Badass of the Century

Chesty Puller

"We've been looking for the enemy for some time now.
We've finally found him. We're surrounded.
That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and
killing them."
Lewis Puller, nicknamed Chesty because of his perfect
posture and the fact that his torso somewhat resembled a fullsize beer keg full of lead bricks, raw muscle and horse steroids,
was a hard-as-shit motherfucker who is almost universallyrecognized as the most badass dude to ever wear the uniform
of the United States Marine Corps. Not bad, considering that
being revered as the pinnacle of toughness by the USMC is
kind of like being King of the Vikings or the toughest Klingon to
ever set foot on the planet Kronos. In his thirty-seven years of
service to the Corps, Puller would rise through the ranks from
Private to General, kick more asses than Juan Valdez on an
insane bender, and become the most decorated Marine in
American history.
Born in the small town of West Point, Virginia, Puller grew up
hunting, fishing, arm wrestling black bears and reading about
military history. He enrolled in the prestigious Virginia Military

Academy in 1917, but dropped out after a year to enlist in the

Marines, mostly because he didnt want to fuck around reading
books about kicking sack when he could be out there booting it
himself. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Marine
Corps Reserves, but was placed on the inactive list ten days
after his enlistment (WWI was winding down, and the
government was scaling the military back). Since nothing was
going to stand between Chesty Puller and his mad desire to
shoot motherfuckers in the eye, Puller re-enlisted in the Corps,
this time going in as a lowly Private. After thirteen weeks of
running eighty miles a day, climbing sheer cliff faces with his
bare hands, and crawling under barbed wire while pissed-off
Drill Instructors whacked him over the head with rusty
medieval polearms and belted forth a constant stream of
compound profanities vile enough to make the baby Jesus cry,
Puller was shipped out to kick asses in Haiti.
Puller's mission was to maintain order in Haiti by killing endless
hordes of Caco Rebels bent on the violent overthrow of the
U.S.-sponsored Haitian government. Over the course of five
years, Chesty fought in over forty engagements against these
rebels, where he gained valuable experience in small-unit
tactics, jungle warfare, and ripping his enemies hearts out
through their ribcages with his bare hands. His toughness and
badassitude earned him rapid promotions, and by the time he
was shipped out to Nicaragua in 1930 he was already a
commissioned Lieutenant. Er... again.
Lieutenant Puller first established himself as a Marines Marine
(i.e. a total badass) while punching rebels in the kidneys in the
dense Nicaraguan jungles. In one of his first missions of the
campaign, Puller led his platoon up against a much larger force
of heavily-armed rebel scum, charging the fortified enemy
positions without even flinching. Over the course of one week,
Pullers men routed the enemy in five separate engagements,
completely annihilating the rebel positions while sustaining
minimal casualties. For his bravery in combat, Puller won the
Navy Cross the Marine Corps second-highest award for
bravery (just below the Medal of Honor, and some say he got
jobbed out of the MoH because he refused to play any bullshit

political games). Another time he was leading his unit through

a treacherous mountain pass when all of a sudden these rebel
jackasses ambushed him from all sides with machine guns,
mortars and crazy dirtbikes with guns mounted on the sides.
Four of Puller's men went down under the initial attack, but he
got his boys to cover, directed their fire, and then led a
flanking maneuver that resulted in the complete destruction of
the ambushing forces. Then, on the march home, he was
ambushed twice more both times resulted in the epic ass
kickings of everyone who fucked with him. For getting his
platoon home safely with minimal loss of life, Puller received a
second Navy Cross. By the time that he left Nicaragua, Chesty
was known as The Tiger of the Mountains, a nickname he
earned presumably by clawing the eyes out of a traitorous
rebel, and was so despised by his enemies that the leaders of
the rebel guerrillas had put a 5,000 peso reward on his head.
You know you're doing a good job of whomping faces when
your enemy is willing to hire bounty hunters and mercenaries
to take your shit down like Han Solo.
Puller bounced around for a while after Nicaragua, serving at
several different posts both on land and at sea, including a
stint as the commander of the elite Horse Marines unit in
Peiping, China in 1933, where he rode around on horseback all
day and practiced the age-old tactic where riot cops leap off
their horses and take motherfuckers down. He continued to
impress his superiors with his tenacity and his take-no-bullshit
attitude, and when motherfuckers needed their faces smashed
in World War II, it was Lieutenant-Colonel Chesty Puller who
was once again holding the giant fucking sledgehammer.

