Grasp Dont Mean Nothing: Short Stories Of Vietnam Written By Susan ONeill Kindle

collection of interrelated short storiesthink Hemingway's In Our Time or O'Brien's The Things They Carriedfocusing on a nurse's tour of duty in Vietnam.
O'Neill is uncompromising in her picture of the costs of the fighting, both physically on the wounded American, Vietnamese and, in a piece that's rare in Vietnam fiction, Cambodian and psychically on the men and women in the operating rooms.
The style matches the materialstraightforward but smart and lyrical, Belongs on the short shelf of Vietnam classics,

I served as an army operating room nurse in Vietnam from May ofto June of, I joined the army for the money and the travel, and because I was naïve and had no idea what I would be getting myself into.
It was one of the biggest learning experiences of my life,

The government doesnt have hard figures for how many women it sent to Vietnam, but trust me: We were vastly outnumbered by men, and it defined us and governed our existence.
We could have been ugly as toads we could have dragged our knuckles in the dust and picked our noses in public.
It wouldnt have mattered. We were pulled by demand into a vast sea of men, Embraced, seduced, conquered, sometimes impregnated, and now and then wed,

There are eighteen short stories in this book and if they are all as bloody as the first one, I might not make it to the end.
Im the one who had to go sit in the hall when I almost fainted on a tour of the delivery room before my second son was born.


I had been told and noted myself subsequently that many of these individual short stories are related and can be seen as a single book.
I was disappointed because I love short stories and hate to have any of them pulled out of my grasp.
My ego was massaged when my memory whispered to me, “Remember that character Soriano from a couple of stories back” and I actually did remember.
I read sitelink The Yellow Birds with the same concept: short stories taped together to make a novel.
Maybe its not all that rare, Since I am possibly entering into a short story era since I have quite a few lined up on my To Read shelf.
GoodReads kindly tells me that I havebooks on my short story shelf and most I have not read.
Now, that might drag me away from mysteries for a while,

Is a war story written by a woman different than a war story written by a man Could you read a story and tell Im reading Dont Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam and the stories seem pretty much the same as those written by men.
If two stories are different it is because they were written by two different people, not because of any difference in the genitalia.
Would an infantryman write different than a nurse Writers undoubtedly benefit and write from their experiences, but I think a good writer can create from a variety of points of view.
But, can a man be a woman

The point of view in this book is from behind the front lines in the medical units.
That does make it different from most war stories that focus on the fighting, The medical people see the results of the fighting, delivered right to their door, I am actually surprised that there are not more gruesomely dead people here, I guess those dont make it to triage in the medical tent,

Towards the end of the book there are quite a few references to antiwar and protest songs being played in the background.
Each time it surprises me since I dont think of those songs being popular right there in the midst of the war.
Kind of like “Good Morning, Vietnam, ” Just seems odd. Wonder what the commanding officers thought of that The mixed feelings about the legitimacy of the war are dealt with:

“Im sure there wasnt any one of us nurses realized what we were getting into.
But even those of us who have doubts, well, were not so I dont know vocal maybe Or unhappy I mean, we are serving our country.
” She patted the Lieutenants arm again, “Look, all Im saying is, were not the experts, What do we know about the

motives behind all this So the way I see it most of us just kind of stay in the middle we dont go out and march for either side.
We just do what we have to, to keep ourselves busy until its time to leave, ”

And what about the title Many of us want to know what the title is all about.
Here its laid out in the introduction:

“Dont Mean Nothing” was an allpurpose underdog rallying cry a sarcastic admixture of “cool,” comedy, irony, agony, bitterness, frustration, resignation and despair.
Work all day on a soldier who dies Work on a soldier all day who gets sent back into battle Get DearJohned Get bit by a rat Fall off a shipping dock and snap your spine If you couldnt control it, if it was FUBAR fucked up beyond all recognition, you could at least declare that it “dont mean nothing.
” This hip, feigned indifference was the humor of the impotent, a small bunker in the real war the war against insanity.

You dont find many books about war that are written by women, Arent that many women out there in the wars but there were the nurses, And some women do write about war: sitelinkLaura Hillenbrand, sitelinkElse Morante, sitelinkMarge Piercy, sitelinkBobbie Ann Mason, sitelinkTatjana Soli, sitelinkKristin Hannah, sitelinkDang Thuy Tram.


I am going to give the book five after thinking about the overall impact of the book on me.
Most of the time I was reading Dont Mean Nothing, I was thinking about it as a good four star book.
But Im giving it the overall five because I think that the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts.
This is a very good book, Thank you, Susan ONeill!
I just finished this book a couple of weeks ago and I'm still staggering under the weight of so much beauty, tragedy, and truth.
Every story is a gem, and they are all polished to perfection, This is near the very top of my list of best books I've ever read, Remember the opening of the television show M, A. S. H. , and the stoic, angelic grace with which the nurses ran toward the medevac chopper That's just how Sue O'Neill's stories of Vietnam made me feel.
From the beginning to nearly the end, I was mesmerized by these stories and characters linked by three different places in Vietnam.
The tales were charming, others terrifying, nearly all sucking me in, not allowing me to be anywhere else but exactly where the story put me.
The last two fell a bit short, but those were small blips overall this collection stands with some of my favorite novels, as it feels like a novel, not just many brief tales.
It's not only that characters wind from one hospital to another, but that these people are many facets of those who served and died there, also those who called Vietnam home.
O'Neill's gift lies in depicting an abundance of lives, women and men, young and old, Nearly all the characters felt authentic, and while I'm a squeamish sort, this wasn't an overly bloody book, Recommended with deep appreciation for O'Neill's writing, stitching together a complex war and its far flung participants, I don't know why I didn't expect these stories to be as good as they are, but Ms, O'Neill, I apologize. This is an excellent collection!

A selection of stories about people, by people who served in Vietnam.

PTSD is nothing new, it's been around since the first ever conflict, It's too bad that it took so long for it to be recognized as a serious problem, Maybe if PTSD had been recognized earlier, the horrible treatment of our Vietnam vets would not have been quite so terrible.
Let's face it, like any other soldier, these veterans were just doing as they were told but had to suffer in silence.
I had a hard time getting through this book not because of disturbing subject matter, or anything like that I was simply bored.
O'Neill was a nurse through the Vietnam War, and I suppose I expected this book to be more of a first person account of nursing in Vietnam.
She states in the introduction that it is a collection of stories of pure fiction, and I think it felt very fictional to me.
LIke there was something left out, Events she described that would normally cause a lot of emotional resonance for me fell flat, She isn't a bad writer many of her descriptions are quite clever, but I felt she couldn't decide if she wanted all the stories to be interrelated and just kept waffling back and forth, leaving me very confused.


I will also say that I am probably disappointed because I wanted this book to be like "The Things They Carried" or " Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam" and it wasn't both books are phenomenal by the way, and I would highly suggest reading them.
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