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When brotherhood became an oath

Jerry Glazer
1 min readJan 18, 2023

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How do you pick up the threads of an old life? But there was no going back. The past had evaporated as so much water under a blazing sun. And the future became a challenging desert of impossible confrontations.

None more than my returning brothers wanted to become productive members of society. But the emotionally dead became barred from entering the portal to civilian life.

We could not know that our ability to survive the dreadful war had made us unfit amid what was once our stomping grounds. We were angered easily and suffered night terrors. We felt alienated and unappreciated by an uncaring public.

We thought we were the same people who stepped foot in the Vietnam war, but unfortunately, PTSD slipped into our lives. The overwhelming anxiety of the battlefields followed us home. And this made integration into our former existence difficult, if not impossible. And yet, we were all American heroes and patriots.

Jerry Glazer — Vietnam Uncensored

Click here to the first chapter of Vietnam Uncensored at vietnamjerry.com, get the weekly newsletter, and listen to the NPR radio broadcast of Cpl. Cummings’s ghost story.

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Jerry Glazer
Jerry Glazer

Written by Jerry Glazer

Jerry Glazer is an author of short stories, essays and novels. The 1st chapter of his Vietnam memoir can be read for free at www.vietnamjerry.com

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