Excerpt: 365 Days, by Ronald Glasser

As a military physician, how you feel about the situation depends on how you look at the war—and, of course, the casualties. Lenhardt, for instance, sees nothing wrong with the war; he says it’s better to fight the communists in Vietnam than in Utah. If you see the patients, broken and shattered at eighteen and nineteen as something necessary in the greater scheme of things, then there are no complaints. But if you see these kids as victims, their suffering faces, burned and scarred, their truncated stumps as personal affronts and lifelong handicaps, then you may take a chance on doing what you think is right.

Peterson and Grieg were two of our general surgeons. Hubart and Lenhardt were the other two. They took call every fourth night, and the nights they were on they took all the admissions that day. If they got really bombed, the others just stepped in with them. During Tet and the time the 101st went back into the Ashau, they all came in.

Peterson was on night call in the hospital when the AOD received an emergency call from the Kanto-based air command at Yokota. Because of an accident on the runway, an air evac from Nam scheduled early that morning would have to be diverted to the Naval air station at Atugi, about two miles from Zama. Atugi’s runway is shorter than Yokota’s, but the pilot had radioed that one of their VSI on board was going sour, and there was some concern whether he would get in country alive. The Air Force and the pilot were willing to take the chance on Atugi, and Atugi agreed. For those flying in Nam, the war doesn’t end with the coasts.

The plane landed a little after midnight. It came in under the eerie light of the airstrip with power on, flaps down, its wings almost forty-five degrees to the winds. Touching down on the very edge of the runway, the pilot dumped the flaps, and with the aircraft settling heavily on the concrete, slammed on his brakes, screeching the plane down the runway. Halfway down the strip the brakes began to smolder. With the plane streaming smoke he pulled it into a tight half-turn, and by applying power, skidded it along the edge of the runway until it came to a stop fifty meters from the end of the strip.

Peterson was waiting with the medic near the edge of the pad. The chopper had barely touched down when the crew chief jerked open the door. The inside of the chopper was covered with blood. In the dim half-light of the landing pad it looked like drying enamel. 

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Peterson and the medic started running onto the pad at the same time. Hunching over to clear the swirling blades, the crew chief helped them into the chopper. The wounded man, his head hanging limply over the edge of the stretcher, was still lashed to the sides of the chopper. Blood welled up from under his half-body cast. Grabbing the top of the plaster cast, Peterson tore it off. A great gush of blood shot up, hit the roof, and then dying, fell away. He put his hand quickly over the wound and pressed down to stop the bleeding; he could feel the flesh slipping away from under his hand. Taking a clamp out of his pocket, he took his hand off the wound and, with the blood swelling up again, stuck the clamp blindly into the jagged hole, worked it up into the groin, and snapped it shut. The bleeding stopped. The chopper, still running, was vibrating around him.

Covered with blood, Peterson yelled to the corpsman to get some O-negative and to call the operating room. Then, with the crew chief, he carried the soldier off the chopper and gave him the first four O-negative units right there on the helipad under the landing lights. By the time they got the patient up to the OR he had some color back.

Peterson operated for two hours. He had to expand the wound, ending up with an incision that ran twelve inches from the front of the patient’s thigh, right under his groin, and back around the sides of the leg. When he had cut out the infection and cleaned what he couldn’t cut, he had a decent view of the area and carefully went after the artery. Dissecting down through the leg’s great vessels and nerves, he found a medium-sized branch of the femoral artery, right above the bone, with a small hole in its anterior surface, and tied it off.

The pathologist from the 406th came in; they had used up all the O-negative blood they had, but it wasn’t enough. Half an hour later, a chopper carrying all the O-negative blood at Kishine came in, and two hours later one came in from Drake. It took ten units of blood, but the leg stayed on.

Ten units of blood, though, can do strange things to you. It dilutes normal clotting factors, so that even while you’re getting blood, you bleed. Before Peterson had tied off the vessel, the trooper began to ooze from the edges of the wound, then from his nose and mouth. While Peterson worked, Cooper, the head of medicine, opened the blood bank and gave the patient units of fibrinogen and fresh frozen plasma. The bleeding was held in check enough for Peterson to finish up and close the wound. He left the patient to Cooper, and since it was too late in the morning to go to sleep, he went to the snack bar and had some coffee. An hour later he began his morning cases.

