The Red Badge of Literature

...writing parents and friends so they can buy their own endotracheal tubes...

...They will drop the point, trying not to kill him but to wound him, to get him screaming so they can get the medic too...

...The medics, though, stay on line only seven months...

...Published in the April, 197 1, issue of The Washington Monthly as “The Burn Ward...

...The effect is disorganized, laconic, rather unsettlingly fragmentary, until one realizes that such a disjointed technique is perfectly suited to the outlines of the lunatic war itself: its greedy purposelessness, its manic and self-devouring intensity, its unending tableaux of helicopters crashing on missions to nowhere, futile patrols ending in bloody slaughter, instantaneous death in some remote mess area miles behind the action...

...After a while, I changed...

...yet it is a tribute to Glasser’s great skill as a writer that from this most morally loathsome of wars, which has in some way degraded each person who has been touched by it, he has fashioned a moving account about tremendous courage and often immeasurable suffering...

...Trained as a pediatrician, Glasser relates how he began to feel a special empathy for these blown-apart, uncomplaining, sometimes hideously mangled casualties of war...

...stealing plasma bottles and walking around on patrol with five or six pounds of glass in their rucksacks...

...They know he will...

...It is therefore a valuable and redemptive work, providing as it does a view of the war from the vantage point of a man who has not only been there but has himself, obviously, seen and suffered much...

...I soon realized,” he writes, “that the troopers they were pulling off those med evac choppers were only children themselves...

...Glasser’s yeoman soldiers, aided by modern technology, are as miserably up to their necks in war as were those of Shakespeare...

...In retrospect, it may be that both the appeal and the vitality of these novels and poems-and of lesser yet beautifully crafted works like John Horne Burns' novel of World War 11, The Gallery-had to do with a kind of residual unconscious romanticism...

...It is not due to the good will of the Army, but to their discovery that seven months is about all these kids can take...

...A tour of Nam is 12 months...

...It is possible, then, that the further we remove ourselves from wars in which a vestige of idealism exists or-to put it the other way aroundthe more we engage in waging wars which approach being totally depraved, the less likely we are to produce imaginative writing which contains many plausible outlines of humanity...

...they nervously conspire to kill their swinish senior officers, and then chicken out...

...It is this quality, reverent at its best, enormously touching in its concern for the simple worth and decency of life, that gives 365 Days its great distinction and may cause it-one hopes-to become one of those rare chronicles we can use to help alleviate the killing pain of this war, and its festering disgrace...

...Both Stephen Crane and Hemingway were conscious of the insanity, the brutalization of war, but there were still a few idealistic principles embedded in the Civil War and the First World War, thus lending to The Red Badge of Courage and A Farewell to Arms certain ironies and contradictions which helped give to each, finally, a romantic and tragic resonance...

...Nearly all of Glasser’s stories of combat, although admittedly second-hand (as was The Red Badge of Courage), are remarkable miniature portraits of men at war...

...And so it goes, and the gooks know it...

...They trip over mines and are reduced to vegetables...

...In the last story* in the book, Major Edwards, a doctor in the hospital burn unit, is faced with the hopeless task of saving a young soldier cruelly burned across 80 per cent of his body...

...Recounted in a dry, dispassionate, superbly controlled and ironic voice, these anecdotes mingle at random with Glasser’s own vividly observed, first-hand sketches of hospital life in Japan...

...The tale is simple, the situation uncomplicated: a dedicated physician, through no other motive than that resulting from the mighty urge to hold back death, trying against all odds to salvage someone who himself is suffering, without complaint, ecstasies of pain...

...It is a banal and senseless war, lacking either heroes or a chorus...

...This is a familiar story and one that could have been both clinical and cloying, but Glasser’s hand is so sure, his eye so clear, that the moment of the boy’s imminent death and his last cry to the doctor“I don’t want to go home alone”seem to rise to form a kind of unbearable epiphany to the inhuman waste and folly of war...

...Two human beings, then, locked in the immemorial struggle against inexplicable fate...

...365 Days, by Ronald J . Glasser, George Braziller...

...These awful vignettes are rendered with splendid understatement...

...After all, the Civil War and the two World Wars of this century, whatever their horrors and whatever the historical blunders and idiocies that propelled them into being, possessed moral aspects which could make an individual's participation in the conflict not entirely ignoble...

...At first, when it was all new, I was glad I didn’t know them...

...It was here that he first encountered the evacuated wounded from Vietnam, “the blind 17-year-olds stumbling down the hallway, the shattered high-school football player being wheeled to physical therapy...

...In the best of these worksthose of Whitman and Melville, Hemingway, Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Mailer, James Jones-the writers seemed possessed by an almost Euripidean need to demonstrate the eternal tragedy and folly of warfare, its persistence as a mysterious and destructive force dwelling in the very matrix of our nature, its stupidity, its boredom and anguish, and the glorious heroism it sometimes calls forth in spite of itself...

...As Glasser says, in one of the most poignant of his passages, about the “medics”: “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...

...The Red Badge of Literature a review by William Styr6h Why is it that the war in Vietnam has inspired tons of journalism, most of it ordinary, yet such a small amount of imaginative literature...

...After that, they start getting freaky, cutting down on their own water and food so they can carry more medical supplies...

...Perhaps only an ear exquisitely attuned to the banal and senseless, like Glasser’s, could do justice to such a nightmare: certainly many of these pages of callow, dyspeptic dialogue-uttered out of young souls quite trampled down with despair and fatigue-are as authentic and as moving a transcription of the soldier’s true voice as any written in recent memory...

...after a night of grisly hand-tohand murder they are enraged when the cook runs out of cornflakes...

...Glasser is a physician, a former Army major who found himself assigned in 1968 to the U. s. Army hospital at Zama, in Japan...

...In the act of changing, in the process of becoming involved with these boys, Glasser listened to many stories about the horrors of combat in Vietnam...

...For it shows that in the midst of their most brutish activity there is a nobility in men that war itself cannot extinguish...

...Could this be merely the continuation of a negative trend which began during the Korean War-a conflict which also produced little that was notable in the way of fiction, drama, or poetry...

...For up until the past two decades the wars America engaged in proved to be the catalyst for memorable work from some of our finest writers...

...He’ll come...

...I was relieved they were your children, not mine...

...It is through Glasser’s calm, unsentimental revelation of such moments that we are able to shake off some of the horror with which these pages are so often steeped and to see 365 Days as the cleansing and redemptive document it is...

...It is a long leap, both historically and aesthetically, from the clear, frightened, distinctive identity of the hero of Stephen Crane (to whom, incidentally, Ronald J. Glasser's book* is dedicated) to the blurred, undifferentiated, curiously William Styron is author of Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner...

...But if the war has been a war made up of victims and has been denied its true heroes, it has nonetheless had its moments of great sacrifice and courage in the face of incredible suffering...

...6.9 5. one-dimensional 20th-century victims wandering or staggering through the Vietnamese landscape of 365 Days...

...It is in the hospital episodes, however, where the force of Glasser’s professional concern melts with the compassion and sensibility of a gifted storyteller, that we are given scenes of wrenching power...

...or quite simply refusing to leave their units when their time in Nam is over...

...it is like a law of Rature...

...They were grim stories mostly, touched with the cold hand of mortality and having to do with slow or sudden death and unspeakable wounds, yet some of the tales were wildly improbable and overlaid by the graveyard hilarity that inevitably accompanies any chronicle of warfare...