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Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam veteran

By VVAW

Lewis B. Puller, Jr, 48 Pulitzer Prize winning author, disabled Vietnam veteran committed suicide on May 11, 1994.

The son. A marine general "Chesty" Puller, Lewis Puller lost both legs and parts of his hands when he stepped on a land mine in 1 Corps in 1968.

His book, Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet is about his experiences with his father (the most decorated marine in World War II), Vietnam combat, his anti-war feelings (see excerpts), depression and alcoholism.

He supported normalized relations with Vietnam and had returned from a visit with disabled North Vietnamese veterans.

Unfortunately he could not reconcile his pain. He shot himself, leaving family and friends.

The third week of April that year more than a thousand Vietnam veterans gathered in Washington to protest American involvement in the war. On Sunday, April 19, 1971, they began assembling in West Potomac Park, and their activities over the next five days, reported extensively on national and local television and in newspapers throughout the country, came to be known as Operation Dewey Canyon III after two similarly named earlier military operations in Vietnam. I was not a part of the antiwar movement and indeed thought that the motives of many of its leaders were self-serving and destructive to the country, but as the week wore on and I watched my former comrades give vent to their feelings and frustrations, I was almost persuaded to go to Washington and join them.

In the course of the week they conducted a ceremony for the war dead near the tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetery, established a campsite on the mall, demonstrated at the Pentagon and at the Supreme Court, and staged a candlelight march around the White House. Throughout the week they lobbied on Capital Hill for an end to the war. One articulate young combat veteran named John Kerry delivered a moving address before a special session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that, for me, summed up the sense of betrayal and the disillusionment I felt toward the administration and the leadership that had directed the course of the war from the safety of its Washington power base.

On Friday, April 23, in a culmination of the events of the week, the protest veterans were scheduled to march to the steps of the Capital and discard their medals in a symbolic gesture of their feeling of having been discarded themselves by the nation. These were my brothers, not starry-eyed intellectuals or malcontents dedicated to the overthrow of our form of government, but soldiers and marines, any of whom had paid for their perspectives with shattered lives and shattered limbs. They were now saying that their sacrifices had been meaningless, that my sacrifice had been meaningless, and that the precious blood spilled by our dead and maimed fellow veterans had been meaningless. For years I had been hearing similar rhetoric from antiwar spokesmen whose ideology war foreign to me; but I was now hearing from these young men whose kinship with me had been forged in the bloody crucible of Vietnam, and its impact, like a for lifting from a shrouded landscape, stripped me of my remaining self-delusions.

On Thursday night, before the climatic last day's events in Washington, I took my medals from our bedroom closet and debated whether I should drive to Washington to throw them away. As I sat silently in the dimly lit closet feeling the weight of bronze and silver in my hand and studying the red, white, and blue stripes of my Silver Stand and the majestic cameo of George Washington on my Purple hearts, I know that I could never part with them. They had cost me too dearly, and though I now say clearly that the war in which they had been earned was a wasted cause, the medals still represented the dignity and the caliber of my sacrifice and of those with whom I had served. I could no more discard them than I could repudiate my country, my Marine Corps, or my fellow veterans. As I put them away, I was very sad and very tired by grateful nonetheless that my children were asleep in their beds in American rather than anywhere else in the world.

—excerpt from Fortunate Son