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 Excerpts from 365 Days
“The stories I have tried to tell here are true,” says Glasser in his preface. “Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to have disbelieved some of them, and at first I did, but I was there long enough to hear the same stories again and again, and then to see part of it myself.” Assigned to Zama, an Army hospital in Japan, Glasser arrived there in September 1968 as a pediatrician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, primarily to care for the children of officers and high-ranking government officials. But with an average of six to eight thousand wounded per month, Glasser, along with all other available physicians, was called on to treat the soldiers. The death and suffering he witnessed were staggering. The soldiers counted their days by the length of their tour—one year, or 365 days—and they knew, down to the day, how much time they had left. Glasser tells their stories—their lives shockingly interrupted by the tragedies of war—with humane eloquence. The excerpts are telling…
Page 14… Peterson was waiting with the medic near the edge of the pad. The chopper had barely touched down when the crew chief jerked open the door. The inside of the chopper was covered with blood. In the dim half-light of the landing pad it looked like drying enamel. Peterson and the medic started running onto the pad at the same time. Hunching over to clear the swirling blades, the crew chief helped them into the chopper. The wounded man, his head hanging limply over the edge of the stretcher, was still lashed to the sides of the chopper. Blood welled up from under his half-body cast. Grabbing the top of the plaster cast, Peterson tore it off. A great gush of blood shot up, hit the roof, and then dying, fell away. He put his hand quickly over the wound and pressed down to stop the bleeding; he could feel the flesh slipping away from under his hand. Taking a clamp out of his pocket, he took his hand off the wound and, with the blood swelling up again, stuck the clamp blindly into the jagged hole, worked it up into the groin, and snapped it shut. The bleeding stopped. The bleeding stopped.
Page 25… “Hear!” Peterson had to move the phone a bit away from his ear. “They sure are. Someone in Nam decided they’re not going to have more than 3000 in-patients in country at any one time; might look bad or something like that, so for the next two or three weeks we’ll begetting thirty to forty medical evacuations a day. The problem is, where the hell we’re going to put them?”
Page 33… …Mayfield watched the, realizing without the least satisfaction that if they had to they’d go again and again. It wasn’t because they wanted to or even believed in what they were doing, but because they were there and someone told them to do it. Strange war. Going for something they didn’t believe in or for that matter didn’t care about, just to make it 365 days and be done with it. They’d go, though; even freaked out, they’d go. They’d do whatever he told them. Three mornings in a row after lying in the mud all night, they got up and pushed the gooks back so the choppers could get the wounded out. They charged, every time, just go up and went, right over the RPD’s and the AK’s. No flags, no noise, no abuse. They just got up and blew themselves to shit because it had to be done. The same with ambushes. They’d do it, and if led right, they’d do it well. But they always let him know somehow that they would rather be left alone; it would be OK if they caught the gooks, but if they didn’t, that would be fine too. At first it had been disconcerting—troopers who didn’t care but who’d fight anyway, sloppy soldiers smoking grass whenever they could, but would do whatever was asked. Skeptical kids who made no friends outside their own company and sometimes only in their own squads, who’d gout and tear themselves apart to help another unit and then leave when it was over without asking a name or taking a thanks, if any were offered. It had taken Mayfield a while to get used to , but after a month in Name he began to realize and them to understand that his troops weren’t acting strangely at all, that, if anything, they were amazingly professional. They did what they were supposed to, and it was enough. They did what they were supposed to, and it was enough. They had no illusions about why they were here. There was no need for propaganda, for flag waving. Even if there were, these kids wouldn’t have bought it. Killing toughens you, and these kids were there to kill, and they knew it. They took their cues from the top, and all that mattered from USARV to the Battalion Commanders was body counts.
Page 49… Graham was eighteen years old when a tracer round skidded off his flack vest and triggered a grenade in his webbing. He struggled for a moment to pull it off and then, according to the other medic working with him, he jumped out of the aid station, and kept running, with the grenade bouncing against his chest until it went off.
Page 52… Watson didn’t mind talking. “Why not go all out, man? They need me, and I know what I’m doing out there. Hundreds of cases—fucken hundreds. The big-shot dermatologists, they come down once a week. They look at all that rotting skin and shake their heads and leave. Know what we done? We got a mix-master, threw in a couple of quarts of calamine lotion, a few kilograms of mycolgue for the fungus, and figured some tetracycline and penicillin couldn’t hurt, just in case there was any bacteria around. Called it jungle mix and bottled it and handed it out. Fucken dermatologists couldn’t believe it. Wanted to know where we’d read about it, what medical journal…. …Medics in the 101st carried M&M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the young.
