Table Of ContentBROKEN BODIES/SHATTERED MINDS
A Medical Odyssey from Vietnam to Afghanistan
BROKEN BODIES/SHATTERED MINDS
A Medical Odyssey from Vietnam to Afghanistan
Ronald J. Glasser M.D.
Former Major, United States Army Medical Corp
Copyright © 2011 by Ronald Glasser M.D.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written consent from
the History Publishing Company.
Published in the United States by History Publishing Company LLC
Palisades, NY 10964
www.historypublishingco.com
SAN: 850-5942
Glasser, Ronald J.
Broken bodies/shattered minds : a medical odyssey from Vietnam to
Afghanistan/Ronald J. Glasser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN 2011927256
ISBN-13: 9781933909486
ISBN-10: 1933909471
ISBN-13: 9781933909486 (e-book) ISBN-10: 193390948X (e-
book) 1. Soldiers--Wounds and injuries--United States. 2. Soldiers--Health and
hygiene--United States. 3. Soldiers--Mental health--United States. 4. United
States--Armed Forces--Medical care. 5. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Health
aspects. 6. Afghan War, 2001---Health aspects. I. Title.
UH215.G53 2011 355.3’45’0973
QBI11-600091
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
In admiration and respect for Dr. Michael McCue, arguably one of the finest
neurosurgeons in America, who cares for the wounded of Iraq and Afghanistan
through the Department of Defense Heroes Program and who edited these pages
for content and accuracy—paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence—
with a surgeon’s scalpel.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Forty Years of War
The Late Great 1968/Welcome to the Army
Zama/The Wounded
The Medics/Then and Now
America’s Wars/An Autopsy Report
Med-evacs and Gunships/A Short and Deadly Technical History
The Changing Face of Military Medicine
Teleconferencing/More Than Six Degrees of Separation
All the Toms/Iraq 2004
Shell Shock/The Shattering of Minds
The Wars Within
Multiple Deployments/Brains at Risk
The Bleeding Wars
IEDs/Blasts that Kill and Maim
Traumatic Brain Injuries/PTSD/The Invisible Wounds
All the Jakes/Adrift in Afghanistan/2010
That Deadly Sense of Privilege
All the Carries and Priscillas
Bullets of Grief/A Prescription for Prevention
“Is My Junk All Together?”
Chronicles/Reduxing Vietnam
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References and Recommended Reading
Index
FOREWORD
In a country that over the last forty years has grown more distant, becoming less
involved and less concerned about its military, Dr. Glasser’s newest book is both
a cautionary tale as well as a powerful redemptive work. Expertly crafted, there
are sections of this book that could be used by active duty personnel to teach
past military history—both successes and failures—as well as become a primer
on current strategy and tactics, including the liturgy of the ever-changing,
evermore-deadly, and evermore-challenging wounds of war.
The connections with our past wars, particularly between Vietnam and our
current wars, are valid on factual grounds. We never had enough troops in
Vietnam and we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan. We never sealed the
borders in Vietnam and we cannot seal the borders in Afghanistan. We never had
a real exit strategy in Vietnam and we clearly do not have an exit strategy of any
merit or validity for Afghanistan. We trained a South Vietnamese Army that
lasted a year. The Iraqi Army will last a few months, the Afghan Army a few
weeks.
Dr. Glasser writes with a quiet elegance, factual precision, and emotional
restraint that make this a book of great power and greater substance. It will
enlighten, amaze, and trouble you—and it is a book America needs now, more
than ever.
—Lt. General Harold G. Moore, U.S. Army (Retired)
1.
FORTY YEARS OF WAR
Why write anything? For those who aren’t there, it’s like it isn’t happening, and
for those who are, it’s like it doesn’t count. But there have been 1.9 million
soldiers and marines deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade, with
over 5,000 killed, some 300,000 wounded, another 250,000 diagnosed with
PTSD and over 300,000 with traumatic brain or concussive central nervous
system injuries, along with amputees approaching levels not seen since our Civil
War. These are by any measurement or comparison truly enormous numbers.
You’d think that so many wounded, if not dead, would be hard to ignore. But
they are.
Yet, these numbers do count, not only to the families of those killed and
wounded, but also to the nation. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have become a 3
trillion dollar war that we can continue to ignore or simply write off. There will
be both a moral and economic reckoning before these wars are over and we all
finally do go home. And that is what this book is about, that reckoning—the
physical, mental, and psychological costs of these wars, those real and those
invisible wounds, the anguish and persistent suffering. Unlike all our other wars,
the real legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan is not the graveyard but the orthopedics
ward, the neurosurgical unit, and the psychiatric outpatient department.
This is a book about forty years of war. It is written from the bottom up rather
than from the top down. These are the stories of the soldiers and the marines
who actually did and still do make the fight, and those doctors, nurses, and
medics who are there when they die and then simply turn around and go on to try
to save those who have somehow managed to survive. It is not a book of
memoirs or even remembrances, nor is it a book of narrative non-fiction; these
stories are no more and no less than the truth. Everything in this book happened.
All the numbers and facts are real.
But war is a brutal business. So in places I’ve changed unit designations in
the hopes of protecting those we have once again sent out to the Edge of
Empires. In “All the Toms” and “All the Jakes,” the real Tom and Jake asked me
not to use their names. I interviewed both a number of times. They not only
survived their deployments, they survived intact. Tom is now in Special Forces
and Jake will soon be leaving the Marines.
Yet, because of the confusion caused by the Army’s and Marine’s multiple
deployments, I merged Tom’s and Jake’s stories with those battles and firefights
they had heard about or those fought by other squads or platoons in their
company, regiment, or brigade in order to give a clearer understanding of a
history that had so quickly overtaken both the strategists as well as those making
the fight. What is unchanging and unchangeable is that those things Tom and
Jake saw and experienced were exactly the same things that were seen and
experienced by every soldier and marine I talked to or interviewed. There is a
terrible democracy to war.
The wounds though, those mangled arms and lost legs, the burns and
penetrating head wounds, the transected spinal cords, the grief and the
depression, the traumatic brain injuries, the blindness and the pain, all speak for
themselves. As for the dead, we still have our poets:
You think their dying is the worst thing that can happen.
Then they stay dead.
Description:Told in the narrative, and from personal experience, author traces changing nature of warfare from jungles of Vietnam to streets and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan and the physical and psychological damage of wounds to troops in U.S. Army and Marine Corps. And what it has come to realize. The eff
