Puller’s life and death touched millions, in part because he bore the name of his late father, a Marine general who retired in 1955 as the most decorated soldier in the history of the corps. Puller, with a different kind of military distinction thrust on him, did not shy from its burdens. “He was monstrously disfigured,” says Sen. Bob Kerrey, who met him in the Philadelphia naval hospital where they were both recuperating. “Everywhere he went people turned and looked. But because of it, he was able to reach people in ways that he couldn’t if he were temporarily able-bodied. He left a great legacy.” By 1971 he had turned against the war, but he could never join his fellow veterans in tossing away his medals. “They had cost me too dearly,” he wrote, “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.” He was offered several government jobs, but preferred to keep writing. After a visit to Vietnam last year Puller began plans for a monument in the former demilitarized zone. Characteristically, friends say, he had in mind not a statue, but a school.
Puller made no effort to hide the dark sides of his nature. He was an alcoholic even before his injury, and a worse one after, until he quit drinking in 1981. Later he developed an addiction to painkillers, which he also overcame, but at great cost. When he fell from his wheelchair and broke his hip earlier this year he endured the pain without narcotics. Meanwhile, his life was changing. His wife, Toddy, had developed a career of her own, winning a seat in the Virginia state legislature. (Puller had run for Congress-as a Democrat-in 1978 and lost.) Now, with the excitement of his Pulitzer behind him, Puller found himself home alone for days at a time. Friends say that when Toddy was home they fought, and that recently she told him she wanted to separate. Kerrey suspects she blames herself for the suicide. “I have told her not to,” he adds. “Lew, by his own telling, could be monstrously abusive and difficult.”
It was, ironically, as a civilian that Puller rose to heroism; his military career was too short to offer much scope for achievement. He won a Silver Star for the action in which he lost his legs, but NEWSWEEK has found evidence that the facts were not quite as heroic as the account in Puller’s book. It takes up only about a page out of nearly 400, but it is a dramatic passage, in which he confronts a squad of North Vietnamese fleeing an encircled village: " . . . it dawned on me, to my horror, that I was the only obstacle between them and freedom," he wrote. He got off one shot before his rifle jammed, and several soldiers returned fire. “Standing alone with a malfunctioning weapon and seven enemy soldiers bearing down on me, I was at once seized by a fear that was palpable and all-encompassing … I turned abruptly, with Watson in tow, and ran as fast as I could toward the safety of the bluffs … With only a few meters left to cover in my flight, a thunderous boom suddenly rent the air.”
Yet the citation that accompanied Puller’s medal makes no mention of a fire fight or of fleeing enemy soldiers; it basically just says that he stepped on a land mine and, despite terrible injuries, “effectively continued to direct the efforts of his unit.” That is essentially the same account given in a dispatch filed shortly after the incident by a NEWSWEEK correspondent in Da Nang, who interviewed several members of Puller’s company, including his captain. None of them seems to have mentioned Puller either firing his weapon or being shot at.
By Puller’s own account, the soldier who was closest when he hit the mine was his radioman, Lance Cpl. Richard Watson, who was about 10 meters away-close enough to be knocked flat by the explosion. Watson, who is now a high-school teacher in Virginia, spoke with great reluctance about the incident; he admires Puller greatly and has no desire to impugn his memory. But he conceded that the account in the book-which he read when it came out-was “not exactly the way I remembered it.” He says he saw no enemy soldiers, although carrying his heavy radio up a hill, “I spent most of my time looking at my feet…… I do not remember [Puller] firing a shot,” he said. “I don’t remember any weapons being fired before the mine went off.”
To be fair, Puller never really traded on this story; his reputation rested on what happened after he stepped on the mine, not before. Yet it is strange and sad that he should feel the need to invent a more heroic setting for the defining moment of his life. Fate robbed Puller of the chance to demonstrate his father’s kind of bravery. But courage is more than how a man performs under fire. Puller’s brave fight against pain and humiliation over 25 years marked him, not as a fortunate son, but surely a worthy one.