Related: Battle of Ia Drang: The United States Army’s Brutal Entry into the Vietnam War 

Five days later they moved Robert Kurt from the ICU down to the medical ward, where he became Cooper’s patient. Peterson had checked him every day while he was in Intensive Care and continued to check on his wound even after he had left the unit. Kurt was quite a bit older than the average soldier, much more alert, and certainly more interesting than the usual adolescent corporal who came through the evacuation chain. He told Peterson he’d been drafted when he had dropped out of his first year of graduate school. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to go on, he said, it was just that he was getting tired of going to school and wanted to be free for a while. He had taken a chance, and the Army got him.

Two weeks after the operation, Peterson came by and found that someone had put an 101st Airborne patch on Kurt’s bed frame.

“You’re kidding,” he said, staring at the patch.

“No,” Kurt said, shrugging. “I figured since I was in it, I might as well really be in it. Besides, I wanted to be with guys who knew what they were doing. I didn’t know,” he said, smiling good-naturedly, “they would be goddamn crazy.” 

Peterson nodded, a bit too soberly.

“No,” Kurt said, “don’t get the wrong idea. They saved my life. Any other unit, and I’d be dead now. I mean it. I’m glad I was in the 101st.”

Peterson didn’t look convinced.

“It’s the truth. We get hard-core lifers, E-8’s and E-9’s, captains with direct battlefield commissions, who know fighting. It’s their life. When things get hot, they just step in and take over, tell you to get down and wait, this is what’s happened and that, and this is what to do. They’re calm, and so nobody panics. It’s not some storybook thing.” He looked down at his leg. “I know I’d be dead now, we’d all be.”

Peterson just stood there and let him talk. Apparently Kurt needed to talk, and he let him.

“We got caught—three companies. It must have been an 800-man ambush. They just waited on both sides of us and closed the door on each company—just cut us off from one another. The fire was coming into each company, from all sides, front and back. They really had us. It happens....” He paused, seeing the look on Peterson’s face. “And it’s going to keep happening. The thing is what happens after you get caught—that’s what counts. I was in B Company. If we broke through the gooks in front or in back of us, we’d be running into fire from our own companies, and they were too strong for us to move out to the flanks. We had three artillery batteries of our own working with us, and some of the 1st Air Cav’s. No one panicked. We just dug in, found out where we were, and started calling in blocking fire. We were calling it in fifteen meters from our positions. We’d call in a salvo to keep ’em from coming through and one or two rounds farther out to keep ’em from coming around. All the FO’s and RTO’s from A, B, and C Company were in touch with one another; there wasn’t any time to clear the grids. We were calling in shells on each other, but when an RTO heard another company calling rounds into the grids they were in, he had enough sense to pull in his own unit and call back their location.

“At one time, we were calling rounds ten meters from each other’s positions. That’s tough shooting. No one blew. If we’d panicked...I’d be dead. They had us cold for four hours, but we beat ’em.

“When I got hit, the med evacs couldn’t get in. The colonel just got on the horn and told one of the gunships to come in and get the wounded. I was bleeding like a pig. They came in, firing the whole time, picked us up, took us right in to the TOC CP; they were getting hit too, but the 101st always carries a surgeon along with them at the TOC. The gunship must have blasted half the CP apart to get us in. The Doc clamped my leg and gave me blood and sent me off again.

“That’s the difference, see,” Kurt said. “I mean support, not panic, knowing what you’re doing, good officers and NCO’s. The 4th and 25th Divisions would have been shooting at each other, breaking out into each other’s lines of fire, calling in artillery and gunships all over the place, and there wouldn’t have been a colonel around to give a shit.”

Peterson shook his head.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kurt said. “But once you’ve hit a village where Charlie’s gotten no cooperation, you sort of get a different view of things. They really kill ’em, the kids and the old people. No, I’m not kidding. We hit three like that. They hang the bodies from the main gate. It makes you think after a while.”

“See you tomorrow,” Peterson said politely and left. He’d heard it all before, all the reasons. To him it seemed that those in the government had gotten us into a war and then, finding themselves in a bind, not quite sure of themselves, had simply abandoned the problem and left each person to decide for himself. Well, since the options were out, he would use his. 

The next morning, he took out half of Kurt’s stitches. There was some pus oozing out from the edge of the incision. While Peterson probed the wound, squeezing out the pus pockets, Kurt talked. As Peterson plunged deeper, Kurt gritted his teeth but kept on talking about a trooper who’d frozen on a pull-release bouncing betty.

“But why didn’t you help him?” Peterson interrupted as he put down his probe.

Kurt looked up at him, obviously offended. “How?” he said flatly.

