An American doctor and author, most famous for his best-selling book "365 Days", the pre-eminent Vietnam War book reviewed in the Washington Monthly and the New York Times. 365 Days has been translated into nine languages and is widely read. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Medical School and is a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Library JournalPediatrician Glasser, whose best-selling 1971
memoir, 365 Days, recounted his experiences as an army physician
during the Vietnam era, updates his earlier observations with this
disturbing exploration of the medical aspects of the Iraq and
Afghanistan conflicts, where explosives are the enemies' weapons of
choice. Survivors of these improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and
suicide bombs may suffer massive injuries, amputations, and brain
damage, requiring years, if not lifetimes, of expensive treatment.
Other explosive injuries to the brain are subtle and difficult to
detect without advanced imaging equipment. Glasser argues
convincingly that the effects of surviving repeated shock waves
contribute to soldiers' and veterans' high rates of prescription
drug addiction, suicide, and debilitating post-traumatic stress
syndrome. The tragic human cost of such injuries is paralleled by
our mounting financial obligation to provide lifelong care for the
ever-growing number of returning soldiers. VERDICT Glasser writes
with a passion that challenges those who might wish to avoid the
harsh medical and social costs of current warfare. General readers
will find themselves engrossed in his accounts of the spirit,
creativity, and heroism of our soldiers and the medics, nurses, and
physicians who care for them.-Kathy Arsenault, St. Petersburg,
FL
Publishers WeeklyEach war has its signature wound, and in America's
latest wars, it carries the prefix "poly," writes Glasser (Another
War, Another Peace), a former U.S. Army Medical Corp major . In
this deftly written and researched account, he explains that
because so many more soldiers survive their wounds today than did
in Vietnam, they often suffer from multiple injuries requiring
"poly-trauma units." Glasser describes how improvised explosive
devices in Afghanistan and Iraq blow off limbs, wreak havoc on
internal organs, and cause devastating concussive brain damage--the
signature injuries of our new wars. Glasser points out that today's
wars with new weapons, new injuries, and new treatments all add up
to "new suffering" for soldiers. He also focuses on the "Band of
Sisters" in the new wars whose major cause of PTSD once was sexual
harassment and now is combat. The weight of Glasser's research is
compelling. But his powerful telling of these wounded warriors'
stories is more than enough reason for a nation to read and react.
(June)
Ronald Glasser's book is an argument for a choice between two
stark, inescapable courses of action: call up a national draft and
put everything we've got into the fight, or withdraw our forces
from Southwest and Central Asia -- or to use his phrase, the "Edge
of Empire." The paradigm shift between our presence in Indochina
and our multiplex of wars these days is best reflected by the fact
that the enemy used to shoot. Today, soldiers get blown up. And
that is a fundamental difference, Dr. Glasser says. It seems that
this veteran Army medic takes the image of exploded bodies as a
larger metaphor for what is going on: everything is blowing up in
our face and we have no plan.One decade after the beginning of a
global war of undefined scope and duration against a protean foe
that could hardly care less about the next American election cycle,
the United States as a society is not at war -- only its allegedly
all-volunteer Armed Forces and military families who have carried
the entire burden for this Ten Years War, what some have called a
crusade against evil that may simply be freedom enduring the
sweeping dust over the "Graveyard of Empires." Since the weight of
the fight is almost entirely borne by a sliver of the population,
Glasser raises the question of a draft directly and forcefully. He
writes that "even after a decade of fighting, with the volunteer
army stretched to the limit and more and more reserve forces being
deployed multiple times, no one is complaining, or even talking, of
sharing the burden by instituting or considering a draft."It may be
too glib to declare that the suffering remains the same, not only
for all the psychological, physical, emotional, and social
casualties returned back home to normal civilian life with the war
still going on in their heads, or reflected in the form of a missed
limb or a burned face.Although extraordinary strides in technology
have kept more G.I.'s alive, many are condemned to live with
injuries that, for some o
Virtual SurvivalLower U.S military casualty rates are obscuring the
horrors of war.The human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
are high--and hidden, due to advances in combat medicine, and this
masks the ferocity of these conflicts. In Broken Bodies, Shattered
Minds: A Medical Odyssey from Vietnam to Afghanistan (History
Publishing, June), Ronald Glasser quotes one army nurse in Baghdad:
"We're saving the really severely injured, legs gone, blinded,
deaf, parts of brains destroyed. You may go home, but you won't be
the same as when you left." As Glasser writes, "Those that the
nurse talks about now number in the tens of thousands."So the wars'
overt cost, the death toll, would be much greater if not for new
medical developments that enable the "low" fatality statistics to
hide the brutality of these struggles. The wars' signature wounds
are traumatic brain injury and multiple amputations, which occur
because our soldiers are being blown up by IEDs. Such wounds would
once have been fatal, but not anymore, thanks to surgical advances
and the transformation of combat medicine. "We have been lulled by
our own successes in simply keeping our troops alive--as if death
is the only measure of risks on the battlefield," Glasser writes.
"Despite the growing sophistication of our battlefield medicine and
the new body armor, the orthopedic wards at Walter Reed are
becoming filled with numbers of amputees not seen since the Civil
War."In Vietnam, "small arm and automatic weapon rounds were...the
signature wounds," Glasser writes, "the wounded bled to death. ...
Brain injuries ... in Vietnam were universally fatal." Glasser, who
served as a doctor there, wrote the bestselling 365 Days (1971)
about that conflict.In Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds, Glasser
argues that advances in vascular surgery and improvements in body
armor have allowed soldiers to survive awful injuries.Medicine's
structure has adapted to modern war and so have its techniques,
leading t
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