出版社周刊评论
It's a pleasure when a new writer has something to say and says it well. Former army nurse O'Neill's debut story collection captures the physical and psychological tensions of her 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam with refreshing maturity and a profound sense of compassion. The title, she explains in her penetratingly honest introduction, is "an all-purpose underdog rallying cry a sarcastic admixture of `cool,' comedy, irony, agony, bitterness, frustration, resignation, and despair." It addresses the need of the Americans in Vietnam to harden themselves while maintaining their humanity a battle that often seems as unwinnable as the war. O'Neill presents a portrait gallery of nurses, soldiers, and natives, grouped into three sections reflecting the three hospitals where she worked. In "The Boy from Montana," a veteran nurse recalls a casualty of war along with her na?ve assumptions about medical conditions under fire; "Butch" details the attachment an American soldier forges with a little Vietnamese boy. "Monkey on Our Backs" follows a nurse's efforts to rid the world of her commanding officer's annoying pet, and features a bizarrely funny confession and some unexpected entrepreneurial ingenuity. In another darkly humorous tale, "Commendation," an archetypal schemer named Scully provides a cynic's guide to bureaucratic logic. While many of the images Bob Hope's USO show, the secret war in Cambodia, the music of the times are familiar, they are made fresh through the nurse's viewpoint. O'Neill's stories are both entertaining and thought-provoking, especially when she depicts feigned indifference to all kinds of pain. Focused and sympathetic, this is a valuable contribution to the mostly macho literature of Vietnam. Agent, Nat Sobel. 5-city author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
This collection of short stories is unique in its representation of a group from whom we rarely hear in the literature of the Vietnam War: the women who were sent there. Of course, these are not stories of combat, since at that time women weren't involved in the battlefield. But they were in nurses' uniforms and they were USO aides, and in other ways, too, they served in the war. Consequently, O'Neill's stories are of people who fight their battles outside the combat zone: a hapless grunt falls from the height of seven feet and now doesn't feel anything from the waist down, a nurse determines the future of her out-of-wedlock child, and another nurse finds both the privileges and the perils of rank. Don't mean nothing is actually a term that, along with other expressions, had meaning to those who were "in country" in Vietnam. That the war haunted so many who participated in it is shown by the fact that O'Neill waited 30 years to give voice to her feelings in these stories. Marlene Chamberlain
《学校图书馆杂志》(School Library Journal)书评
Adult/High School-O'Neill served as an operating-room nurse in Vietnam from the spring of 1969 till early summer 1970. At the time, her anger and the need to forget kept her from writing about her experience. Now in middle age, she has the perspective to see the situation more clearly and offers a stark, often darkly humorous picture of her Vietnam War. Her stories are fictional accounts of her recollections from three very different hospitals in which she served. O'Neill reminds readers that while soldiers suffered the guilt of killing, the nurses felt the pangs of survivor's guilt. They faced dying and maimed soldiers, many of them in their teens, as well as Vietnamese men, women, and children caught in the war's destruction. Possibly most complex of all, as the only females in a world of battle-charged young men, they faced unrelenting, strident cravings for sex from the men with whom they served. Some women were used, abused, and even raped. These stories offer snapshots in the lives of a series of characters facing war's bloody results and dealing with it as they can-through drugs, through sex, through flaunting the rules, or even by putting a hit contract out on a monkey. Most of the players are barely beyond their teens and their attitudes and actions will strike a chord with most young adults. This is a fascinating glimpse of the Vietnam War from a very different perspective.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus评论
