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Bullets and Bandages
By Robert Sanischalchi
ISBN-10: 1-58982-247-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-58982-247-4
Robert Sanischalchi’s book Bullets and Bandages is the story of Rob Marrino, a young man who volunteered for the US Army during the Vietnam War. As the battlefield genre goes, so does Bullets and Bandages.
Young recruit Marrino becomes a medic and is quickly shipped over to Vietnam, does his time, finds his girl (an American lass from New Jersey at that) and comes back home. Early in the story Rob Marrino, known as “Doc” to the soldiers in his unit, makes friends with Corporal Clarence Green, a more experienced soldier who is on his second tour to Vietnam. Though Doc is a white guy from New Jersey and Green is a black man from Alabama, their different backgrounds do not keep them from becoming fast friends and steady partners. They fight their way through the next 80% of the book with heavy casualties on both sides of the battles. Friends and comrades are peeled away one by one through enemy fire, land mines and even a poisonous snake. Eventually Marrino’s number is finally called and he gets his ticket home.
If there were any issues with this book then I guess they would be a few things that I felt a bit out of place. For instance, the author mention’s Clarence Green praying with a rosary, which I was a bit uncomfortable with in the character’s believability. I grew up in the South and know that with the exception of Louisiana, rural Southern African Americans who are Catholics and would own a rosary would be extremely rare. Had the character been a little more developed and we could have had a reason for the rosary – given him by a chaplain, taken from a lost comrade or even that Green was that very anomaly – a rural black Catholic. Also, there was a point in the story where the author mentions that the French were fighting the VC at one point when that was not the case. The French fought the Viet Minh, who were not only communist but also had several nationalists groups within the group. And in another scene Robert Sanischalchi introduces the reader to a “General Mooreland” and even though this might not be a sketching of the actual General Westmoreland it led me to wonder about the choice of the character’s name.
But these points are actually nit picky meanderings that don’t get in the way of action, if that is what you are looking for. And if that is what you are looking for Bullets and Bandages is full of it! You will find the pace of this book in quick step with collisions and life-or-death situations from cover to cover. Oh, and Corporal Marrino goes through a hell of a lot of morphine in this book. (On the wounded, that is to say…!)
Having studied Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and having lived in Vietnam for the better part of fifteen years, in both Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and in Hanoi, I couldn’t wait to get started into this book. According to Robert Sanischalchi much of the story line is based around his own brothers’ war stories as he was too young to have served in Vietnam. He dedicates his work to the Vietnam veterans and from there goes on to paint a picture of the unsung combat soldier. I would hope that the veterans will read Robert’s book and appreciate his work.
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