Martin J. Glennon, who serves as the chaplain for Vietnam Veterans of America’s Chapter 905 in Porter County, Indiana, put in a 1969-70 tour of duty as a medic in Vietnam for six months in the field with the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd/506th Infantry and later at the Camp Evans medical evacuation hospital unit, C Company, 326th Medical.
Glennon saw more than his share of the war’s carnage, and it affected him deeply. When he came home, Glennon writes in his memoir, A Decisive Battle at Firebase Ripcord: A Medic’s Story (98 pp., $5, paper), “I was not the same man who had touched down in the Republic of Vietnam a year earlier. The innocence of youth had been lost somewhere in the jungles of Nam.
“I was returning, now a different man: not just a man who had been forced to grow up before his time or a man changed by the sobering realities of war, but too, a man who had been profoundly changed by what I experienced on the July morning when I received Christ into my life.”
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—Marc Leepson