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right,

they're in front of us, they're behind us.
They can't get away this time."
As the commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Pullers
men were tasked with making an amphibious assault near the
Matanikau River on the sunny Pacific resort island of
Guadalcanal and staking out a critical strategic Margarita
stand. Two companies of the 1/7 hit the beaches, and almost
immediately ran into a force of Japanese regular infantry much
larger and more well-prepared than anything the Marines were
expecting to face there. The invasion force was cut-off and
surrounded by an enemy counter attack, and Puller quickly
realized that he had to get his boys out of there before they
were cut to pieces. Another group of Marines tried to break
through the Japanese flank and reach the stranded men, but
the enemy resistance was too strong and they were too wellfortified to be displaced. The commander of the operation told
Puller that it was hopeless, and that those Marines were lost.
Well Chesty Fucking Puller never resigned defeat for any
reason. He slammed his fist down on the table and
immediately stormed out of camp toward the beach, where he
flagged down a U.S. Destroyer that happened to be sailing off
the coast. Despite having absolutely no authority to do so,
Puller boarded the vessel and immediately began organizing a
second amphibious assault aimed at breaking through the
Japanese lines. From the deck of the ship he directed the
Destroyer to fire everything they had at the enemy
fortifications. The shelling, coupled with the second landing,

punched through the enemy blockade and cleared a path for

the stranded Marines to escape. One week after this defeat,
Puller and his men would return to the mouth of the Matanikau
River and obliterate all Japanese opposition in the sector,
probably with their bare hands.
During that same campaign, Puller would once again prove his
brass-ballsitude by going above and beyond the call of duty in
the name of kicking every ass he could find. On the night of 24
October 1942, 700 men of the 1/7 were positioned in a thin,
mile-long line, defending an American airfield that was critical
for the success of the Guadalcanal operation. They suddenly
came under an intense onslaught from the seasoned men of
the Japanese 17th Army, who came charging full-speed at the
U.S. positions. For over three hours in the middle of the night,
Chesty Puller ran up and down the U.S. lines directing his men
and giving orders to his company commanders. When the
smoke cleared the next morning, the hard-fighting men of the
1st Marines had killed 1,400 of the enemy and captured
seventeen trucks loaded with weapons and PlayStations while
sustaining fewer than 70 casualties. Before he would leave
Guadalcanal, Puller would be shot twice by snipers and hit
once with shrapnel from an exploding mortar round, but none
of that bullshit would slow him down because he had well over
200 hit points thanks to his 18 Constitution score and the fact
that he was a Level 15 Marine Commander. Shit, fucking
Admiral Yamamoto himself could have swooped in on a giant
fucking red dragon that breathed fire right in Puller's fucking
face and Chesty would have just casually dusted himself off,
broken the dragon's neck, and hurled the Admiral into an
active volcano.
Puller continued to fight in the Pacific Campaign, once again
earning distinction at the Battle of New Britain Island. This
time, three separate Marine battalions had been hit hard by
enemy fire and lost their commanding officers, so Puller
himself ran up and down the American lines, re-organizing the
men under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, and eventually
leading an assault that would break the enemy lines an
action that would earn him his third Navy Cross. Later in 1944,

Puller led the 1st Marine Regiment in the Battle of Peleliu, an

engagement that was one of the bloodiest battles in the
history of the Corps.
After WWII, Puller returned stateside for a while. He taught
strategy and tactics at various military institutions until one
day he heard that some godless Commie bastards were
fucking with Democracy over in Korea. Puller cracked his
knuckles, loaded up his Colt 1911, and landed at the head of
the 1st Marines at Inchon in September of 1950. At the Battle
of Choisin Reservoir, Puller and his men found themselves
holed up in the town of Koto-ri, completely surrounded by ten
full Divisions of Chinese Infantry hell-bent on killing every
American they could find and then re-animating the dead
bodies to fight as their undead army of the night. Heavily
outnumbered, and fighting in ball-freezing sub-zero
temperatures, Pullers troops broke the enemy lines, smashed
through seven enemy divisions, and then stayed behind as a
rear guard, bearing the brunt of the Chinese onslaught so that
the rest of the Marines could complete their retreat (Puller
refused to refer to it as a retreat, however, he preferred to call
it, "attacking in a different direction"). The 1st Marines
withstood fierce attacks by hordes of Communist soldiers but
held their position, inflicted tremendous numbers of casualties
on the enemy and managed to provide enough time for the
Allies to evacuate all of their wounded men and salvageable
equipment. Sheer bravery in the face of intense fire and a
seemingly winless situation earned Chesty Puller his fifth Navy
Cross an unprecedented accomplishment that has never
been equaled.
As it should be for any good badass military commander,
Chesty Puller was admired by his men and feared by his
enemies. He always led from the front, fighting in the trenches
with the men, and never flinched under even the most serious
fire. One time a grenade landed next to him, and when the rest
of the guys around him dove for cover he glanced at it and
nonchalantly said, Oh, that. Its a dud. He inspired loyalty
and courage in his Marines, treated his men well, insisted on
the best equipment and discipline for his troops, and had a no

fear, win-at-all-costs attitude that won him fourteen medals for

combat bravery in addition to countless unit citations and
campaign ribbons. He is the most highly-decorated Marine in
history, and a legendary figure amongst his brethren. To this
day, Marines at Parris Island end their day by saying, "Good
night Chesty Puller, wherever you are!"