Books: The Fabulous General Chesty

MARINE! (403 pp.)—Burke Davis—Little, Brown ($5.95).

He shouted battlefield orders in a bellow that rattled the Halls of Montezuma. He stalked about under enemy fire as though he were daring anyone to hit him. He had an abiding love for the enlisted man who did the killing and the dying, and a sneering hatred for the staff officer who did the sitting and the meddling. He thrived on combat until he became a legend to his troops—the toughest fighting man in the whole United States Marines. His name was Lewis Burwell ("Chesty") Puller, and when he was retired in 1955 as a lieutenant general, he was the most decorated man in Marine Corps history.

In Marine! Burke Davis has written a gaudy, bloody, gung-ho account of the horn combat leader who eagerly went off to war with his green eyes gleaming malevolently, a stubby pipe clenched in his crooked mouth, and a copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars tucked into his duffel bag. The son of a wholesale grocery salesman, Chesty Puller—he always walked with his chest up and out, like a pouter pigeon on parade—spent only a year at Virginia Military Institute before quitting in 1918 to enlist in the Marines, only to be thwarted when World War I ended before he could kill any Germans. But Puller was soon blooded while fighting bandits in Haiti and Nicaragua, where he was known as El Tigre and won the first of his five Navy Crosses.

"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.

In the 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 his way to safety through the encircling hordes of Chinese. "We're not retreating," he told his marines. "We've about-faced to get at more of those bastards."

War to 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 to."