Debut assortment of Vietnam pieces, from a nurse who was there, that wants to be a true story collection, but the madcap anecdotes flush with familiar tropes fail to either stand alone or cohere. A cast of hospital personnel stumbles through the alternate craziness and boredom of life just behind the front lines, all the while struggling to calculate the meaning of the war. In "Butch," a young Specialist tries to adopt an even younger Vietnamese boy to give himself a clear wartime identity. In "Psychic Hand," a short-timer nurse palm-reads for a Vietnamese girl whose lifeline has a dot at the end: they're both about to check out, so to speak. Most often, it's O'Neill herself who gets in the way of these pieces. In "One Positive Thing," a pregnant nurse contemplating abortion participates in surgery on another pregnant woman who's been shot-the scene has the potential to rivet, but the payoff for the character is simply sentimental, where O'Neill could naturally have been colder and more damaged. In "Monkey on Our Backs," a nurse puts out a contract on a small primate that almost stands for all that is ancient and sacred about Vietnam (the actual Vietnamese characters are little more than cliche furniture), and while the story threatens to become allegory, O'Neill cuts it off before it comes to mean anything. There are nice moments-an M-16 as heavy as a corpse, a nurse who finds a blown-up snapshot of herself hung on a wall as a pinup, the intensity of a moment when an anesthetist decides not to medicate a patient undergoing surgery-but they are random and infrequent. The high-jinks that follow the spiking of a barbecue's steak sauce in "Drugs" perhaps comes closest to capturing the absurdity of war, but the horror of it is almost absent here, and many of these stories may just as well have come from day camp. M*A*S*H, with lots more sex and cursing. Author tour
摘录
The Boy from Montana Smoke hung like a curtain in the dying light, softening the lines of Agnes Reedy's face. It was a worn face, square, heavy. She squinted as she took a last drag on her cigarette, dropped the spent butt, and ground it out with her sneaker. Then she picked up the crushed filter and slipped it into the pocket of her bloodstained operating room scrub shift, a strange gesture of tidiness amid the stark disarray of the dirt-bound hospital compound. She leaned against the picnic table. "I'm sorry you had to go through something like that so soon," she said. "You've been here what--two, two and a half weeks? It's a hard lesson. "Back home, you get used to people dying, but usually they're old. Cancer, heart failure. Yeah, once or twice you'll see a kid--leukemia or maybe a car accident. But it's different-- "Nothing prepares you for this. "The fights, the losses, all the healthy, good-looking young men. It's hell. Even now, even now--with more than six months down. It's still hell. "Let me tell you about my first time. I hope you don't mind. After what you've just been through." She smiled briefly, ruefully. "You know, I've never talked about it, really. I just feel like now, right now, it's time--I've had it in my head so long, and I've got to tell somebody about it before I go back where nobody'll understand, nobody'll want to hear." She glanced across the compound, over the rubber quonsets, green touched with soft pink from the sunset. A jeep rumbled by, kicking up dust. On the other side of the dirt road, a man in fatigues hauled on the ropes of the hospital's flagpole as a clutch of soldiers stood to attention. A twilight ritual, putting the flag to bed. Agnes watched them, her eyes dark and private. She was twenty-five; her eyes were ancient. "I met the boy from Montana about three weeks after I came here. He was lying on a gurney outside, like usual--" She nodded toward the OR unit behind her. "--and he was awake, squinting up into that god-awfully bright sun--it was the middle of the morning. I pulled his chart out from under the mattress and checked his name and where he was from. I always did that, back then, when I was new--I was always looking for someone from Iowa back then. "The chart said Montana. "So I said, 'Montana, huh?' I looked him over--he was good-looking, even with all that red mud all over him--blond, blue-eyed young guy. And he didn't seem to be in any pain. I said, 'I didn't know anybody lived in Montana.' Joking, trying to, you know, make him smile. "And he did. A little smile, and he said, 'Well, I do.' Then he kind of nodded off to sleep. "I wheeled him in through the air locks, into the first operating room. Where we were today. Toby Stewart and I scooted him onto the OR table; I cut off the front of his shirt. There was this little round bullet hole on his chest, right above his left nipple. The anesthetist started his IV and gave him some sodium pent, and I soaped up his chest and started to shave him. All very textbook." She sat down heavily on the tabletop and drew out her pack of Salems, held it out. "No? Sure?" She shook out a cigarette, slid the book of matches from the cellophane sleeve, and lit up. Waved the match out, set it beside her on the splintered wood. "Steve was first-call surgeon that day. You've seen what a good guy he is--really sweet, quiet. Polite Southern boy. Well, he