365 Days

New York: George Braziller, 1971. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xii, 292 pages. Glossary of Military and Medical Terms. DJ has tear at bottom back near spine. DJ has some other wear and soiling. After graduating with his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, Ron was drafted into the Army where he served as a physician in Japan during the Vietnam war. His best-selling book 365 Days is still considered to be one of the most important books about that conflict. He continued to write prolifically throughout his career as a pediatric nephrologist. Ron helped improve the lives of thousands of children. The author was a Major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, stationed at the hospital in Zama, Japan, in 1968, where he treated the wounded flown in from Vietnam. Ronald Joel Glasser (May 31, 1939 - August 26, 2022) was an American doctor and author, best known for his book 365 Days, chronicling his tour of duty as a US Army doctor during the Vietnam War. Published in 1971, the book became a bestseller. It was reviewed in the Washington Monthly and the New York Times. 365 Days has been translated into nine languages. In June 2006, Glasser, a Minneapolis physician, published his seventh book, Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq. In his foreword, Glasser writes: These stories are true. I was part of some of them; the rest belonged to others. What was so troubling was not what I saw or heard, but that it all kept happening again and again... As for me, none of this was written out of pique or anger, but to give those caught up in this terrible enterprise something all their own, something they could give to others and say, "this is what happened." 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. Derived from a Kirkus review: Glasser, a U.S. Army doctor stationed in Japan's Kanto Plains (where serious American casualties are flown for medical treatment), sutures together 17 true stories -- some mere fragmentary sketches, but all based on his personal experience or conversations with patients -- which exemplify various aspects of the war: the atrocities, pot smoking, falsification of body-count statistics, the villagers' hatred of American soldiers, their complicity with the VC, the omnipresent booby traps -- it's all here. The main emphasis, however, is on the medical operation. Glasser reports that 98% of the American wounded who get to Japan survive: then he tells us about their physical and psychological burns, how it is to face living with massive disfigurements, without legs or arms, about the surgeons who perform emergency operations day in, day out. Some of the accounts are quite clinical and require a strong stomach. That's the kicker in this book.