365 Days - Softcover

Glasser M.D., Ronald J.

4.31

719 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807600016 ISBN 13: 9780807600016

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 2014

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A new edition of Ron Glasser's classic. In this gripping account, Glasser offers an unparalleled description of the horror endured daily by those on the front lines. “The best book to come out of Vietnam.” David Mamet

Assigned to Zama, an Army hospital in Japan in September 1968, Glasser arrived as a pediatrician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps to care for the children of officers and high-ranking government officials. The hospital's main mission, however, was to support the war and care for the wounded. “They all came through the hospitals of Japan ... the chopper pilots and the RTO's, the forward observers, the cooks, the medics and the sergeants... the heroes and the ones under military arrest, the drug addicts and the killers.” At Zama, an average of six to eight thousand patients were attended to per month, and the death and suffering 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―of lives shockingly interrupted by the tragedies of war―with moving, humane eloquence.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Author:

"These pages were not written in desperation, nor were they written out of boredom, or even, I think, to prove a point, but rather to offset the sinking feeling we all had that some day, when the whole thing was over, there would be nothing remembered except the confusion and the politics.

I certainly did not see it all, and in truth I have dealt with only a small part, but I saw enough, more than enough. They all came through the hospitals of Japan, one of which I was assigned: the 9th Division fighting in the Delta-the Riverines-the 1st Air Cav, the 101st, the 4th and the 25th, the 1st and the 173rd, the chopper pilots and the RTO's, the forward observers, the cooks, the medics and the sergeants... the heroes and the ones under military arrest, the drug addicts and the killers. Sooner or later they all came to us at Zama.

The stories I have tried to tell here are all true. Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to disbelieve 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."

About the Author:

Ronald J. Glasser, M.D., is a physician and the author of several investigations of trauma in modern warfare, including Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds and Wounded: Vietnam/Iraq, as well as the general medical studies The Light in the Skull and The Body Is the Hero. He is also the author of the novels Another War, Another Peace and Ward 402. He lives in Minneapolis.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.