Never forget!-----Review: "365 Days: 50th Anniversary Edition," by Ronald J. Glasser

Review: "365 Days: 50th Anniversary Edition," by Ronald J. Glasser
"Don’t count the days—make the days count. 

So goes an old adage on military deployments. 

Ronald J. Glasser did both as a physician treating the wounded in the Vietnam War. 

• After returning home, he wrote 365 Days, a collection of short stories drawn from the patients he treated and the colleagues he served with...
• The 17 stories in 365 Days assume the perspectives of combatants and others connected in some way to the front lines. 

Much war literature focuses on a platoon, squad, or company
365 Days recalls the oral tradition of war stories...

Here, for example, is how he describes the work of front-line medics, asked time and again to do the impossible:

Medics in the 101st carried M & M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the young...