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- <text id=94TT0681>
- <title>
- May 23, 1994: Obituary:The Wound that Wouldn't Heal
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
- May 23, 1994 Cosmic Crash
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- OBITUARY, Page 75
- The Wound that Would Not Heal
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> Vietnam changed Lewis B. Puller Jr.'s life 26 years ago--and
- led to his suicide last week
- </p>
- <p>By Paul Witteman--Reported by Daniel S. Levy/New York
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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