Vietnam War Short Stories (iv) ‘365 Days': Amedical officer in Japan treating wounded American soldiers, Ronald J. Glasser chose his title from the wounded men's preoccupation with the number 365-the number of days in a Vietnam tour of duty. The stories deal with the sense of futility expressed by dying and wounded young men. “The stories I have tried to tell here are true,” says Glasser in his preface. “Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to have disbelieved 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.” Reviewing the work in The Washington Monthly, William Styron, described 365 Days as "A moving account about tremendous courage and often immeasurable suffering...; a valuable and redemptive work." Another reviewer, Robert Armstrong of Minneapolis Tribune, described it as "Chilling, shocking, extremely moving, heartrending... There is no other way to start thinking or reading about 365 Days." "Its quiet eloquence, its factual precision, its emotional restraint...make it a book of great emotional impact", said Thomas Lask of The New York Times. Newsweek magazine praised the work as “The most convincing, most moving account about what it was like to be an American soldier in Vietnam.” ‘Amazing But True Stories' Very Crazy, G.I.: Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War by Kregg P. J. Jorgenson is a compelling, highly unusual collection of amazing but true stories in which US soldiers reveal fantastic, almost unbelievable events that occurred in places ranging from the deadly Central Highlands to the Cong-infested Mekong Delta. In the Army Now is another entry from the chronicler of REMF life, David A. Willson. This one is a sort of prequel to the other two books he had written. Watch with awe and dread as the unnamed narrator slides from reality into a surreal nightmare that seems to envelop everything around him. There isn't any Vietnam action in this book, since it chronicles the early Army days of the anonymous narrator, from basic training to advanced individual training (AIT) in Indiana, but the threads that will become major narratives in both “The REMF Diary” and “The REMF Returns” are quite visible here. According to Publishers Weekly, “The REMF Diary” is a plotless, characterless debut, which reads as memoir loosely disguised as fiction, is related by a nameless soldier, a 24-year-old self-described loser "a piece of jetsam on the sea of life" with a menial desk job in Vietnam. The often self-deprecating narrator is also funny, intelligent and cynical."
