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

ISBN-13:	9780982546277
Publisher:	Serving House Books
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.58(d)

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

In this debut story collection--the first by a woman who served in Vietnam-- Susan O'Neill offers a remarkable, unprecedented glimpse into the war from a female perspective. All the nurses who served there shared a common bond: to attend to the wounded. While men were sent to protect America's interests at any cost, nurses were trained to save the lives of anyone, soldier or citizen, ally or enemy, who was brought through the hospital doors. It was an important distinction in a place where killing was sometimes the only objective. And since they were so vastly outnumbered, women were both revered and sexually craved.

For these women and the men among whom they worked and lived a common defense against the awful onslaught of dead and dying, wounded and maimed, was a feigned indifference, the irony of the helpless. "Don't mean nothing" became their mantra, a small bunker in the real war--the war against total mental breakdown.

Powerful, provocative, and often wonderfully funny, each of these tales offers new and profound insight into how the war in Vietnam forever changed the lives of everyone who served there. "Broken Stone" is an astute look at the relinquishing of faith and the sacredness of sex. The tremendously touching "Butch" is a story of love, loss, and the native casualties of war. And the darkly hilarious "Monkey on Our Backs" follows the escapades of a much-maligned and detested pet primate who causes one Lieutenant so much grief that she asks a Marine to kill it. But like the cat that came back, the monkey remains--a reminder that taming a jungle is an exercise in futility.

A moving contribution by a woman to the literature of Vietnam, Don't Mean Nothing is eye-opening and unforgettable. Here is a book that enlarges our understanding of the American experience in Vietnam.

BALLANTINE AND UMASS PRESS

With remarkable restraint and uncommon poignancy, O'Neill ... delivers assertions of humanity from the depths of a barbarous war.

Boston Magazine

This collection of short stories is unique in its representation of a group from whom we rarely hear in the literature of the Vietnam War:
the women who were sent there. Of course, these are not stories of combat, since at that time women weren't involved in the battlefield.
But they were in nurses' uniforms and they were USO aides, and in other ways, too, they served in the war. Consequently, O'Neill's stories are of people who fight their battles outside the combat zone:
a hapless grunt falls from the height of seven feet and now doesn't feel anything from the waist down, a nurse determines the future of her out-of-wedlock child, and another nurse finds both the privileges and the perils of rank. Don't mean nothing is actually a term that, along with other expressions, had meaning to those who were "in country" in Vietnam. That the war haunted so many who participated in it is shown by the fact that O'Neill waited 30 years to give voice to her feelings in these stories.--(Chamberlain, Marlene) (This text refers to the Hardcover edition)

ALA