Don’t Mean Nothing

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.