Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing Where Have You Been, Bobby Marr? by Morris Dalla Costa. For this review, I received an ARC by the author in exchange for an honest review. This book was published on August 30, 2021.
I will begin this review with a confession. If I hadn’t been asked to review this book, I probably wouldn’t have read it. And, truth be told, I would have been at the losing end of that bargain. Looks are deceiving and this book is a perfect example of that. I admit that I have bought books before solely because of their gorgeous cover (who hasn’t?) and have ended up regretting my impulsive buy upon reading them later because the content of those books was not worth the expense. This book, however, is the complete opposite. I am not a big fan of books that have people on the cover (frankly speaking) and the title itself doesn’t give you a whole lot to go by in figuring out what this book is about. So it is not a book that I would pick up on first sight.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
More truer words have never been said. Quite literally.
Who is Bobby Marr?
Bobby Marr is not a famous person or someone who quickly comes to mind when you say his name. He is just your average regular guy who graduated from high school in the late 1960s like thousands of other 18 year olds in the country. And ironically, that is what is so special about him. He’s no one we know but, at the same time, he is. He is all of us, because all of us go through that crux in our lives after high school or college where we ask ourselves, “Okay, now what?” And the decisions we make from there shape our entire adult lives.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear — Ambrose Redmoon.
At this point in Bobby’s life, the United States was drafting young men for the Vietnam War. And he was drafted and later on deployed to Vietnam as an army medic. But Bobby’s (and the author’s very well written) account of the war is not like those they tell us in movies or novels. There’s nothing glamorous or glorious about war. Wars are horrific, and Bobby’s story never lets you forget that. He, like every other soldier around him, lived in constant fear of his life knowing that if he didn’t die one day, he would probably die the next. Wars are violence, gore, and death. Constant death. And the author doesn’t shy away from describing the reality of that. He doesn’t paint it pretty, and that is one of the most important things about this book, in my opinion. When we watch a movie or read a book about war, we usually follow a character that stands out. Not so here. Bobby was a medic, trying to patch up and save the lives of the men in his unit, and he went where he was told. But what he experienced had devastating consequences to his physical well-being and mental health. And that is one of the reasons why I think this book is more than meets the eye. It tries to help people understand what Vietnam veterans actually went through during the war, a heavily misunderstood war altogether, and how damaging it was for the psyche and mental health of its combatants.
Depression and PTSD are serious illnesses. And that is the other enemy Vietnam veterans had to fight against once they came back home. That and the cruelty of their fellow citizens. Cruel people don’t usually see the damage they cause with their comments and denigrating looks, but cruelty is one of the most devastating offenders for mental health, and I couldn’t help but relate to Bobby while I was reading his story. I’ve never been to war and he and I are probably complete opposites. We never would’ve gotten along in high school but, just like him, I have been a victim of cruelty too due to a speech impairment. It is not disabling and I in no way wish to compare my impairment to war injuries but nonetheless I think that cruelty shouldn’t be disregarded so offhandedly either. It can be seriously damaging.
The importance of mental health and the acknowledgement that these diseases are just as serious as diabetes and AIDS is even more on the foreground today due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic than it was fifty years ago but that doesn’t mean that mental health was any less important in 1968 than it is now. And this book is a good reminder that diseases such as these can also become pandemics, and perhaps are, because millions of people suffer from them and have done so for more time than COVID-19 since it spread like wildfire in 2020.
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven — John Milton.
This book also aroused my interest in reading more about the Vietnam War. Of course I’ve heard about the Vietnam War before, but there is not much (if anything) that I know about it, and this book got me looking into other books that talk about it. And books that make you want to read more and arouse your interest in a specific topic are, in my opinion, good books. Finally, I want to say something about the writing. This book is easy to read, and the writing clear and precise. I appreciated that. It allowed me to immerse myself completely in Bobby’s life story without worrying that the writing style was going to jar me completely out of it. I liked that.
I gave this book an I Really Liked It (equivalent to 4 stars in Goodreads) rating.
