Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405150014
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By HUGH A. MULLIGAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ALEXANDRIA LENGTH: Long
The very first day he donned a floppy bush hat and took command of his Marine platoon in the bad news boondocks of Vietnam's northern "Eye" Corps, Lew Puller was asked the question that from his earliest remembrance determined his destiny.
"What's it like?" asked Willie Turner, a huge corporal from Texas, who was the platoon guide on patrols into Charley country, "to be the son of the Corps' most famous Marine?"
A drill instructor at Quantico, Va., peering out from under the menacing tilt of his campaign hat at a new batch of officer candidates, had phrased that same question in basic Leatherneckese a few months before: "Now who among this miserable collection of pukes could possibly be Chesty Puller's son?"
Lewis "Chesty" Puller, winner of five Navy crosses, hero of Guadalcanal during World War II, the Inchon landing and the breakout from the Chosin reservoir during the Korean War, the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps. He rose from private to major general in a 37-year-career that began with chasing bandits in Nicaragua and commanding the Horse Marines in Peking, and in retirement left him broken and in tears, leaning over a bed in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, surveying the wreckage of his only son.
Less than three months in Vietnam, climbing a nameless hill with a jammed rifle, while trying to evade seven North Vietnamese regulars, 2nd Lt. Lewis B. Puller Jr., Chesty's boy, detonated a howitzer shell booby trap that propelled him upward with a thunderous roar amid an acrid smell of cordite.
Drifting in and out of consciousness as they loaded him aboard a helicopter on a stretcher that also contained a combat boot with the bloody remnants of one foot, he had a recurring thought: "I had spent my last healthy moments in Vietnam running from the enemy. . . . I had failed to prove myself worthy of my father's name."
The Puller inheritance, as he was often reminded around the family dining table that had belonged to Robert E. Lee's aide-de-camp, included a great- grandfather shot out of the saddle with Jeb Stuart's cavalry, a great-uncle who commanded a division at Gettysburg, a cousin named George S. Patton.
On that humid October day in 1968, near the crest of a sandy bluff overlooking a lethal stretch of beach, hedgerows and unfriendly thatched villages along the South China Sea known as "The Riviera," the Vietnam War should have been over for what was left of the 23-year-old Lew Puller. But for him, the war was only beginning. It was against a more terrifying enemy than Chesty Puller ever faced: the enemy within.
His brief career in the Marine Corps had netted him two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star and a lifetime confinement in a wheelchair with his right leg gone below the hip, a 6-inch stump remaining of his left thigh, a thumb and little finger missing from his right hand and only a thumb and half a forefinger remaining on his left hand.
When Dad came home at the end of World War II, crowds were cheering, bands playing, and politicians were baying the accolades of a grateful nation.
Now, from New York to Los Angeles, cities across the country are welcoming back troops from the Persian Gulf War with blizzards of confetti down a flag-draped canyon of heroes.
Chesty's boy, watching on TV from a wheelchair in his Alexandria home, still wonders: What happened to his parade? He is about to embark on a nationwide tour that will take him to some of those cities where confetti and flags will be flying, to promote and defend "Fortunate Son," his remarkable autobiography.
It is a harrowing account of the lonely battles he fought against despondency, despair and alcoholism to come to terms with the father he "loved more than the legend" and to find it in his heart to forgive the country and Corps that he felt had betrayed him.
Like driving out at odd hours in his handicap-geared car to place a single red rose at the apex of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and to stare at his own reflection in the polished black granite etched with the names of so many of his buddies, he regards the four years spent reliving the war for his memoirs as part of the healing process.
To an interviewer, he admits to "agonizing a lot over the acclaim showered on those returning home from Desert Storm." He is glad casualties were so few but wonders whether the mood of the nation would have changed had those aluminum coffins begun piling up at the Dover, Del., morgue.
Lew Puller, like many Vietnam vets, came home to rejection, scorn and defeat. His friends didn't want to talk about the war. Mere mention of it embarrassed the neighbors, put the damper on any party. "How did it feel," a university professor asked one of his Vietnam buddies, "to be a paid killer?"
Rolling his wheelchair into class at William and Mary law school, Lew encountered students his age who bragged about manipulating the system to avoid the draft. "The most common dodge was a teaching deferment," he recalls with lingering resentment. "My class seemed to be loaded with teachers who sat out the war and now wanted to be lawyers."
The son of the Corps' most bemedaled Marine thought of throwing away his own medals, but couldn't bring himself to do it. "They had cost me too dearly." He brooded about divorcing loyal and loving Toddy, who had borne him their second child out of the wreckage. She wouldn't hear of it. He tried suicide, but pronounced himself a failure even at death.
For 10 minutes of teetering triumph, he paraded on new artificial limbs before his proud, jut-jawed father, but even that, like the war he fought in Vietnam, dissolved in defeat. There wasn't enough limb fragment left to sustain mobility. He was doomed to life in a wheelchair.
