Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A Medical Odyssey from Vietnam to Afghanistan

280 Pages·2011·1.73 MB·English

by  Ronald Glasser M.D.

BROKEN 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.
C
ONTENTS
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
F
OREWORD
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, ever-more-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.
F Y W
ORTY EARS OF AR
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.
2.
T L G 1968/W A
HE ATE REAT ELCOME TO THE RMY
During the decade of the Vietnam War, the Selective Service System swept up some
20,000 draftees every month! Over 4 million troops were sent to Southeast Asia to
fight, to die, and be wounded in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Whatever has been
written or said about Vietnam, there was a regular harvesting of young men and little
else before it was over.
By the time I was drafted in the summer of 1968—the year that I completed my
medical specialty training and ended my military deferment—the Army was not only
running down, but running out of virtually everything, including physicians. The chief
of the county hospital where I had finished my training as a pediatrician wanted me to
stay on at the hospital to care for the pediatric patients of the county’s indigent
population. He actually sent a letter to the Pentagon, through our Senator, asking for an
additional two-year deferment for me.
The next week, he received a certified letter from the Pentagon that said right up
front, “Absolutely not … in case you haven’t noticed we have a war going on and every
citizen, including every physician, is expected to do his duty.” As it turned out, that
wasn’t quite everybody.
The 101st Airborne, The 82nd, The First Air Cav, The 25th Division, The 9th, The
Americal, and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, because of deferments given for being in
school, in the National Guard, having asthma, having a bad back, being flat-footed,
almost anything that a family could get a doctor to document, were made up of
eighteen- and nineteen-year-old blacks from Cleveland, Detroit, and Cincinnati,
Hispanics from East Texas, and poor southern whites. Virtually every Field, Company,
and General Grade Officer was from a small town of less than 7,000.
There were few soldiers in Vietnam from families of wealth, power, prestige, or
privilege. There was actually a time in early 1969 when the Marines (that had been
since their beginnings a volunteer outfit), because of deaths and injuries, were running
out of trigger-pullers—and sergeants in induction centers across the country would walk
down the line of new draftees and every third one, tap them on the shoulder and say
“Marine” … “Marine” … “Marine.” At the time, that was pretty close to a death
sentence and the draftees knew it. There were some, though, who viewed the military as
a stepping-stone to a political career. Again, they were mostly from the South—and
there weren’t very many of those.
In early 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lowered the IQ standards for
induction into the military, giving the Army over the next three years an additional