A battlefield hospital is like the sucking drain of a war. Sooner or later, everything come through there. Glasser was a doctor at Zama, a hospital in Japan that treated those injured in Vietnam too badly to be patched up in country, and not injured enough to die. The hospitals saw something like 8000 patients a month, closer to 11000 during the Tet Offensive.

But this isn't really Glasser's story, it's the stories of the men he treated, and how they wound up in his hospital. The overall feel is a lot like Michael Herr's Dispatches, though this book came out sooner, in 1971 while the war was still a going concern. Glasser has a fair amount of literary talent, but part of me wishes this had been more focused on his own world of the wards. Perhaps the second greatest illusion of war (after the idea that they can be really be won), is that death, if it comes, and it's not coming for you, is going to be clean, honorable, even cool. Except that by the odds, you're more likely to be shattered, blasted, burned, to suffer in agony for hours or days or years, before wounds finally do you in. The book only reaches that authenticity in the last story, about a severely burned soldier and the doctor who cares for him.