Susan O'Neill's Don't Mean Nothing is a collection of short stories told from the perspective of medical personnel during the Vietnam War. The book is scheduled to appear in paperback in March 2004. Her web site is http://susanoneill.us/.

Wayne E. Yang: You waited until you had raised three children before you mined your experiences in Vietnam for your fiction writing. Clearly, there were the practical demands of life that kept you from writing about Vietnam, but what did the passage of time give you in terms of psychological separation from your experience there when you began writing the short stories? And how did the stories evolve?

Susan O'Neill: Because I waited about 25 years before I started the book, my memory wasn't clear enough to do an honest memoir--to remember names and dates and be fair to everybody, including myself. So the time mandated that the book would be fiction. I had no idea how to write it as a novel--there was no real plot line, just a year of war and medicine. Then I read O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and was impressed by his use of short works that related to each other. I decided I'd try it, highlighting events and people that had stuck with me over the years.

The “Boy From Montana” was my first story. I drew it from an essay I'd written years before, when I was a journalism student at the University of Maine, Orono. I wrote it for an essay contest at the school, in the form of a letter to my daughter explaining why I no longer saluted the flag. It won a minor prize back then. Once I decided to write fiction about the war, I dug out the old essay and had at it. I probably wrote a half-dozen versions of that story before I came up with the present version, a story told to someone who's not seen or heard. In truth, the off-page character was intended to be “The Lieutenant,” and probably would have been recognized by the reader as such, but the story I planned to put before it--and did, originally--was axed by my editor as not being strong enough to begin the collection. So “The Boy from Montana” stands alone, and the reader can only guess that it was the “baptism” of the Lieutenant in the ways of combat medicine.

Had I tried to write these stories when I first got back from Vietnam, they would have been angry diatribes. The years allowed me to try to make them literature. I don't mean I'm not still angry, at heart, at what we did over there; that's a constant. But the anger doesn't make me incoherent now; I don't feel the urge to crowd people with it, rub their faces in it. Instead, I found myself free to use it as a creative force.

In spite of my long, frequently-interrupted college career--my 16-year BA, I like to call it--I'm largely self-taught in literature. I read voraciously, but oddball stuff: books I pick up at yard sales, funky little out-of-print bios and novels, lots of Shakespeare, religious books, old classics that everybody else read when they were 12 or 16 or in proper college literature classes--I only took one of those in all that time, and it did little more for me than make me hate Moby Dick because I had to read it in one night with a baby at my breast. Anyway, all those years of reading eclectically if oddly helped inform the stories, sometimes indirectly (like borrowing from “The Tempest” for the odd name or detail in my magician's story), and sometimes directly (like lifting my monkey from Asian folklore). I guess I can say that, because I was older and more seasoned when I wrote the stories, I could give myself permission to have fun with them. I couldn't have been subtle or ironic when my indignation was raw.

WY: Tell us how you ended up serving in Vietnam.

SO: I was young and stupid. I grew up in Indiana, in the industrial Midwest and was in that lower middle class whose kids usually went to work in the factories after high school graduation if they couldn't get hefty scholarships. Young women of my social status and generation who didn't want to work an assembly line and couldn't get big bucks usually found themselves at a community college learning secretarial skills or in one of the then-omnipresent three-year “diploma” RN schools sponsored by hospitals--they were cheap because we staffed the hospital, and the training was practical rather than academic.

My parents--my Dad worked in a tire factory and Mom was a housewife/mother--had five kids; they were very proud to be able to offer us trade school options. I went to nursing school because I would've made a horribly disorganized secretary. It got me away from home at minimal expense to Mom and Dad, and I knew--having taken care of my younger sisters and brother--that even if I didn't have deep natural nursing talent, I had a strong enough stomach for the profession.

In those days, the military needed nurses, so they offered to pay three-year students a stipend during their last school year in exchange for a two-year commitment. A friend of mine, very gung-ho and patriotic, needed someone to go with her when she drove to Chicago to enlist, so I went. While she was filling out papers, the recruiting sergeant gave me his dog-and-pony: I could get paid to finish school, then I'd be sent somewhere exotic, far from Indiana.

