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Summary: A Different Look at the Vietnam War
Review: Humor, pathos, fear, love, and death are all players in this wonderful collection of short stories written from the point of view of the nurses who served in Vietnam. In Susan O'Neill's capable hands the war is fought in surgery, in a hallway comforting a soldier dying of his burns, in the confessional, everywhere except the battlefield. This is a truly human and affecting portrait of a war that confounds us to this day.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: 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.
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Summary: Masterful Storytelling
Review: Other Amazon customer reviews have done a great job of outlining the subject matter of these stories. But the stories, which are fine pieces individually, are also wonderfully orchestrated in this collection. Some stories are poignant, some are dark with flashes of humor, and 'Monkey On Our Backs' is laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end. The stories benefit from both a common thread and great variety, and the overall effect, with recurring characters, is a bit like reading an episodic novel.
Above all, Susan O'Neill is an excellent storyteller, a writer who has mastered her craft. I hope we're going to see more stories from her. I would expect her narratives to be compelling whether set in a war or not. Highly recommended.
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Summary: One of my favorite Army Nurses
Review: Sue O'Neill along with Mary Reynolds Powell (A World Of Hurt) and Sharon Grant Wildwind (Dreams That Blister Sleep) is one of a rare breed of women who not only flew 10,000 miles into a war zone to support an Army whose average age was 19 (in WW II it was 26), she also had the strength and the vision to write about her experiences.
Don't Mean Nothing is an essential Nam book, along with the late Lynda Van Devanter's Home Before Morning. While I don't accept that the war was literally unwinnable, I totally agree that the way it was being fought, with no sense of a Win Scenario at any time, resulted in a mindless and sickening waste of human life - on both sides.
President Johnson, the simpleton who put more than 500,000 US troops in harm's way, yet never defined a Win Scenario or Exit Strategy, once boasted that the Air Force "couldn't even bomb an outhouse" without his approval. Similarly, the target selection for the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in which the US lost 922 aircraft, was carried out at cozy White House lunches, without a single Air Force commander being present.
Sue's anger at a mind-numbingly incompetent Government, who denied Ho Chi Minh a fair crack at democratic elections (which he may well have won) by installing the hateful and corrupt Diem in the South, is well stated.
These stories take you under the hood, behind the propaganda and the lies and put you right there in the middle of a war that either should never have happened or which should have been fought very differently at the very least.
A great writer. A great human being.
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Summary: This means something
Review: Sue O'Neill's compelling stories, whether those that shock and sadden or those that amuse, bring an important dimension to the human side of the Vietnam War. No matter where you were or which side you were on during that period of time that changed our country so incredibly much, or if you were even born, you owe it to yourself to buy this book with its gripping and perceptive tales of war through a woman's eyes. If you don't know this nurse's stories, you don't know the Vietnam War and you don't know us.
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Summary: Goes right to the gut
Review: 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!
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Summary: Stories Too Good to Be Made Up
Review: 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.
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Summary: Incoming!
Review: Susan O'Neill's collection of short stories DON'T MEAN NOTHING is more than isolated thoughts about what being in Vietnam as a participant in that bloody political blunder. This book reads like a novel in that the same characters weave in and out of these short thought/experiences and it does begin as a year of combat duty for a nurse and ends as that nurse goes back stateside. Perhaps the term 'Short Stories of Vietnam' references the way life was lived during there - moments in between Incoming shellings, explosions, overwhelming Medevacs, moments when there was time for the simple acts of being alive like sex, comradery in the hooch bars, momentary communication with soulmates dressed/talking/feeling/fearing like you. O'Neill is a master of terse statement; her economy of words, richly descriptive as they are, can click a photo thought or memory so precisely that even a few pages can burn an experience on your psyche that is indelible. O'Neill knows her material, having served as a nurse in Vietnam in 1969-70. Obviously a bright thinker and writer, she has elected to wait 30 years before committing to paper her responses to that most unpopular of 'wars': that distance adds a more sensitive quality to her stories than would an immediate visceral response after returning to the States, a time when absolutley noone wanted to hear about Vietnam, much less try to understand it from a participant's point of view. Although the entire 'collection' of stories is well done, there are bound to be tales that hurt the heart more than others. For this reader the Introduction is the most powerful of all, carrying with it flashbacks and images, thoughts and words that are so powerful they re-kindle nightmares. 'The Boy from Montana', 'Medcap', 'Prometheus Burned' are cogent, painful, and magnificent. But O'Neill can also write comedy, especially the sick type of humor that maintained sanity in Vietnam. All of these stories, ending with a terific 'Commendation', flesh out the details of the history of the Vietnam conflict. O'Neill is up there with Philip Caputo, Stewart O'Nan, Tim O'Brien and others who have dared write the truth. Here is not just the feminine input, but the nurses' or noncombatants' view. An excellent book by a sensitive, fresh writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Well crafted stories
Review: 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.
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Summary: Looking back, it did mean something...
Review: 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.
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