The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr., 1991
In-depth memoir by a Vietnam veteran who lost both legs and most of his hands after tripping a booby trap running from enemy soldiers after his gun jammed. He is the son of a decorated Marine General, a good father but such a decorated war hero that he felt he could never live up to him. He couldn’t help it that his career as a Marine lieutenant started with the Vietnam War.
I couldn’t put this book down! Like my mom said, he expressed his emotions so well, you always knew what he was feeling, and it made you feel like you were right there with him. His descriptions of his platoon’s patrols in Vietnam, through the “Riviera,” the way the enemy was unseen and terrifying, never knowing when you would be shot at, mortar-bombed, or trip a wire that blows you up, were gripping. Then, when they engaged people in the villages, they faced suspicion, lack of cooperation, and even hatred from the very people for whom they were fighting. He was in Vietnam for 3 months when he was blown up. He came home to spend 2 years in a Navy hospital. He was deeply, deeply depressed; alternatively angry at the lack of understanding and the lack of appreciation he received, and he turned to alcohol to numb his feelings. His fellow Americans despised his service at the same time they pitied him. He tried and tried to use prosthesis to walk, but his injuries were so bad that he finally resigned himself to life in a wheel chair. His wife, Toddy, was an angel. She never left him. She was pregnant when he went to Vietnam, and after he returned, she stuck by him while he went through so many trials and emotions. They were still able to have children and they had one more child, a daughter. After about 15 years, he hit rock-bottom; he was a raging alcoholic and needed help. Toddy checked him into a 28-day rehab and it changed his life. He gave up drinking and made his peace with his experience, his fellow Americans, and himself.
Fantastic book! The character of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump is taken partly from the experiences of Lewis B. Puller, Jr. and I found out about this book after reading Gary Sinise’s Grateful American. This book changed Gary Sinise’s life and led him to devote the rest of his life to making sure our American veterans never feel unappreciated again.
Here are some of the quotes I liked from the book:
A few others, from military families for the most part, shared my opinion that the war in Vietnam was but another manifestation of the domino theory and were boyishly anxious to do their part to stem the tide of Communist aggression.
from page 36
As we slumbered off to our bunks for the last wake-up at OCS, I overheard one drunken staff sergeant from another platoon tell Brown that 75 percent of us who chose the infantry would be dead or wounded within six months of arriving in Veitnam, but even his somber words could not dull my elation.
from page 47
In late January 1968, several weeks after my Basic School class had begun, the Vietnam War suddenly escalated as North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas began a coordinated assault on hamlets and cities throughout the provinces of South Vietnam….The Tet offensive had begun, and as the ancient citadel of the city of Hue fell into Communist hands with an attendant massacre of thousands of innocent citizens, the magnitude of what we had signed on for registered ominously with my classmates.
The task of retaking Hue was given primarily to the Marine Corps, and in twenty-six days of bloody block-by-block, street-by-street, house-by-house nonstop combat, the once-peaceful and beautiful imperial capital was transformed into a slaughterhouse.
from pages 53 and 54
When I landed a few feet up the trail from the booby-trapped howitzer round that I had detonated, I felt as if I had been airborne forever. Colors and sound became muted, and although there was now a beehive of activity around me, all movement seemed to me to be in slow motion. I thought initially that the loss of my glasses in the explosion accounted for my blurred vision, and 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. 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, and I could smell the charred flesh, which extended from my right wrist upward to the elbow. I knew that I had finished serving my time in the hell of Vietnam.
from page 185
I did not understand why Watson, who was the first man to reach me, kept screaming, “Pray, Lieutenant, for God’s sake, pray.” I could not see the jagged shards of flesh and bone that had only moments before been my legs, and I did not realize until much later that I had been forever set apart from the rest of humanity.
from page 186
I understood the reason for my bandaged hands because I had seen my right hand with its missing thumb and little finger earlier, and I also knew that my left hand now retained only a thumb and half a forefinger. The word prehensile no longer applied to me. I did not yet know or knew only vaguely that I had lost my right leg at the torso and that only a six-inch stump remained of my left thigh. In addition to the damage to my extremities, I had lost massive portions of both buttocks, my scrotum had been split, I had sustained a dislocated shoulder and a ruptured eardrum, and smaller wounds from shell fragments peppered the remainder of my body. Only my face had been spared. It remarkably contained only one small blue line across my nose from a powder burn.
from pages 187 and 188
There were no brass bands to greet me, no rousing renditions of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and no politicians to offer their support for a job well done. I was home, though, back in the United States after a splendid overseas tour that had not quite reached its third month.
from page 191
By now more than thirty-five thousand Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and I wondered if I was losing my humanity not to be able to summon any more compassion for the loss of Hannah’s dog. It took me years to realize that Hannah’s grief was skewed in favor of the dog because she had known and loved the animal well but had never met a single one of the thirty-five thousand dead American boys.
from page 260
I also came to feel that I had given myself to a cause that, in addition to having robbed me of my youth and left me crippled and deformed, allowed me no pride for having been a participant.