He finished law school, served on a presidential clemency board for draft evaders, ran for Congress and lost, then went to work as a lawyer at the Pentagon. But he never could put the war and Chesty's legacy behind him. Even when the old man died after several debilitating strokes, he mourned him in soul-wrenching ambiguity: "I wanted him back, I wanted him gone." After the funeral he brooded long in the darkness of the family room, with frequent trips to the liquor cabinet, "waiting for the blessed numbness that would wash away the turmoil."
Young Lew never intended to become a "lifer" in the Marine Corps. "I wanted to get in and out. I wanted that one big moment of glory to prove I was my father's son," he tells an interviewer. "But it never did happen, did it?"
Despondent over his country's mood swing against the war, the murder and rape insinuations that seemed to be leveled at all Vietnam veterans when Lt. William Calley went on trial for the My Lai massacre, seeing Neil Armstrong walk on the moon when he would never again walk on Earth, contrasting the hoopla and homage and new automobiles conferred on the Iranian hostages with the starkness of his own homecoming, young Puller sank deeper into depression. Days of rage and frustration merged into melancholy of alcoholic night.
By the time Saigon fell, the conclusion was inescapable: "I had lost my legs and several good friends for nothing." He felt used up and discarded by his country and the Corps. His only solace was the new bottle of scotch he opened every other day.
The son of Chesty hit rock bottom, all his sins remembered in an alcoholic haze: the scene he caused at a White House reception, engaging the secretary of defense in what he admits was "inappropriate conversation" . . . tossing that plate of food across the room at a law school cocktail party . . . reducing his two children to tears when he shattered the TV screen with a poker in anger at a documentary on Vietnam veterans . . . the pint of vodka stowed in his desk at the Pentagon to ease the pain of war and remembrance.
Psychiatrists at the Bethesda Naval Hospital diagnosed him as a "mid- to late-stage alcoholic."
When told Chinese communist troops had them surrounded at "frozen Chosin," Chesty Puller rallied his First Marine Regiment with that familiar, armor-piercing growl: "The bastards got us right where we want them. We can shoot in every direction now."
Overwhelmed by the forces of such family legends that destined him to lead a platoon in combat, Puller, the double amputee, summoned the courage to fight back from the depths of despair. He underwent an alcoholic rehabilitation program. One day at a time, he fought a thousand battles with the bottle in a personal TAOR - tactical area of operations - seeded with more booby traps than the Riviera in Vietnam.
In that futile war which had ended a decade ago for most Americans but still raged within him, Sept. 7, 1981, the day he stopped drinking, loomed as large as Oct. 11, 1968, the day he lost his legs. He had eluded death a second time and now with the unseen bravery that doesn't make battlefield situation reports rallied his mutilated body and psyche to rescue the rest of his life.
Being a lawyer, he forced himself to climb that hill again on a long yellow legal pad, a page and a half at a time in longhand, at his desk in the bedroom with the radio tuned to a '60s rock station, the music heard low in the Vietnam boonies over Armed Forces Radio. Total recall came easily. In his nightmares, the Third Platoon of Golf Company, Second Battalion of the First Regiment of the First Marine Division, his father's old regiment and division, had rarely been out of contact.
Illumination rounds detonating in his memory lit up their faces: Doc Ellis, the gutsy medic. Platoon Sgt. Phil Leslie, his cool right-hand man. Willie Turner, who wondered what it was like to be Chesty's son. Hitch and Ski and Cowboy. And that name embedded as deeply in his mind as on the dark face of the monument: Mike Dunkel, whose quick trigger finger one day saved his life in an ambush at the edge of a rice paddy and who died moaning in his arms, one harrowing night.
The struggle to build the Vietnam Memorial fascinated him. Its progress paralleled and symbolized the rebuilding of his life. He was there in his bush hat, trimmed with his medals, the day it was dedicated. Whenever he visits, sometimes late at night, he is reminded of the Buddhist temples in Eye Corps where his platoon sometimes found relief from the 110-degree heat.
"The Vietnamese left candles and jasmine blossoms, bowls of rice, joss sticks, even menthol cigarettes, to honor their dead, the way mourners at the memorial place flowers and poems, fraternity pins, combat boots and dented canteens along the base of the wall. It breaks my heart, but I keep going back."
Now he talks of returning to Vietnam. The past is no longer enemy country.
"I'd like to revisit the terrain where I was hit, see if the trail I took is still there and if that hill looks any different. I doubt if they got condominiums sitting on it, but it was a gorgeous piece of property. I'll never forget that white beach along a blue crescent of sea, and those fishing villages where snipers always opened up on us. I'd like to go into that leper colony, just beyond the tree line, where we always took mortar fire. We knew it was a Viet Cong staging area, but those poor derelicts probably couldn't get away from the war anymore than we could."
After more than two decades of strife, Lew Puller has signed a separate peace with Vietnam and won the terrible war within.
Without legs, Chesty's son has filled his father's shoes.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB