Well, I have FINALLY finished reading Lt. Col. Jon T. Hoffman's biography Chesty--The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller. Good book about one of America's great fighting men, which unfortunately took so long to read due to my insistence on reading it late at night, meaning I was only good for about a chapter before my head dropped into the book and I started slobbering. It was definitely NOT due to any fault of Lt. Col. Hoffman or his subject matter. The book is incredibly well researched and nicely written, and as opposed to several books I've mentioned in the past, reads as it should and not as a hastily written set of notes on 3x5 cards collected by research assistants and then handed to a highly-touted author for him to stamp his name in big letters on the cover. (Not going to call any names here...)

Puller's legendary status among Marines, along with the 1962 Burke Davis' biography Marine!, meant that Hoffman had a particularly difficult task to accomplish in overcoming the ingrained perceptions of Puller to show his human side (with all of its faults) without denigrating one of the truly heroic men of the Corps.

Relying on primary sources and actual field reports, he has taken on a monumental problem and written a worthy account, one that although it lays bare the flaws in Puller's demeanor--his bullheadedness, his disdain for staff officers and staff functions, his occasional paranoia regarding supposed detractors within the Corps, his reputation for being wasteful of the lives of his men, his penchant for deliberately saying contradictory and inflammatory statements--still manages to present a picture of a tremendous leader of men, as well as a tender and loving father and family man. Due to the huge amount of material from his personnel files and access to family papers which until now have not been available, it would be difficult for anyone to say that the work was written either to savage his reputation or further polish it--it is what it is--a careful reexamination that adds depth to the Puller legend.

As his life drew to a close, his relationship with his family grew even closer, and the passages dealing with his son's tour of duty in Viet Nam and subsequent near fatal wounds are truly moving. These events are not covered in detail, perhaps in deference to Puller's son's book, Fortunate Son--The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr., which is going to be the next thing on the reading list.

Good book, well written.
posted by Terry at 11:03:00 AM