“Get him off it,” Peterson said, as he put a new dressing on the wound.

Kurt shrugged. “If we could have, we would have. Look,” he said seriously, testing his leg, stretching it out a bit more on the bed, “it was a bouncing-betty booby trap. They’re all pull-release: you step off it, and then ‘boom’, the lifting charge goes off and throws the explosive charge up into the air.”

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“Couldn’t you have put something on it and let him step off it?”

“Who you gonna get to do it? The detonator’s no bigger than a tit, and you don’t know how much pressure you need to hold on it to keep it from going off. Some of them are really unstable. You don’t have to step off it to set it off; just shifting your weight can do it. Your foot goes first. You just have to leave them. You have to...”

The wound healed nicely, and toward the end of the week Cooper discharged Kurt from the ward and sent him to the medical holding-company barracks, where he could have his physical therapy three times a day without having to stay in the hospital. Peterson gave him the key to his house, and Kurt spent most of his time there, listening to the stereo, reading the magazines, but mostly just taking it easy. After two weeks, his leg was good enough for him to start some slow jogging.

The surgical evacuations were picking up again. Jogging around the hospital area, Kurt was out early one morning when the first med evac choppers began coming in. As they circled slowly around the rim of the fields he watched them, one after another, noting the Red Crosses painted on their noses as they moved in over him.

Peterson never mentioned the evacs to Kurt. They were mostly frag wounds. Some of the kids came in off the choppers with as much as fifty or sixty pieces of steel scattered through their chests and abdomens, and operations lasted five and six hours.

Coming home late one night, Peterson found Kurt sitting quietly on the bench on the front porch.

“Hard day?” Kurt asked, moving over a bit to make room for Peterson to sit down.

“Yeah, they can get sort of long.”

In the dim light streaming through the open door they could barely make out each other’s features.

“You know,” Kurt said quietly, “the only thing that really bothers me about going back—the only thing that really scares me—are those first few weeks.” He looked at Peterson. “I’ve gotten sloppy here; I mean, I’m not sharp anymore. I was running today, some kid came up behind me, and I didn’t even hear him. You know,” he said, turning back to the dark, “I was out on patrol one night. I heard something, I can’t even remember what, or maybe I didn’t hear anything, maybe I just felt it. I stopped the patrol and got everyone into a defensive perimeter. We just lay down head to head, and the gooks broke out all around us, must have been a company. They were moving right at us. We were in some deep shit. I don’t know why I did it, I did it without thinking. I sent off a round. The echoes screwed ’em up and they moved off again in another direction.” Kurt sounded very concerned. “I don’t know if I could do it anymore—takes a while to get back into things.” He turned to Peterson again. “They would have killed us...I’d be dead now....”

The next day, Kurt began pushing himself. In physical therapy they had been using weights on his leg. It was feeling better. He started with short wind sprints and timed miles. His leg kept improving.

Two days after he began sprinting, fifty-eight evacs came in, mostly from the 101st. They had gone back into the Ashau again. Kurt heard about it at lunch, and for the first time since he’d left the ward, he went to the admissions section to see who’d come in. All of them had been badly shot up. Some were already in the OR. A few had been taken right to the Burn Ward; the rest were on the wards.

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“You really missed something,” one of the men said.

“Yeah?” Kurt said, moving closer to the bed. A corps-man hurried past him.

“Grade’s dead. Got drilled right through the head.”

Kurt didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

“It was some shit. We couldn’t see ’em. They came in behind us, too. Dusty got hit by an RPD, blew him apart. We couldn’t even find one of his arms.”

“Me?” another friend said, looking down at his own shattered arms. “You’re kidding, man. I’m out of it. Worry about yourself.”

That night Kurt called Peterson in his office and asked if he could have a sleeping pill. Peterson told him to come by and see him. When Kurt showed up a little past nine, he found Peterson working over his charts.

“Sorry to bother you, doctor,” he said apologetically.

“Sit down, sit down,” Peterson said, eyeing him keenly. “What’s the trouble?”

Kurt remained standing in the middle of the room, tense and withdrawn. “I guess the problem,” he said, “the problem is that I know what it’s like now. Second times...” He fumbled nervously in his pocket for a cigarette. “And getting hit...well, you know.”

Peterson pointed to the bottle of pills sitting on the edge of his desk.

“Thanks,” Kurt said, picking up the bottle.

“Why are you going back?”

Kurt shook out a couple of pills.

“You haven’t answered.”

Kurt shrugged. “I have to.”

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