steps up to the table, takes one look at the kid, and shoves me aside with his elbow. He yells at me--'No time for prep; get me some gloves. Now! "Steve never pushes people around. And he never yells. So when he did, it kind of jump-started the whole place. I dropped my razor and ripped open a pack of gloves for him. Toby threw a gown over himself and dumped a bunch of sterile instruments onto the back table. He gave Steve a scalpel, dropped a handful of clamps on a Mayo stand, and dragged it up. Jim came in just as Steve cracked the kid's chest; I gloved him up, and he crammed retractors into the incision. You know--" She took a puff on the cigarette. "--Jim was new back then, too. I don't think he'd done more than a couple of cases. He's really an orthopedic surgeon. Not that that matters--as you know by now, all the guys do just about everything here, specialties be damned." She rolled her broad shoulders. "God, I'm beat. Where was I? Oh, yes. A nurse--Worthen, she's gone now--she ran out and came back with a cooler full of blood bags. Another tech, Reb Orcutt, he came in and helped me start IV lines wherever we could--arms and legs--and we connected them all to blood. We pulled pump cuffs over the bags, hooked them onto poles, and opened the flow clamps all the way. "That was the first time I'd ever seen a pump cuff, incidentally. I mean, who needs something like that back home, right? These were older ones than what we used today; the cloth was pretty chewed up. But they worked just the same way, like putting a blood-pressure cuff on a blood bag. "Anyway, while I'm ripping open sponge packs, I get a look at the boy's chest. There's blood bubbling up, spilling out around the retractors, around Steve's hands. You wouldn't believe the blood, so much of it. It was just amazing. "Besides Reb and Toby, there was a another tech in the room. He was this tall, skinny black kid, a new guy from some big city--Detroit, maybe, or Chicago. His name was Tewksbury. While the rest of us ran around, hanging blood, opening supplies, focusing lights, throwing sterile drapes on the kid's belly and shoulders--" She took a drag on the cigarette. "--better late than never--Tewksbury was just standing there. "Tewksbury considered himself a Black Panther. He wore this black beret. Even there, even in the operating room, with his scrubs and mask. "What the heck--none of us were going to tell him not to. It wasn't our place. "He'd only been here maybe a week, at most. We tried to get to know him, include him in everything. I mean, I was so new myself, I went out of my way to try to make him feel welcome. But he didn't want anything to do with us; he kept himself apart. He made it absolutely clear from day one that all of us--all us whites, and the black guys, too, guys like Sam, say, who cooperated with us whites--we were all The Enemy." She lifted her hands--square, fingernails dark with blood--in a what-can-you-do gesture, trailing smoke. "Frankly, we figured he was in 'Nam because some recruiting sergeant had wanted to break him. None of us wanted to give the guy the satisfaction, so we'd taken to letting Tewksbury stand in a corner where he wouldn't get in trouble, and we just kind of went on with our business as if he wasn't there." She paused to tap her cigarette's ash on the table edge. The light was nearly gone from the sky; across the road, the flagpole stood naked and deserted. "So." She sighed. "Tewksbury's in the room when we're working on the boy from Montana. He's just standing there in the corner, like usual, in his scrubs and mask and that black beret. But this time--Black Power be damned--we needed all the help we could get. So I pulled him up to the table and grabbed his hand--it felt just like a dead fish--and I wrapped it around the bulb to a blood-bag pump. "We had four of the things going, like today. One on each arm and leg. We're all pumping them up like crazy, flatten- ing those bags right out, squeezing pint after pint after pint of O-neg right into the kid's veins--Reb's running around, taking down empty bags, hooking up new ones; whenever he gets a chance to breathe, he's pumping a cuff up. I'm doing two at a time. And now, Tewksbury's working one. I mean, he's really pumping that bulb, pumping up that cuff. His eyes are absolutely huge above that mask of his, like he's scared to death, but he's pumping. Really pumping. "Together, we kept squeezing blood into the boy--and he kept leaking it right back out. "Up at the chest, Steve's up to his elbows in blood. Literally. We still hadn't managed to get a sterile gown on him, but he had his hands wrapped around the boy's heart and he was squeezing it, trying to get it to go on its own. "You know that little fingertip-sized hole I'd seen in the kid's chest?" She closed her eyes. "I was