I was attracted to the idea for a whole host of complex reasons. I had recently discovered agnosticism, and my folks were very fervent Catholics, so I was feeling guilty (as befitted my Catholic upbringing) taking their money for school when I had turned my back on what they held so dear. So the stipend would salve my conscience, by letting me pay back at least the last year. Plus, I really wanted to leave Indiana; I'd left twice when I was a kid, when my aunt and uncle drove me with them to Florida; in those two brief forays, I fell in love with mountains and seacoast. And here was this guy, offering me Hawaii, Germany, Japan, Fort Huachuca, Arizona...

On the other hand, I was the only student in my nursing school campaigning for Gene McCarthy, and I played my requisite three guitar chords and sang protest songs at the local coffeehouses whenever I got the chance.

So I looked this fat, sweaty sergeant in the little beady eyes and said, "What about Vietnam? I don't believe in Vietnam." He laughed at me and said that there was a waiting list a mile long of nurses clamoring to go, and I couldn't get on it if I tried. So I signed up. Perhaps, when it came down to it, I really did it for the irony--me, going into the Army.

Imagine what my friends and family would say.

I called my Dad from Chicago and told him what I'd done, and there was silence on the end of the line. Then he said, "Well, I guess you know what you're doing."

Right.

I discovered when I went to basic training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, that the waiting list, if there ever really had been one, was no more. I panicked at the idea of actually having to take care of men my own age with traumatic wounds--this was the era of the first Medicare patients, so my little Catholic hospital had been full of old farmers suffering from emphysema and skin cancer. I had no skills I could use in a war zone. So I opted to take the Operating Room course because they needed OR nurses and wouldn't make me pay them back more time. It was a move I never regretted; probably saved my sanity.

Sorry the answer's so long, but it was a complicated situation, as you can see.

WY: Tell us about the phrase “Don't Mean Nothing.” Your characters use it to fend off different situations and events. In your introduction, you tell us that the phrase “'Don't Mean Nothing’ was an all-purpose underdog rallying cry,” that it signaled “hip, reigned indifference [...] the humor of the impotent, a small bunker in the real war—the war against humanity.” Can you tell us why you took the phrase on as your title?

SO: It was, and is, the title of one of the stories; my agent, bless his little heart, suggested it would be a much better overall title for the book than whatever lame thing I had. So I used it. After that, I might add, he tried to get me to drop the title story from the collection because he didn't think it was all that strong. I didn't agree, and I ultimately defended it based on the fact that it was, after all, the title story.

All this aside, it's fitting, because after all these years, the government of the US would still just as soon not remember Vietnam; if they had their way, it wouldn't mean anything at all. Just the fact that we vets were essentially overlooked for years adds a neatly bitter appropriateness to the use of the title.

WY: Your stories focus more on life on the base over the typical portrayal of the grunt on patrol, which we often see in Vietnam era fiction. Moreover, your characters are primarily medical personnel, charged with saving lives instead of taking them (though notably, the anesthetist Jewett in “What Dreams May Come” very purposefully chooses not to alleviate the pain of a captured enemy combatant by turning down the curare he gives him). How does your perspective differ from that of some writers who have written about their experience in Vietnam? Do you see a commonality in your book with that of Stewart O'Nan's Names of the Dead, which featured a medic as a primary character?

SO: I confess I've not read Stewart's book, although I've read many others of his and love his writing. I've read relatively few books on Vietnam, actually; Tim O'Brien's work, and Home Before Morning by Lynda Van der Vanter, A World of Hurt by Mary Powell, poetry chapbooks, little else. By design, really; I've lived it, and I don't feel compelled to read about it.

My intro gives you my basic attitude about the women's view vs. the men's; it was indeed a different war. I've gotten re-connected with a lot of nurses since the book came out, incidentally, and have been rather stunned to discover how many of us suffer from [post-traumatic stress disorder]--some estimates place it at about 50% of women with the onset ranging from immediately after coming home to about 30 years later. My initial surprise stemmed from the fact that we didn't often have that direct kill-or-be-killed stake in the fighting. The PTSD, then, like our perspective of the war itself, had to come from something else, very possibly the day-to-day constant exposure to streams of broken men, sometimes dying men, our age or younger. It's kind of fascinating, how something like that can wreak havoc on an otherwise healthy young woman.

