The Wound That Would Not Heal

By Paul Witteman

The Vietnam War has claimed its victims in various dreadful ways, but the death last week of Lewis B. Puller Jr. seemed particularly haunting. Puller, the son of the most decorated member of the Marine Corps in its history, served in Vietnam as a Marine combat leader. Both his legs and part of his hands were blown off when he stepped on a booby trap. He lived, and he became an attorney at the Pentagon and a respected veterans activist. Then, in 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography, Fortunate Son. Yet his life had recently come to seem barren. His marriage of 26 years was dissolving, and he suffered a serious relapse in his battle against alcoholism. Despondent beyond consolation, he picked up a gun and extinguished a life that had given so many others hope.

Suicide was hardly a concern of Puller's in the summer of 1968. Back then he was trying his hardest to stay alive. Booby traps tormented him and the other soldiers deployed in the coastal region near Danang known as the Riviera. The devices were the spoor, primitive and deadly, of a mostly invisible enemy. Some were as simple as nails slathered with excrement pushed through the bottoms of discarded C-ration cans. But the booby trap Puller stepped on, while in full flight from a squad of advancing North Vietnamese regulars, was made with a howitzer shell. Puller described the moment in Fortunate Son: "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."

With his legs gone, Puller in an instant became half a man. It seemed virtually certain that he would leave his pregnant wife a widow. The triage experts in Danang did their heroic part, however, as, later, did the surgeons, corpsmen and therapists at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital.

Puller had to learn to live with his physically diminished self. During two years in the hospital, among his challenges was coping with what the folks who fashioned prosthetic legs drolly called "stubbies." When Puller went to be fitted for the first time, the designer, himself a double amputee, told him, "We are all out of Caucasian legs, Lieutenant, but if you don't mind, we can fit you with some nice Negro ones." Puller was never able to walk with artificial legs of any color; he resigned himself to using a wheelchair. Accepting his disability wasn't easy, but he had the help of his courageous wife Linda, or "Toddy," as friends call her. He was also buoyed by the simple, touching love of his father, who knew more than a little about combat. Lewis B. ("Chesty") Puller had won his general's stars leading his regiment to safety in the harrowing American retreat from the Chosin Reservoir during the first winter of the Korean War.

In 1978 Puller ran for Congress in Virginia. His defeat depressed him. The following year, his first attempt at suicide failed because he was too drunk to turn on the ignition of his car and asphyxiate himself. "He was a person who was beleaguered and battered by life," says Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "It is a great American tragedy." In a statement as eloquent as any, Puller's wife -- now a member of the Virginia house of delegates -- said, "To the list of names of victims of the Vietnam War, add the name of Lewis Puller. He suffered terrible wounds that never really healed."

There are no accurate statistics on suicide among the 2.7 million Vietnam veterans, particularly among the 300,000 who came home wounded. But veterans' groups believe the rate to be far higher than national averages. Puller's death sent waves of anguish coursing through veterans who have known similar despair and have also sought refuge in alcohol or drugs. But not everyone who shared Puller's experience of life after near death followed the same path. Senator Bob Kerrey, who lived in a ward with Puller during rehabilitation in Philadelphia, lost part of a leg in Vietnam but maintained his spirit. A grieving Kerrey said of his dead friend, "I don't think he died a casualty of something that he did in Vietnam, but I do think he died a casualty of the loneliness that he felt from being set apart."

There is no room on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial for the name of Lewis Puller. To be included, one must have died directly from one's wounds in the war. That will not deter Puller's comrades however. "There has never been a suicide placed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial," says Scruggs. "But we are going to find a special way to take care of Lew on Memorial Day."

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York