Don't Mean Nothing

by Susan O'neill

Overview

In this debut fiction collection--the first by a nurse who served in Viet Nam--Susan O'Neill offers a glimpse into the war from a female perspective. These stories are about women, and men, who served in three combat hospitals in 1969 and 1970. They are interconnected, peopled by one-time "stars" and recurring characters, and they deal both with both the minutia of everyday life in wartime, and grander, more over-reaching themes--love and loss, faith and despair, morality, futility, military idiosyncrasy, magic, and the cost to the soul of a year in war's very particular hell. The stories are purely fictional, yet based loosely on the author's experiences, and they are laced as liberally with black humor as with pathos. 

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011853692
Publisher:	Serving House Books
Publication date:	10/12/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	202 KB

About the Author

Susan O'Neill spent a year as an Army nurse in Viet Nam during the war. This is her first book. She has published short fiction and non-fiction in an eclectic variety of magazines, newspapers, anthologies, internet and audio media, and co-edits Vestal Review, a literary magazine for "Flash" fiction. She lives in Brooklyn. Http://susanoneill.us .

Editorial Reviews

O'Neill served as an operating-room nurse in Vietnam from the spring of 1969 till early summer 1970. At the time, her anger and the need to forget kept her from writing about her experience. Now in middle age, she has the perspective to see the situation more clearly and offers a stark, often darkly humorous picture of her Vietnam War. Her stories are fictional accounts of her recollections from three very different hospitals in which she served. O'Neill reminds readers that while soldiers suffe

Carol DeAngelo

It's a pleasure when a new writer has something to say and says it well. Former army nurse O'Neill's debut story collection captures the physical and psychological tensions of her 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam with refreshing maturity and a profound sense of compassion. The title, she explains in her penetratingly honest introduction, is "an all-purpose underdog rallying cry a sarcastic admixture of `cool,' comedy, irony, agony, bitterness, frustration, resignation, and despair." It addresses

assigned reviewer