Word: puller
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...About Face!" In World War II, commanding the famed 1st Battalion of the Seventh Marines. Chesty Puller saved Henderson Field on Guadalcanal one long, rainy night by fighting off the equivalent of a Japanese division. Puller's men shoved away Japanese bodies to keep open their fields of fire. When the water supply gave out, they urinated into their liquid-cooled machine guns to keep them operating. Puller was wounded twice by bullets and half a dozen times by shell fragments...
...Korean war, Puller led the landing at Inchon. Then the Chinese Communists came swarming across the Yalu, and once again, the marines handed the toughest job to Puller. He was put in command of the rear guard that was to cover the marines' retreat in subzero weather from the Chosin reservoir. Ordered to abandon equipment and vehicles, Puller not only kept everything he had but collected many trucks that the Army had abandoned along the way. He loaded the wounded into trucks and Jeeps, strapped frozen bodies on bumpers and hoods, and set out to fight...
...Chesty Puller was simply a matter of kill or be killed. He openly condoned the shooting of prisoners. He once ordered his artillery to fire on a supporting army unit if it exposed his marines by retreating. Puller's tactics were built around one word: attack. "I'd follow that man to hell," said one marine, "and it looks as though I may have...
Unproved Case. In 1951 Puller roused a national storm by saying that the U.S. was turning soft and by suggesting that fighting men might better be trained on beer and whisky than on ice cream. (He himself was never a man to refuse a drink-a fact discreetly withheld by Biographer Davis.) He once marched his men along an asphalt highway under a broiling sun until even tough young officers were passing out. "We can't hope to win future wars-and we got the hell beat out of us in Korea-unless we have discipline," he said...
...over his roaring protests, Lieut. General Chesty Puller was retired from the corps on the ground that he was suffering from high blood pressure. "I hate like hell to go," said the old war horse, and went home to the Virginia village of Saluda. where he now lives as peacefully as any other veteran. Author Davis makes an attempt to prove that Puller was railroaded out of the service by Marine ex-Commandant Lemuel Shepherd because he did not fit in with the new corps. The accusation, completely unproved, seems to stem more from hero worship of Puller than from...