BOOK REVIEW
Many books have been written about the Vietnam War. Most are the experiences and recollections of infantrymen or combat pilots, or are biographies of officers such as Gen. William Westmoreland or then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “365 Days” (292 pages, first published in 1971) is a memoir written by a doctor who treated patients with horrific wounds received in that brutal conflict. Ronald J. Glasser, a Minneapolis, Minn., physician, formerly was a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He was drafted in 1968 and soon afterward was assigned to Zama Army hospital in Japan. Glasser was a pediatrician sent to serve the children of the dependent military population there. However, the hospital’s primary mission was support of the war and to tend to soldiers and civilians wounded in Vietnam.
“The chopper pilots and the radio telephone operators, the forward observers, the cooks, the medics and the sergeants, the colonels and the contractors, the Special Forces troopers and the Rangers, the heroes and the ones under military arrest, the drug addicts and the killers – sooner or later they all came to us at Zama.” At one time the four Army hospitals in Japan received an average of 6,000 to 8,000 patients airlifted each month from the battlefields of Vietnam, and during the Tet offensive in early 1968 “it had been closer to 11,000” per month, Glasser writes. The Army doctors treated myriad injuries, including gunshot wounds, burns, transected spinal cords, hepatitis, malaria and pneumonia. Many of the “grunts” didn’t bother to take anti-malaria pills because if they contracted the disease they received a six-week respite from combat, Glasser says.
Some injured soldiers transported to Japan via C-141 aircraft were boys with “as much as 50 or 60 pieces of steel scattered throughout their chests and abdomens” inflicted by booby-traps, Bouncing Bettys and land mines. Consequently, surgical procedures could last as long as five and six hours, Glasser relates. One patient from the 101st Airborne who was evacuated to Japan from Vietnam “ended up with an incision that ran 12 inches from the front of his thigh, right under his groin, and back around the sides of the leg.” His operation consumed 10 pints of blood “but the leg stayed on.” If a soldier wounded in Vietnam didn’t die “straight out, right where it happens,” he had “a pretty good chance” to survive, Glasser says. Much of the credit for that is owed to the helicopter pilots who risked their lives to medevac the wounded from combat zones. “In Nam, if they take you off the chopper alive, or just a little dead, it may hurt a lot but you’ll live,” Glasser writes.
Age was a critical factor. The wounded soldiers were “kids who up until the time they were hit were in the very prime of life,” the author explains. “There isn’t one who is overweight. None of them, if they smoke, has smoked long enough to eat up his lungs. There are no old coronaries to worry about, no diabetics with bad vessels, no alcoholic livers, no hypertensives.” Not everyone was lucky, though. The author tells of one infantryman who stepped on a land mine that blew off both of his legs and dislocated his right thumb and left index finger. The young man’s testicles and penis had to be amputated, his left kidney and four inches of his large bowel were surgically removed, his liver was lacerated, and metal fragments lodged in his abdomen. After eight days he died.
At one field hospital in the south-central highlands of Vietnam, a young nurse from Kansas was surprised to learn that medical personnel there treated not only South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians but even a few Viet Cong, too. “We’re in a South Vietnamese Army compound, the village is around us, and around the village are the VC,” a major informed the nurse. “Everyone lives together.” Some doctors at Zama specialized in psychiatric patients. Combat neurosis, battle fatigue, exhaustion, shell shock, “whatever you want to call it, has always been a problem” in war, the author writes. One chapter is devoted to a soldier who, the day after graduating from college, was sent to Fort Sill for artillery training. Next, he volunteered for airborne training at Fort Benning, and then for Ranger training.
Glasser also includes a vignette about a veteran Army officer who had fought in Burma during World War II and then in Korea before arriving in South Vietnam for a tour of duty. The officer insisted that his troops take the fight to the enemy, regardless of casualties. He was fatally ‘fragged’ one night with a hand grenade tossed into his tent. American soldiers in Vietnam counted their days in-country by the length of their tour: one year, 365 days. Hence the book’s title.