Not many people really knew we women were there; now, at this long remove, some of my sisters-in-arms are beginning to write about their experiences; there are several relatively new memoirs out there. And one of my contemporaries, Helen White, has very recently begun to paint what she calls U.S. expressionistic art about her experiences--it's harrowing stuff, and very good. Another, Diana Sebek, will probably be famous some day for her work in clay--also striking and very unsettling work.

I guess what I'm spending entirely too many words saying is, our literature--and our art--is different from the stuff out there by men. Or at least from the stuff I've read and seen. Men might well write about medical aspects of the war--there's a doctor/poet by the name of Grady Harp, for example, whose poetry is rip-your-heart-out stuff, vivid and evocative pictures of his life as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam. But even that isn't like, say, the poetry of Dana Schuster, who served as a nurse. The experiences themselves were just too different. Women lived with so many unique dynamics--our mission as healers, and the semi-powerlessness of being secondary healers, rather than doctors; the huge factor of our rarity in a male-dominated milieu; the fundamental differences in our basic hormonal make-up. Our literature and our art reflect these differences; they're another very valid view of war, a different sort of piece in a large puzzle.

WY: There is a lot of the mystical in some of these stories: the ghost of the Buddhist grave in “The Exorcism,” palm reading in “The Psychic Hand,” (which, along with “One Positive Thing,” are two of the finer stories in the collection, by the way). And then there's moments of absurd coincidences, for instance, when Keeler tries to get rid of the Major's monkey, but the monkey keeps reappearing in different places. Why is there that sense of the mystical and coincidental?

SO: The mysticism, I suppose, comes from my weird choices of reading material. I started reading a lot about Buddhism in Vietnam, and I eventually expanded my interest to all manner of religious and cultural mysticism. (I even once stole a Book of Mormon from a hotel room out west and read it from cover to cover when I got home--I half-expected two clean-cut young in suits to knock at my door, having traced me from the hotel information bank.)

Anyway, I've managed to progress from strict Catholicism to a kind of loose humanism that admits there is some manner of higher power, and there are also many things beyond my ken in this world that can't be dismissed as easily as the standard Western Scientific Mind would like to think. Take fortune-telling, for example. A lot of it is probably pure hokum, but some people do seem to have a real talent. Maybe the future's actually in front of us to be seen, a quite ordinary thing that merely requires a particular acuity or a sense that I don't happen to possess. Who knows? I find such things intriguing, and I'm not above dipping into these particular “What ifs” now and then when it suits my point. I still remember my horror at finding the short stone wall of a Buddhist grave poking out of the motor pool tent in Phu Bai. How better to use that particular piece of cultural insensitivity than to let a ghost elicit a character's feelings?

I've mentioned the monkey above. In Chinese folklore, there's a warrior monkey, a sage with a rather warped sense of humor. I figured that the way we operated in Vietnam, someone in the upper reaches of the military chain of command seemed to consider the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong sub-human, even monkey-like. So I set up my little allegory, borrowed the monkey and let him have his way. I've written two stories in my life that follow one specific thing through multiple circumstances. The monkey was my first. In the second story--this has nothing to do with this interview, of course--it was a cursed pair of Red Sox tickets.

I might add that the novel I'm currently working on features a cat that's a reincarnated alcoholic grandfather. Magic realism becomes habit-forming, I guess.

WY: In your stories, the characters have a tendency to refer to each other by rank (lieutenant, major), rather than by last name or nickname, like the grunts do in some Vietnam War fiction. Was there a notable line drawn between officers and enlisted men in your experience?

SO: First, let me say that one of the characters--friends have argued that she resembles me, but I like to think she's far more intense and humorless than I've ever been--is referred to by everyone as "The Lieutenant." I purposely didn't give her a name; I wanted her to move from story to story like a sort of everywoman, casting judgment on everything she sees--be it her obnoxious friend Scully, the clerk; or a young man dying of burns; or the monkey; or the deadly anesthetist Jewett, whatever. She's a unifying factor, an orientation point, a critical viewpoint, a personality but not a name--it was a stylistic choice, and I leave it to the reader to decide if it works.

