nearly a quarter of a century ago. Not without good reason he may be at his most vivid when he tells what happened to him.
That October day he stepped on a booby-trapped howitzer round and was rocketed sky-high. He “had no idea that the pink mist that engulfed me had been caused by the vaporization of most of my right and left legs. As shock began to numb my body I could see through a haze of pain that my right thumb and little finger were missing, as was most of my left hand.” In addition, the explosion destroyed massive parts of both buttocks, ruptured an eardrum, split his scrotum, and sent slivers of shrapnel through most of the rest of his body.
Hovering near death for many days, Mr. Puller developed a stress ulcer that required the removal of two-thirds of his stomach, augmenting the already intolerable pain. Transported stateside, he remained for nearly two years at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where, through the early phases of his stay, he was utterly helpless and so dependent on morphine that when he was briefly taken off it he was, as he says, “quickly reduced to the level of a snarling animal.” When his weight dropped to less than sixty pounds and his stomach resisted food, he was given nourishment through a nasal tube.
These pages exude the whiff of authentic hell and are, accordingly, sometimes difficult to read. But because Mr. Puller writes with simplicity and candor, with touches of spontaneous humor, his outcry of agony and isolation, while harrowing, leaves one primarily overwhelmed with wonder at the torture a human being can absorb this side of madness.
Slowly the worst of the torment receded and slowly the recuperative process began: skin grafts, reconstructive surgery, endless hours on the operating table, all enacted in a continuum of diabolical pain. He regained some extremely limited use of his mangled hands, but the efforts to restore mobility to his legs through prosthesis, while tireless, were in vain; he would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. There were compensations, however, for his sacrifice: his face was unscathed and his basic senses, including his eyesight, remained intact. So did his sexual functioning. His young wife, who was pregnant when he went off to Vietnam, presented him with a son. Escaped like Ishmael from the vortex of oblivion, he had a future and also, clearly, a tale to tell.
Fortunate Son is an amazing tale, but in many ways an artless one, with great cumulative power yet more compelling as a raw chronicle than a work offering literary surprises. If its prose does not resonate as does Philip Caputo's eloquent Rumor of War, if the book lacks the surreal wackiness and scathing insights that made Michael Herr's Dispatches such an original tour de force, its act of bearing such passionate witness to a desecrated moment in history has its own importance and gives it a place among the meaningful works on the Vietnam nightmare.
As for Mr. Puller's future, it seemed in certain respects almost as calamitous as the experience of war. He acquired a law degree and an ambition to run (as a Democrat) for a congressional seat in Virginia. By this time he had undergone the same traumatic insult as numberless veterans whose brother and sister Americans detested them for an event they conceived to be the handiwork of the warriors themselves. Smarting at this mad response but in a rage at the war and its real instigators in Washington, he made his feelings public, proclaiming that if he were called up again he would refuse to go.
Such statements, coming especially from the son of Chesty Puller, did not go down well in a state as profoundly hidebound as Virginia, where Mr. Puller also was rash enough to choose to run in a district bordering Hampton Roads—the very marrow of the military-industrial complex and a busy hive of patriots ill-disposed to contemplate any such paradigm of the monstrousness of war.
His image as a horribly maimed veteran, rather than inspiring compassion and patriotic rapport, aroused resentment and guilt among the voters and plainly contributed heavily to his defeat. Then he slid into perhaps his deepest peril yet. He had always been an enthusiastic drinker, but shortly after his political loss his dependency became overpowering; he subsided into the near-madness of alcoholism, becoming so deranged and incapacitated that he came close to killing himself. With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous he recovered, and his wretchedly difficult but successful climb out of still another abyss makes up the rest of Fortunate Son, the coda of which culminates in a revealing irony: apparently at peace with himself and the world, Mr. Puller is currently a senior attorney in the office of the general counsel of the Department of Defense.
Or the irony may not be so striking after all. Throughout the book one senses in Mr. Puller a hesitation, an ambivalence about the Marines that he seems unable to resolve. About the Marine Corps, he wonders at one point how “I could love and despise it with such equal ardor.” This tells much about the powerful hold that military life, at its most idealistic, can have upon thoroughly decent men, quite a few of whom are capable of complex quandaries and apprehensions about what they are called upon to do.
What Mr. Puller was called upon to do was to fight in a war that never should have begun, but once begun tainted the souls of all those connected with it. Yet the quality of devotion sometimes inexplicably and maddeningly remains. Just before the famous gathering of 1971, when protesting Vietnam veterans planned to discard their medals on the steps of the Capitol, the author debated agonizingly with himself before putting his medals back in the closet.
“They had cost me too dearly,” he writes, “and though I now saw clearly that the war in which they had been earned was a wasted cause, the medals still represented the dignity and the caliber of my service and of those with whom I had served.”
It would be wrong for flag-wavers to misinterpret these words and cheer Mr. Puller's nobility, and just as wrong for those who reflexively condemn all wars to read them as the sentiments of the enslaved military mind. Like his father, who served heroically in several just wars—or at least understandable ones—Mr. Puller was a professional engaged in what many men of good will still regard as an honorable calling, and one likely to remain so until wars are made extinct; yet he was too young and too unaware, at least at the beginning, to realize the nature of his involvement in a national dishonor.
His father, Mr. Puller notes, came home twice from the Far East in triumph, while his own reception was one of scorn and jeers. The old man, he writes, almost never gave vent to his deepest emotions. But no wonder Chesty Puller finally wept, looking down at his legless and handless son, wreckage of an American war in which random atrocities would serve as the compelling historical memory, instead of the suffering and sacrifice, and for which there would be no Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, no Belleau Wood, no Shiloh or Chickamauga.
[New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1991.]