Word: puller
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...