Dr. Ronald J. Glasser, an army physician who wrote the acclaimed book 365 Days, a searing tale of the Vietnam War through the words of soldiers wounded in Vietnam, died in St. Louis Park on August 26. rice field. Minn: He was 83 years old.
His death at the Minnesota Veterans Home was confirmed by his partner and ex-wife Joy Glasser, who said the cause was complications of dementia.
Dr. Glasser was against the war when he was drafted in August 1968.
He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan. This hospital received 6,000 to 8,000 wounded soldiers each month, flown in from the battlefields of Vietnam during his 365 days of service, and was one of his four fanatical military hospitals in Japan. It’s one.
Dr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat military families in Japan. However, he writes:
365 Days, published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Awards. Playwright David Mamet praised it in The Wall Street Journal, saying, “Despite being the best book to come out of Vietnam, the author wasn’t stationed there.”
Dr. Glasser explained in “365 Days” that he never intended to be a writer, but felt compelled to document what he saw and heard in the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, a novel that vividly depicts the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.
“I didn’t start writing for months, but still, just to convey what I saw and was told. Perhaps to all the kids without doctrine or controversy explaining what they do.” I may not be able to explain myself,” Dr. Glasser wrote.
“As for me,” he continued.
Those likely to survive were “worried about how to explain the missing leg or weakness in the right arm. Will they embarrass the family? At a party where the man was still fine, they Can you get it done?
“Above all, it’s about emphasizing their concern,” he continued.
He quoted an unsourced passage that a fellow doctor had seized upon to understand the state of mind of a dying patient as he tried to escort the body of his mortally wounded brother home.
“These mature young men who have worked, trained and strived to achieve self-confidence and self-sufficiency now know what they can do and what they can enjoy, and suddenly everything is coming to an end,” said the text. “They are ready to live. For them, death is a brutal and personal attack, an unforgivable insult, an unacceptable event.”
Lt. Gen. HR McMaster, former national security adviser in the Trump administration and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, described Dr. Glasser in an email as “the most humane man I’ve ever met.” “One of the people.” His distinguishing characteristics are “his account of war and his experience of those who fought, sacrificed, and suffered” and his “empathy for those whom he treated and whom he listened to.” Including fellow doctors and nurses.
Novelist William Styron, writing for The Washington Monthly, called “365 Days” a “moving account of tremendous courage and often unfathomable suffering.”
Thomas Lask, reviewing 365 Days for The New York Times, wrote, “The quiet eloquence, factual accuracy, and emotional restraint woven into the horror and pain of the subject matter make for a book of great emotional impact.” It is becoming.
“War is the cause and excuse for this book,” Rusk continued.
Lewis H. Lapham, who was the editor of Harper’s Magazine when it excerpted “365 Days,” said in a telephone interview that Dr. Glasser “like Walt Whitman, like his experience as a nurse in the Civil War, The wounded needed love.”
The book was banned in some public libraries because it liberally quoted soldiers’ profanity. Dr. Glasser relented.
“The truth I saw was that common language had failed,” he testified in a lawsuit challenging the ban. “
Ronald Joel Glasser was born May 31, 1939 in Chicago to delicatessen owners Sidney and Anne (Tiemann) Glasser.
After earning a bachelor’s degree and a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1965, he attended a fellowship in pediatric nephrology at the University of Minnesota.
Her marriage to Dr. Janis Carol Amatsuzio ended in divorce. She married Joy Ann Itoman in 2008. They legally divorced in 2018 when he was admitted to a veteran’s home with dementia. But she said, “For personal reasons, including caring for his late memories, I was his wife and partner until the end of his life.
He also has three stepchildren, Rachel, Benjamin, and Aaron Silverman.
Dr. Glasser went on to write several other books, including Ward 402 (1973). “The Body Is the Hero” (1976), on the resilience of the body. “Another War, Another Peace” (1985), a novel about a doctor during the Vietnam War. “Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds (2011)”, which investigated military medicine.
In Ward 402, he is taught to treat body parts rather than people, treating disease and ignoring patients as doctors pursue heroic measures to keep terminally ill patients alive. I investigated whether
“With my heart and lungs and kidneys ready, I was facing the whole human being,” he wrote. Suddenly, human concerns arose: grief, heartache, personal problems, finances, mistrust, fear, and even anger.”