(Reviewed by Christopher J. Lynch)
#CommissionsEarned
Where Have You Been Bobby Marr? is the memoir of Bobby Marr, a young man who left the US to fight in Viet Nam as a whole man, but came back in pieces, physically and mentally. And while all the king’s horses and all the king’s men tried to put him back together, he was never quite whole again.
The book is an all too familiar story of the horrors of Viet Nam and what it can do to destroy the hearts and minds of those who experienced it. And while we get to know Bobby Marr, we are never fully able to understand what it is like to be Bobby Marr. This is no fault of the author, as a reader can no more understand what it is like to experience the horrors of war than it would be to understand childbirth without having lived through it yourself.
We follow the arc of Bob Marr’s life, from his early life growing up in Texas, to the jungles of Viet Nam, to the brutal confines of a Texas prison, to freedom, and to the rinse and repeat cycle of incarceration again.
The book bogs down and becomes repetitive in places, but I stuck with it and I am glad I did. Costa is an excellent writer and he pulls no punches, just like his subject. I would recommend this book to not only those who, like Bobby Marr, have experienced war and had their lives turned upside down, to those who have never – and will never, go into battle, as a cautionary tale of the high price of sending our children off to fight.
