Customer Reviews

Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

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Susan O'Neill wrote this collection of stories long after her tour in Vietnam. The author served in Vietnam as a nurse from 1969-70. Since I met her at a book reading at the Library of Congress, I got the straight dope on this book.

O'Neill decided to write a collection of stories similar to Tim O'Brien. It would be a collection of different stories that would reflect her tour, written chronologically. What is rather clever is that the author broke the book down into three parts. Each part regards where she served: Phu Bai, Chu Lai, and Cu Chi.

The fact is these stories just can't be faked. The first story,"The Boy From Montana," is basically an initiation. You learn the reason not to get too close to wounded soldiers. Just how do you cope, as a nurse, with seeing young men die every day? In this story, there was no conversation per se, as the wounded man made only one reply to a question. If you take this story in combination with "Prometheus Burned," you really understand the psychological pain nurses suffered by having the soldiers die literally in their arms.

The fun part was the recurring character of SP4 Scully, the devious company clerk. The protaganist, in "The Exorcism," is harassed by a ghost. The author takes you back to Vietnam with her ridiculous discussions with the young female Catholic Vietnamese girl who tries to help her get rid of the ghost. Only Scully can swing the deal--at the cost of her prized pizza mixes. Scully surfaces a couple of more times but the end, when he gives her a "big hand" for her tour, is priceless.

Other reviewers have written about the monkey, starting in "Monkey on our Backs." These things really were a menace. Some guys thought they were just so cute, getting them loaded, then watching them hop around throwing excrement at us. Yeah, real fun. The only "trained monkey" I remember was in the 2nd Bn, 5th Cav, when I went to visit a friend. I wasn't the only one who wanted to kill the monkey that day. (I am a cat person anyway.)

What is sad is that this book suffered from bad timing. It was released around 9-11, which meant nobody was paying attention to it. When the author got a call from England, her "good luck" held out and the Queen Mum died during O'Neill's book tour. So...we all have to buy this book in order to override the bad mojo of the author.

Susan O'Neill does a masterful job of capturing the feelings we nurses worked hard to suppress in Vietnam. Like Tim O'Brien, she does it with pure poetry. It's the closest anyone has come to conveying the gut feeling of being at a hospital in-country.Thank you, Sue!

"Don't Mean Nothing" is a wonderful book. Susan O'Neill has a rare ability to bring the reader's heart to their throat just when she's lowered their defences with a good laugh. The book is full of laughter - and tears. There's the breathtaking "The Boy from Montana," a young nurse's first operating room experience, and the beautiful, moving "One Positive Thing," about a nurse's ambivalence over her unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. Every person who went to Vietnam came back changed, and every story in this book shows us how. These are compelling stories, and I recommend them highly.

I live in Indonesia (where I grew up), and do most of my reading during fairly frequent and extended surf safaris on boats. I ordered DON'T MEAN NOTHING from Amazon, and when it arrived, I read the first couple stories and then forced myself to put the book away, saving it for precious boat-time reading material. I just got back from my latest trip, and I tell you, I read two stories a day, taking them like a illicit drug. And like an addict, when the book came to end, I was severely wishing there were another dozen to read.

Anybody who's reading this review already knows the collection is set in Vietnam during the war, told from the original perspective of medical personnel working with war casualties. But as with all great stories-or at least, the kind of stories I really love-the authentic and intriguing details of setting and scene only serve to enhance the characters, and it was this assemble of ordinary folk (acting pretty much as ordinary folk would in extraordinary situations) that made the collection such a riveting read for me. The story "Butch" made me-macho surfer dude--misty-eyed, and "Monkey on Our Banks" made me laugh out loud, because I knew a monkey just like that one in my boarding school (it once stole and ate a bunch of candy laxative, with predictable results in the girls' dorm).

As an oftentimes struggling and paper-ripping writer, I marveled at author O'Neill's way with words that don't get in the way yet do immaculate service to the story. But mostly, I so enjoyed the reading that my inner critic never made a peep.

Highly recommended.

Susan O'Neill's stories help us better understand the experience of nurses in the Vietnam War, and, not so incidentally, of the men who populate her stories as minor characters. Readers should find this collection a pleasing fictional counterpoint to the valuable memoirs by women who served in Vietnam. O'Neill has structured the stories to take place in the three hospitals she herself served in, a suggestion that there is a rich autobiographical basis for the people and events here. These stories strike a nice balance between the pathos and humor of military service. To complement O'Neill's fiction I especially recommend In the Combat Zone, a wrenching collection edited by Kathryn Marshall, and two fuller autobiographical accounts of American women in the Viet Nam War: Home Before Mourning, by Linda Vandevanter, and A World of Hurt, by Mary Reynolds Powell. Readers interested in Vietnamese women's stories might start with Lady Borton's After Sorrow.

... It was a man's war (aren't they all?), but we women vets are out there among you. Maybe you work with us. Maybe we live next door. Maybe we're related to you. It's very possible that you've met some of us, but you don't know it; we tend to keep a low profile.

If you're at all curious about what the underrepresented female side of of the Viet Nam "conflict" was like; if you like stories about medical and surgical types; if you did indeed enjoy M*A*S*H--well, ...Buy it. Don't wait for the paperback; if you don't buy the hardcover (and the price on Amazon? Such a deal!), there might never be one...

This collection of fiction shows that Susan O'Neill is a talented writer first and foremost - and not just a woman veteran of Vietnam. O'Neill's stories capture the very essence, the distorted waking dream quality of the Vietnam War. The stories are like the discrete vignettes of a Hieronymous Bosch painting: in one corner a sadistic doctor is torturing a wounded North Vietnamese by giving him insufficient anaesthetic during surgery, in another corner a major's pet monkey is trashing an operating room, further on a Vietnamese ghost squats on an abandoned grave mound next to the mess hall, meanwhile Bob Hope strides the Xmas show stage swinging a golf club. O'Neill encapsulates the haunting horrible aesthetic of Vietnam with more deftness and subtlety than any writer so far. For this reason, the stories gain from repeat readings. O'Neill always treats this war, tragic because of its pointlessness, with seriousness and dignity. My favourite story from the collection was 'Prometheus Burned'. O'Neill's Prometheus is a former pre-med student who is educated enough to understand, not only the Prometheus pun, but also the fact that he is dying from third degree burns. Susan O'Neill's stories are for thoughtful grown-ups, not gung-ho flag wavers. At best, they will turn the latter into the former.

The stories are fiction, but the experience is real. You can see through the eyes of the characters and sense some of their experiences, the good and the ugly. They came to life to such an extent that I found myself wondering what became of the survivors after the war. Stories with characters who are so alive must be worth reading. For non-veterans, this book may change your outlook on veterans, nurses, and the Vietnam War forever.

There have been many combat and recovery stories about Vietnam, but no one before has written from a woman's perspective such profoundly disturbing and darkly humorous insights, with a tough and unsentimental grasp of the horrors, ironies and psychological pressures of a war that still haunts America.

O'Neill is the kind of writer that I look for constantly and seldom find. I was sorry when the book ended.

As a former special forces combat medic in RVN, I can honestly
say this is one of the finest collections of short stories
about Vietnam in the war years I've read. I was suprised by the clarity and honesty of O'Neill's work and appreciated the
humor and intentions to tell a good story. Congratulations to
the author. To those drowning in the Brokaw/Ambrose/Spielberg commercial tsunami of fawning appreciation of the gabbiest generation, this book is a lifeboat. Buy it and read only one story a day.