5.0 out of 5 stars "Harrowing and Raw Vietnam Novel

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2021

Verified Purchase Bullets and Bandages: Bond of Brothers by Robert J Saniscalchi

Here is a riveting war novel, focused on the American medics of the Vietnam War, executed in a superb fashion and woven from the very yarn of wartime trauma and emotion. This book is of a piece with Tim O'Brien's celebrated treatments of Vietnam, or on the basis of the taut, spare diction, perhaps the better analogue is Hemingway's Spanish correspondence or going back even further, the aching honesty and directness of The Red Badge of Courage. Emotions run high, and parts are not easy to read, but this is clearly the intention of the author, and it is achieved masterfully. It has always struck me as strange that modern American wars have failed to produce the literature of, say, World War I (the sublime Wilfred Owen et al.) or the Spanish Civil War (Garcia Lorca and of course Papa Hemingway); but I suppose our gifted war writers—or this one at least—have simply redirected their considerable talents to the wars of the past. In any event, war literature will always have a place in the English canon, and this book is an admirable contribution to that honorable tradition.