There was in the Army, as you say, a line drawn, in the sense that the Brass would have liked to remind us, whenever possible, that we were officers first and women after. The distinction worked in the United States, because everything was more formal there, and there was more time to enforce the officer/enlisted caste differences. Ideally, from the Army's point of view, officers were a caste of leaders, and they were to remain aloof from enlisted staff. Enlisted had to operate under their orders, without favoritism or prejudice, or the system would become sloppy.

But in Vietnam, at least where things were busy--as opposed to, say, the hospital I write about in the last of Three Minor Love Stories--we all lived and worked together, 24/7, and our ties as team members in this very difficult, teamwork-intensive scene were stronger and more important than the artificial concept of rank. So fraternization wasn't uncommon at the hospitals.

But still the enlisted staff had had it drilled into their heads that to call an officer, even a team member, by her first names just might be seen as insubordination--so it wasn't uncommon to have nurses sitting around, smoking dope with their enlisted staff in the staff's hooches or their clubs, and still hear the guys calling the women “Lieutenant.”

WY: There is also a clear tension between the genders. You often talk about the lingering gaze of the men on female officers and other personnel.

SO: We were in a distinct minority. I mean, I thought I was in a minority at the headquarters of my nursing school in South Bend; Notre Dame was at that time all male, so the ratio of men to women ran at about seven to one. In Vietnam, it was more like 700, maybe even 7,000, to one. That can make things pretty tense.

One thing I did not treat in the book, because I didn't have personal experience with it--thank the gods--was rape; it wasn't as uncommon as it should've been, and when it happened, it was underreported and largely unpunished. It was a man's world, and the primary mission was to take care of those injured in the war. It was also the 60s, and although we were fast becoming enlightened as a nation about war and protest and drugs and race, we were still not advocating for women's rights. Many of the women vets I've met lately who have horrible PTSD were raped in Vietnam. Whether it happened to us or not, we always knew that it was possible. So if our adolescence and the ratio weren't enough, there was the threat of our gender being used against us. So of course, there was tension. Although I might add that, in many cases, men were very protective of us precisely because we were so rare.

WY: And then there are those whose positions transcend rank--so to speak; you refer on several occasions to the power of the clerks. How did all this figure in the politics of the base?

SO: Like any civilization unto itself, the base moved by complex rules, official and unofficial. Doctors who were considered deities back home simply because they were doctors had to march to a more human drum in Vietnam because they lived in this tight, constant community.

Everybody knew who the asshole doctors, the asshole officers, the asshole sergeants, and the other assorted assholes, were. These folks could--and sometimes would, if they were officers--insist upon obedience in spite of the fact that what they were asking was clearly wrong or even detrimental. Their rank permitted it. But their arrogance was held in check somewhat by the knowledge that they had to work, eat, shower with, piss standing next to and sleep one building away from the guy or the woman they were so bent on insulting. Also, there were a lot of armed men around, and if you were horrible to those around you, you could find yourself “fragged” [eliminated by a fragmentation grenade] or, at the least, the victim of some anonymous but painful practical joke. After all, probably the second most popular saying, after “Don't mean nothin',” was, “What're they going to do--send me to Vietnam?”

The so-called Clerks' Mafia was another example of the way that reality could run counter to the formality of rank. All paperwork passed through one or another clerk's hands. Clerks were usually lowly Spec 3s or 4s or privates--mere peons, in the eyes of the formal Army ranking system. But if you put any request in writing--and in the Army, most requests had to be in writing--a clerk would handle your papers and convey them to the proper higher power. Or...not. If you wanted to know who was coming to take someone's place, you'd ask a clerk; they saw the paperwork. If you wanted to go to a particularly desirable R&R [rest and recreation] spot, like Sydney, Australia, you didn't want to piss off the clerk handling your orders. Even though all he was was, in effect, a conduit, he still could divert the papers you needed. Lose them. Put them on the bottom of a pile.

Because of the structure beneath the structure, a lot of things happened in Vietnam that just never would've been tolerated in a hospital back home. There's a wonderful book called "Ri"--unfortunately, it's out of print, but it can still be bought through the author, George Allen--about a hospital corpsman who adopted a Vietnamese/Cambodian orphan who was a patient at the 12th Evac. The corpsman and others on his ward and throughout the hospital, actively conspired to keep this child as a patient well beyond his legal allotted time, and to actually hide him from the top brass, so the corpsman could set the complicated adoption process in motion. In a U.S. hospital, he and those who helped him could've been busted for disobeying orders, court-martialed for insubordination, and probably...sent to Vietnam for their sins.

