GLASSER : 365 days (fülszöveg)
"There was a time the Army hospitals in Japan were averaging six to eight thousand patients a month," writes Dr. Glasser. "There were days and some times weeks when the choppers never stopped coming in, and when they couldn't fly the Army brought the casualties overland from the Air Force bases in ambulance buses. The surgeons seemed ready for the emergency, and even the internists, but I had been sent to Japan as a pediatrician to serve the children of the dependent military population there. I soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those med evac choppers were only children themselves....
"Zama, where I was assigned in September, 1968, was an excellent hospital. Literally thousands of boys were saved. But the effort had its price; after a while it all began to seem so natural, even the blind seventeen-year-olds stumbling down the hallway, or the shattered high school football player being wheeled to physical therapy. I can remember stepping out of the pediatric clinic into a corridor filled with forty to fifty litter cases, walking past them and joking when I could, but not feeling particularly in volved. At first, when it was all new, I was glad I didn't know them; I was relieved they were your children not mine. After a while, I changed. These kids were so brave, they endured so much, were so uncomplaining, you couldn't help but feel proud of them. I can remember only one boy who would not stop screaming.
"I talked to the kids in the beginning just to have something to say and to get them talking. Later I came to realize they were all saying the same things – without quite saying them. They were worried, every one of them, not about the big things, not about survival, but how they would explain away their lost legs or the weakness in their right arms. Would they embarrass their families? Would they be able to make it at parties with guys who were still whole? Could they go to the beach and would their scars darken in the sun and offend the girls? Would they be able to get special cars? Above all, and underlining all their cares, would anybody love them when they got back?
"The stories I have tried to tell are true. Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest were from the boys I met. I would have liked to disbelieve some of them, and at first I did, but I was there long enough to hear the same stories again and again, and then to see part of it myself."
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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