Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet
The son of a retired marine myself, I could relate to parts of Lewis B. Puller, Jr.’s story. My dad had retired from the Corps before he met and married my mother, so I never knew him as a marine. Although proud of his service in the South Pacific, he never urged me to follow in his footsteps.
Lew, Jr. was the son of the legendary Lewis “Chesty” Puller, one of the more decorated marines in the history of the Corps. He didn’t have to urge his son to follow him into the marines. He just came home from the Korean conflict to a parade and much hero worship. So is it any wonder that five-year-old Lew, Jr. wanted, when he grew up, to seek his own glory in war?
In Fortunate Son, Lewis B. Puller chronicles his yo
Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lewis B. Puller, Jr.'s memoir is a moving story of a man born into a proud military legacy who struggles to rebuild his world after the Vietnam War has shattered his body and his ideals. Raised in the shadow of his father, Marine General Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, a hero of five wars, young Lewis went to Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War and served with distinction as an officer in his father's beloved Corps. But when he tripped a booby-trapped howitzer round, triggering an explosion that would cost him his legs, his career as a soldier ended, and the battle to reclaim his life began.
Puller, Lewis Burwell, Jr.
(b. 12 August in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; d. 11 May in Mount Vernon, Virginia), military officer, lawyer, and recipient of a 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 hav
Lewis B Puller, Jr., who transformed his years of struggle with physical and emotional ravages of Vietnam War into a Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, shot and killed himself yesterday (11 May ) at his Fairfax Country, Virginia, home. He had lost his legs and parts of both hands when he stepped on an enemy land mine in Vietnam as a Marine officer in He told story of his ordeal and its agonizing aftermath in an inspiring book titled &#;Fortunate Son,&#; account that ended with triumphing over physical disabilities and emotionally at peace with himself.
He spent last months of his life in turmoil, friends and associates said. In recent days, they say, fought a losing battle with alcoholism, a disease he had kept at bay for 13 years, and struggled with a more recent addiction, to painkillers initially prescribed to dull continuing pain from his wounds. Friends said he and his wife, Linda T. (Toddy) Puller, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, had separated shortly before his death. Fairfax country police released few details of suicide.
He was alone, and his body was found in the afternoon by members of his family. &#;To the list of names of victims of the Vietnam War
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