WY: There is an overwhelming sense of fatigue sometimes among your characters. They talk about constantly having to scrub down the operating rooms, for instance, and you often note their bloodstained clothes. You weren't that gung ho on war in the first place. You must have found yourself up to your armpits in blood and gore. What did that do to your outlook on that particular war? On war in general? How does that affect your view of our current war in Iraq?

SO: Before I went, I just assumed that war would involve injury and death; that's why I was being sent there, after all. But it's one thing to look at it from a distance, and form neat mental pictures. Once you step through the looking glass, as it were, into the reality of it--once your sneakers are full of somebody else's blood--you look at the whole thing quite differently. The blood's no longer a metaphor; it goes through to your socks and into the skin of your feet. Into your soul.

Back in the states, when I so glibly thought I knew what Vietnam and war, in general, was about, I had opposed it on some cool-headed philosophical basis, from some distant notion of empathy. Gradually, in Vietnam, I became horrified at how callow my ideas had been. This--the war itself--was beyond empathy; it was the embodiment of chaos, a black hole of despair. It was too big to put a mind around. Too damning. If people who didn't know each other could do this sort of thing to each other--take away their homes, their livelihoods, their health, their very lives--what did that say about us as a species? And this wasn't even personal. It was all strictly political. I once found myself in the operating room, working on Vietnamese victims of a bomb dropped we had accidentally dropped on a little movie theatre, and I remember thinking how horribly wrong this all was, and how there was no way on earth to apologize for or to repair something of this magnitude.

I went through a long, depressed dark night of the soul. Where I had been an agnostic, I devolved into a bitter atheism. I spent my day off at an orphanage in Hue, trying to convince the children, at least, that I wasn't a monster just because I was American. Maybe trying to convince myself. And I did a lot of thinking, a lot of thinking. Trying to understand the nature of all this, the why of it. Trying to get a handle on my own despair.

I guess at that point, I became a true pacifist. Oh, I have no doubt that, if someone came to my house and threatened my life or the lives of those I love, I would fight for myself, for them. I'm too pragmatic to think I would simply turn the other cheek. But I know for certain, from my experience in Vietnam--from what I saw, what it did to me, who I was and who I became--that I can never buy the idea that it's necessary to inflict violence upon strangers for the sake of political aims. And it makes me sick, physically miserable, to think that we can be so cavalier as to depersonalize what happens in war by playing with words and evoking a “big picture” of the global good that will be gained by dropping bombs on other human beings. Because politics change; they change faster and faster as the world gets smaller. Today's enemy is tomorrow's ally, and in the eyeblink in which that transition takes place, we've spilled a huge amount of blood on our sneakers. Beyond that, we've disrupted lives, sometimes beyond repair--left civilizations in chaos, left other human beings to live hand-to-mouth, without electricity, without clean water, without basic sanitation, without family members...

As for Iraq, it saddens me that we haven't learned from our mistakes. There are evils in this world, yes; there are bad people, bad governments, and Iraq's was one. But we don't understand the Iraqi culture; we don't really care as a country, as a government, about the Iraqi culture. Our government sees Iraq as an opportunity--and you and I and everybody else, from the neoconservatives to fundamentalist Christians to the CEOs of the conglomerates currently “making our country great,” can fill in the blanks as we wish in postulating what that opportunity might be, but the point remains that our government is just being opportunistic. But it's making one enormous, embarrassing mistake that it made in Vietnam, one that just might make all the difference: it's believing that an outside government that doesn't understand or care about a culture can by sheer force convert that culture into something it's not ready or perhaps even willing to become. I'm wondering how many of our fine, idealistic young people will have to die, to be injured, to become as jaded as I am, before we decide to tell the world we won and pull them out of harm's way. How many of Iraq's fine people will have to die, be injured, or be turned by the chaos of war from indifference or perhaps even agreement with what we're doing over there, into true and lasting enemies?

About Wayne E. Yang: Wayne E. Yang is a freelance writer. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Asian Review of Books, Small Spiral Notebook and other publications.