Post-Mortem

By LANCE MORROW

365 DAYS by Ronald J. Glasser, M.D. 292 pages. Braziller. $6.95.

"When you are describing a disaster," Ronald Glasser explains, "you talk to the victims." Glasser is a young Minneapolis pediatrician who was drafted in 1968 and assigned to the Army hospital at Camp Zama, Japan. His job there was to care for the children of military families. But his attention was soon absorbed by the hospital's more specific mission--mending the thousands of shattered soldiers who were flown in from battle in Viet Nam. Glasser began listening to the wounded in his off hours, then writing their stories down. Though his previous literary experience was limited to "fiddling" with collegiate poetry, he eventually shaped what he heard into 365 Days, a literary fugue of documentary sketches that may survive among the most brutally vivid accounts of war ever written.

Glasser's intention was not to get at the political truth of Viet Nam but to get at the particular, personal experiences of some of the Americans who fought there. He succeeded almost too well. As in all fictionalized journalism, the greater the author's skill at re-creating the minute details the more the reader wonders exactly how the writer got it all down so precisely. Glasser exhaustively rechecked details with his witnesses. As he explained recently: "I'd asked, How hot was it? Is this how it happened, how it looked?" Often the wounded demanded changes. They edited out, for example, most generalizations and political ironies. One advised him: "Don't sound like a damned journalist."

Lost Legs. Glasser's chronicles begin at Zama, where the doctors were surrounded by adolescents whose bodies, for no purpose that they could fathom, had been suddenly mutilated. "They were worried," Glasser observed, "not about survival, but about how they would explain away their lost legs. Would they embarrass their families? Could they go to the beach and would their scars darken in the sun and offend the girls. Above all, and underlining all their cares, would anybody love them when they got back?"

365 Days--the one year of a standard combat tour--is, among other things, a compendium of the special lore of Viet Nam, with its vocabulary of "dinks" and "loaches" (light observation helicopters). Glasser interweaves dual themes: the elaborate efficiency of the U.S. medical organization (98% of the wounded who make it to Japan survive) and the even more elaborate systems for killing, the insane ingenuity of war. Men mimic the machine's inventiveness. Pressed for high body counts--even given quotas--some units "buried their kills on the way out [on a mission] and dug them up again to be recounted on the way in."

"Mayfield," a highly skilled, 43-year-old career sergeant, devised forlornly human techniques--separating the newly arrived married men into different platoons, for example, to reduce the danger that they would all be killed at once. Medics are allowed in the field only seven months because they start developing an obsessive sense of responsibility. Says Glasser, "They begin getting freaky, cutting down on their own water and food so they can carry more medical supplies; stealing plasma bottles, writing parents and friends for medical catalogues so they can buy their own endotracheal tubes." Some carried M & M candies as placebos, slipping the sweets between the lips of the wounded "as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Viet Nam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are left alone to take care of the young."

In various ways, the book suggests again that My Lai was no isolated incident. Glasser tells of one old Vietnamese casually shot because he would not give up the carton of Cokes he was carrying on his bicycle. Other gestures are simply the dreadful protocols of war: after a bloody fight, helicopter pilots gathered the dead North Vietnamese in cargo nets and flew off to dump them in the path of the retreating enemy.

Glasser describes two night ambushers at work. One is intent on completing a collection of North Vietnamese army belt buckles, like Norman Mailer's Sergeant Croft collecting gold teeth. In the claustrophobic jungle night he encounters a "gook," attacks him with a bicycle chain and then with his bayonet, "knifing again and again until he could feel the head coming loose in his other hand." Back in camp at breakfast, another soldier sees the blood on his hand. "That you?" he asks. "Johnson looked thoughtfully at his hand. He seemed suddenly subdued, almost awed. 'No,' he said. That's him.' "

Though his hatred of the war is all but incandescent throughout, Glasser's book is more complex than an antiwar document. He sympathetically records, for example, the story of "Mccabe," an intelligent and ambitious college man who joined the Army, passed OCS, then entered Ranger training, partly out of some sense of what Yeats called "the fascination of what's difficult." A personal ethic of excellence propelled him to master the techniques of survival and killing. There is a larger American lesson in him. Mccabe wound up, 27 days after he arrived in Viet Nam, sitting on an armored personnel carrier and calling down artillery to blow apart a Vietnamese village--"women, children, dogs, huts, rice, water buffalo, the whole thing"--because someone had fired a single sniper round from that general direction.

Other doctors, notably William Carlos Williams, have combined literature and medicine. Boris Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, regarded the fusion as a ministry to body and spirit. Ronald Glasser, 31, considers his excursion into prose less a vocation than a special necessity of the moment, a response to the anguish and perplexity of young soldiers who are, he believes, essentially children. He has no immediate plans to write anything else.

Glasser grew up on Chicago's North Side, went to Johns Hopkins medical school and, after he completed his internship and residency there, went on to Zama. His tour of duty finished, he has been practicing as a pediatrician at Minneapolis' Hennepin County General Hospital and is now returning to study kidney disorders in children at the University of Minnesota medical school. At his hospital recently, Glasser said, "I've handled a child-battering and two child-molestings today. All in all, I've gotten so I don't like adults very much."

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