Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller Jr.

Fortunate Son is Lewis B. Puller Jr.'s own account of his life, and it opens under the shadow of his father, Lieutenant General Lewis "Chesty" Puller, the most decorated Marine in the Corps's history, a legacy Puller says he felt obligated to live up to when he volunteered for Vietnam after graduating from the College of William and Mary in 1967. Puller tells his own story of October 11, 1968, when he tripped a booby trapped howitzer round while leading an infantry platoon, an explosion that took both his legs, his left hand and most of the fingers on his right hand, and nearly killed him outright; his weight fell to fifty five pounds during the weeks he spent fighting for his life afterward.

Puller narrates his own long, difficult recovery, his decision to attend law school and pass the Virginia bar, his work for the Veterans Administration and on President Gerald Ford's clemency board for Vietnam era draft evaders, and an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978. He writes with unusual candor about the alcoholism that took hold during these years, the periods of despondency his physical losses fed, and the treatment he underwent in 1981 that gave him more than a decade of sobriety before the pressures of ordinary life began to erode it again.

Reading the book means following a genuinely unflinching account of what surviving catastrophic wounds actually costs, physically and psychologically, over decades rather than in the dramatic weeks right after the injury, told by a man determined not to soften either his suffering or his own failures along the way. It suits a reader who wants the long aftermath of war, not just its battles, told honestly by someone who lived every year of it.