from page 277
On far too many evenings I fortified myself for the nightly news with an extra drink or two, and news of the war was always depressing.
from page 293
By then, however, I had begun to take solace increasingly in drink, and by the time second semester classes began, I had to curtail a daily routine of half a dozen drinks between the cocktail hour and bedtime.
from page 300
Lieutenant Calley was ultimately found guilty of the premeditated murder of twenty-two civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment, but I felt his punishment could never right the evil he had done or the perceptions he had helped foster of America’s soldiers and marines as bloodthirsty killers.
from page 305
My strongest resentment was reserved for those who had no service at all….Most of them were blissfully unaware of how fortunate they were, but I bore them none of the ill will that I held for my contemporaries who had manipulated the system to avoid military service. The most common dodge was a teaching deferment…There were also students who had obtained medical deferments, some of which were legitimate and some of which were, if not fraudulent, at least questionable.
from page 307
There was, in the academic environment in which I found myself in 1971, a prevailing attitude that American involvement in the Vietnam War was, if not downright immoral, certainly a mistake of epic proportions. From that premise flowed a corollary that any effort to avoid involvement in the war was justifiable or even laudable. As I came to believe in the spring of 1971 that this attitude was representative of the thinking of an increasing percentage of the American public, I also began to feel that my own sacrifice and that of all of us who had fought the war were meaningless. Unable then to discover any higher purpose for the wasted lives of the dozen men whom I counted as friends who had not come home, I began to despise the government and the Marine Corps, which had asked of many of us everything we had and given back almost nothing.
from page 308
One articulate young combat veteran named John Kerry delivered a moving address before a special session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that, for me, summed up the sense of betrayal and the disillusionment I felt toward the administration and the leadership that had directed the course of the war from the safety of its Washington power base.
from page 311
I desperately wanted a drink; but I could see that my mother was reestablishing control after having had most of her decisions made by others for several days, and we honored her wishes….After we got back to Williamsburg that evening, I looked in on my sleeping children and then at last fixed a drink. For a long time after Toddy had gone to bed, I sat in the darkness of our family room, periodically going to the kitchen to replenish my glass, and waiting for the blessed numbness that would wash away the turmoil.
from page 324
By the end of March [1975] cities where American marines and soldiers had fought and died were toppling like dominoes, and Pleiku, Quang Tri, Hue, and Da Nang all were overtaken by the advancing North Vietnamese Army. In addition to our having to witness the personal tragedy of uprooted refugee families being deprived of their homes and possessions, it was now crystal clear to me that America’s involvement in Vietnam and my own sacrifice had been for naught.
from page 336
To this day I think we, as board members, were in the business of determining the guilt of the wrong people, and it was for me as shattering an experience as the loss of my legs and a dozen good friends in Vietnam to discover face-to-face the arrogance and the blindness that so often passed for leadership during the Vietnam era.
from pages 342 and 343 during his service on the Clemency Board
I concluded by stating that though I did not have the perspective of growing up black, I knew what it meant to be a member of a minority and to be judged on the basis of personal appearance rather than intrinsic worth.
from page 361 during his unsuccessful run for office
I was also drinking heavily almost every night, and my dependence on alcohol had become so fixed that my primary goal on rising in the morning was to make it home in the evening so that I could begin anesthetizing myself.
from page 394
I also knew that I would never be able to drink again. That realization, signifying the end of a relationship that had sustained me for twenty years, triggered in me a sense of loss that I was not at all certain I could handle. I was truly terrified at the prospect of living the rest of my life without alcohol, and I mourned its loss with a grief as palpable as any I could have mustered had a loved one been taken from me.
from page 407 when he is finally in detox and 28-days of rehab
As I emerged from the alcoholic fog of years, my physical and mental state began to improve. On the physical side the tremors, which of late had so frequently sent me to the bottle well before breakfast time, abated almost immediately after I arrived at PI…I also stopped throwing up after meals…My senses also seemed to sharpen as I put more distance between myself and my last drink, and there were times when my restored sensitivity to colors, shapes, textures, sounds, and tastes was so joyously exquisite as to be almost uncomfortable…
Mentally the first and most noticeable improvements were the restoration of my memory and a renewed ability to grasp detail.
from pages 414 and 415
Also, “Avoid getting hungry, angry, lonely, and tired (HALT),” and on and on until I felt I was being programmed.
from page 417 on the ways to keep from drinking again
…I also came to see that while the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake and never should have been fought, my role in it had been as honorable as circumstances would permit. I had not performed perhaps as well as my father might have; but I had done the best I could, and it was time to move on to new challenges.
At another meeting the topic was “geographic cures,” the relocation that practicing alcoholics often undertake as a futile solution to problems caused by their alcoholism…Finally, one speaker described how like a nomad he had moved from place to place as his drinking progressed and how sad and foolish it had been to think he could outrun a problem that was part of him.
from page 428
Loved this book and loved this man! Thank you for writing this book, Lewis B. Puller, Jr. And thank you, Gary Sinise, for mentioning it in your wonderful memoir!