Puller, Lewis Burwell, Jr.

(b. 12 August 1945 in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; d. 11 May 1994 in Mount Vernon, Virginia), military officer, lawyer, and recipient of a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr..

Puller was one of three children of Lieutenant General Lewis (“Chesty”) Burwell Puller, then the most decorated U.S. marine in history, and Virginia Montague Evans, a fourth-grade teacher. In Fortunate Son, Puller describes being drawn to a military career by age six, while witnessing a military ceremony to award his father a fifth Navy Cross, the most ever awarded a marine and the nation’s second-highest medal for valor. “I had first begun to grasp the concept of battlefield glory and with it sensed a commitment to a calling over which I would be powerless.” After failing health forced Chesty to end his distinguished thirty-seven-year career in the Marine Corps, strangers came to the Pullers’ rural Virginia home to pay respects to Puller’s father. “I decided early on that I wanted men to feel toward me the way they felt toward my father,” Puller wrote, “as throughout my youth I witnessed examples of hero worship toward him that would have befitted the denizens of Mount Olympus.” Puller attended high school at Christchurch School and graduated in 1962. After graduating with a B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary in Williams-burg, Virginia, in 1967, Puller joined the Marine Corps. In August 1968 Puller married Linda Ford Todd (“Toddy”); they had two children.

Puller arrived in Vietnam in August 1968 as a second lieutenant and was assigned to the Second Battalion of the First Marine Regiment of the First Marine Division. As a platoon commander, he led patrols in a coastal plain, derisively called “the Riviera.” On 11 October 1968, while engaged in firefight with North Vietnamese soldiers, he stepped on a booby-trapped 105-millimeter howitzer round. Puller 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.” Not realizing the extent of his injuries, he felt an elation that “I had finished serving my time in the hell of Vietnam.” Looking back, Puller wrote, “I did not realize until much later that I had been forever set apart from the rest of mankind.”

Less than three months after arriving in Vietnam, Puller left with two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry. He had sustained massive injuries that nearly killed him, including the loss of his right leg to his torso and all of his left leg except six inches of thigh; he also lost the thumb and the little finger from his right hand and all fingers except the thumb and half of the forefinger on his left hand. Sent to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, he endured several surgeries and many months of physical and occupational therapy before being released in August 1970, nearly two years after his injuries.

In the fall of 1971, Lewis returned to the College of William and Mary to attend the Marshall Wythe School of Law. On 11 October 1971, exactly three years after suffering combat injuries in Vietnam, his father died. His father’s death and the Vietnam War haunted Puller for the remainder of his life. After passing the Virginia bar and graduating from law school in 1974, he worked in the general counsel’s office of the Veterans Administration. In October 1974 he was detailed from his new job to present cases before the Presidential Clemency Board, convened by President Gerald Ford to review the cases of military deserters and civilian draft evaders. In April 1975 Puller was appointed to the Clemency Board, one of only four Vietnam veterans among the eighteen members. Leaving the Veterans Administration, he went to work for the Paralyzed Veterans of America in August 1976. In the fall of 1977, he volunteered to work on the political campaign of Charles Robb, who was running for lieutenant governor in Virginia. Puller then left his job with the Paralyzed Veterans of America to seek election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia’s First Congressional District. Running as a Democrat against the Republican incumbent Paul Trible, Puller lost badly, garnering only 34,419 votes (28 percent) to Trible’s 88,048 ballots (72 percent). In October 1979 he went to work as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the Department of Defense. After years of heavy drinking, Puller attempted suicide in 1979. On 5 September 1981 he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, embarking on more than a decade of sobriety.

In the mid-1980s, Puller began writing Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr., which was published in 1991. The book won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography. Puller viewed the book’s principal themes as his relationship with his father, his reconciliation with his country, and the Vietnam War. Indeed, one of the subheads of the title is “The Healing of a Vietnam Veteran.” Puller claimed the title Fortunate Son came from John Fogerty’s same-titled, antiwar protest song of the late 1960s, explaining that “I sort of turned the song on its ear,” since he viewed the title as an ode to his father. Puller took a leave of absence from the Department of Defense to work as writer-in-residence at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he was at the time of his death in 1994.

On Memorial Day in 1992, Puller was a speaker at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In the fall of 1993 he made a journey of reconciliation to Vietnam to dedicate a school, for which he helped raise money, near the site where he had suffered his wounds. His wife was elected to the Virginia legislature in 1991. The couple separated in 1994, and Puller slipped from sobriety. He died at his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

As the son of the most celebrated U.S. marine, Puller embraced the military life and paid a heavy sacrifice for his short stint in Vietnam. Fortunate Son, a tale of reconciliation, spoke to a generation of Americans who lived through the Vietnam War. “To the list of names of victims of the Vietnam War,” claimed Toddy Puller, “add the name of Lewis Puller. He suffered terrible wounds that never really healed.”

The University Archives at the College of William and Mary has a file on Puller. His autobiography is Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr. (1991). Brian Lamb interviewed Puller for C-SPAN’s Booknotes on 24 May 1992. The interview was published in Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas (1997). The lives of Lewis and Toddy are briefly covered in Mary Jordan, “The Fight of Their Lives,” Washington Post (1 July 1991), and Ken Cross, “Surviving Was the Easy Part,” People Weekly (fall 1991). William Styron, “The Wreckage of an American War,” New York Times Book Review (16 June 1991), provides an extensive review of Fortunate Son. Marylou Tousignant, “Puller’s Vietnam Reconciliation Realized,” Washington Post (20 Apr. 1995), discusses Puller’s effort to build schools in Vietnam. Obituaries are in the New York Times (12 May 1994) and the Washington Post (17 May 1994).

Paul A. Frisch