Page 149… Gentlemen, you may smoke. My name is Colonel Griger, Psychiatric Medical Adviser to the United States Army—Vietnam. This hour of your active-duty orientation has been set aside for a discussion of military psychiatry. I know what is on your minds; it is on everyone’s mind who is going to war. Let me first try to allay some of your fears. Since you are physicians, it won’t be as bad as you think. I’ve just recently returned from Vietnam and I can assure you that your chances of getting hurt or killed—unless you do something foolish or are somewhere you shouldn’t be—are much smaller than right out here on the streets of San Antonio, Texas. I am not saying that Vietnam will not be a difficult place. It is difficult for everyone, whether he admits it or not. The point is to make sure, whether it’s yourself or your patients, that when the tour is over those difficulties are left behind where they belong—in Southeast Asia….That is why I am talking to you this hour. To try to make sure that a year’s problem does not become a lifelong disability.
Page 243… He stopped by the foot of the last bed and waited for Ade to open his eyes, watching the blood dripping slowly out of the bottle into the catheter they had sewn into the patients neck. When Ade finally looked up, it took him a while to focus his eyes. “Made it, huh?” he whispered. Brock moved closer to the side of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Made it.” “Going back?” “No.” Brock shook his head. “They offered me another team, but…well, I didn’t want to begin again. I’m going home.” “You’re gonna be tough in the bars, man.” Brock smiles. “Yeah—guess so.” “Still having the same dream?” “Same one,” Brock said soberly. “Same one, every night.” Ade closed his eyes against the lights. “Should see somebody about it.” “Later. How they treating you?” “I get all the blood I need.” The ward master was walking toward them. “I’ve got to go,” Brock said, taking Ade’s limp hand in both of his. “I’ll keep in touch. Good luck.” Ade looked up at him and smiled wanly. “That’s past, man. Gone. Take care.” Brock was walking away before the ward master reached him.
Page 260… “Gentlemen: You have been assembled here at Yokota Air base to escort these bodies home to the continental United States. Each body in its casket is to have at all times, a body escort….Escort duty is a privilege as well as an honor….Your mission as a body escort is as follows: to make sure that the body is afforded, at all times, the respect due a fallen soldier of the United states Army. Specifically it is as follows: 1) To check the tags on the caskets at every point of departure. 2) To insist, if the tags indicate the remains as non-viewable means exactly that—non-viewable…. …Coastal Airlines loads the bodies on an angle. Be sure that if the body you are escorting is being carried by Coastal Airlines that the caskets are loaded head down: this will keep the embalming fluid in the upper body. If the body is loaded incorrectly, namely, feet down, the embalming fluid will accumulate in the feet and the body may, under appropriate atmospheric conditions, begin to decompose.”
Ronald Glasser
365 Days and Wounded |
On 365 Days
“The last chapter of this book is already justly famous. The rest of the book deserves to be. It will be, too. Its quiet eloquence, its factual precision, its emotional restraint braided into the horror and pain of the subject matter make it a book of great emotional impact.” —Thomas Lask, New York Times
“The most convincing, most moving accounts I have yet read about what it was like to be an American soldier in Vietnam.” —Peter Prescott, Newsweek
“365 DAYS lifts the lid on the physical side of war. Stephen Crane could not have been a better guide.” —Robert Sherrill, Chicago Sun-Times
“A moving account about tremendous courage and often suffering....a valuable and redemptive work.” —William Styron, The Washington Monthly
“Chilling, shocking, extremely moving, heartrending. There is no other way to start thinking or writing about 365 DAYS.” —Robert Armstrong, Minneapolis Tribune
“Until the Wilfred Owens and Henri Barbusses and Anton Myrers of the Vietnam War reveal themselves, this book will serve as the standard 'Lest We Forget.’” —Josiah Bunting, Atlantic Monthly
“I felt my pulse rising as I red, but could not put the book down. If you can emerge from the experience unshaken, you're a better man then I am.” —John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate
“Glasser's professional concern melts with the compassion and sensibility of a gifted storyteller, and we are given scenes of wrenching power...A valuable and redemptive work.” —William Styron, Washington Monthly |
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