such a rookie. I hadn't checked his back. All I'd seen was that little entry wound; if I'd checked his back, I would've seen the exit wound, where all the damage was. But he'd been lying on his back, on a sheet, and Toby and I moved the sheet with him onto the table." She dropped her cigarette, stood to crush it out, recovered the butt. "So." She climbed back onto the table. "Steve's working on the kid's heart. It was completely mangled, that heart, and he's trying to make what's left of it pump blood. Squeezing it. And every time, with every squeeze, the blood just bubbles out the holes. Everything was soaked--the kid's chest, Steve and Jim, all those crumpled-up surgical drapes. "We were all tense, all concentrated, hardly even breathing, none of us saying a word. Except Steve; he was begging the heart to beat, begging the kid to stay alive. Every now and then, he'd stop squeezing for just a second, and Jim would poke at the heart with his needle and suture, trying to sew it up. Trying to close the holes between beats. But the sutures just kept slipping out. So Jim was cursing, very quietly. "But the rest of us, nobody was saying a word. Reb, Tewksbury, and I kept pumping the blood, bag after bag. I can't speak for the boys, but I was praying to myself, praying as if all our lives depended on it. Praying, pumping. "Reb kept Tewksbury at it--when he emptied a bag, he pulled the bulb out of his hand and pushed a new one in. Tewksbury didn't have an ounce of fat on him, and you could see these veins in his arms bulging up like ropes when he pumped. And pumped. It's like his hand's a separate thing, the only thing really alive about him. He's stuck right to the spot where I put him; sweat's pouring down his forehead under that beret. It's dropping off his nose, which is sticking out over the mask. Dripping into his eyes. But I swear to God, he didn't even blink. Only his hand--it just kept pumping. He didn't even stop between bags, when the bulb wasn't there. He just squeezed. Like a robot. Fast, hard. Really hard." She stared at her own hand, clenched and unclenched it. "Too hard." It was almost a whisper. She pulled out her cigarettes again, tapped one out, held out the pack. "No? Sorry--I forgot." She lit up, inhaled deeply, blew a long plume of smoke up into the deepening night. "I'd say we'd been working for more than an hour when Tewksbury burst his blood bag," she said. "It exploded. Blew up. Like when you smash a bag filled with air. Like a gunshot, out of nowhere. We were all so quiet, so intent, and that noise--ah, God. It's like it just blew everything--instruments, pump bulbs, even the anesthesia stuff--right out of our hands." She glanced at the glowing tip of her cigarette; music from a distant stereo drifted by. The Stones' "Satisfaction." She said, "It woke us up, brought us back to our senses. "The blood from the bag--it made this wet sound, sort of spockled--all at once, all over the ceiling, the walls, the floors, the lights, the instruments on the tables, Steve, Jim, all of us. It splattered on our masks. It hit our eyes and noses. Hit the corners of the room, all of them, top and bottom. All these little tiny red spots, like fine spray paint. I even found blood behind my knees when I took my shower. "Someone--I don't even remember who--removed the bulb from Tewksbury's hand and led him out. I saw him go; his hand was still pumping." She took a deep breath, tapped the ash off her cigarette. "I never saw Tewksbury again." Agnes Reedy shifted her feet on the long board seat. Her sneakers were streaked with blood and dirt, but they still shone softly in the dark. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and husky. "Well, after we all started breathing again, Steve--very gently--sets the boy's heart down, back in his chest. It twitched and leaked once or twice, like it was trying to beat, then--nothing. Jim threw down his needle holder; his last suture slipped out, just like the others. I remember how it looked, this thick red thread dangling down over the bloody sheets. I can't forget that; when I'm threading needles now, I still think about it. Funny, how some things stick in your mind." She inhaled, exhaled smoke. "Steve and Jim, they both just stepped back and pulled off their gloves, and they left. They didn't say a word. "Worthen came in and wheeled the boy's body out. We all stood there and watched her. When the kid was gone, Toby packed up his bloody instruments and carried them off. And Reb and I were left to scrub down the room. "It took us hours, the whole rest of the day. Neither of us said a thing; we just scrubbed the blood off the floor, the table, the walls, the light, the ceiling." She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "When I finally came out of the OR, there was a sunset. A nice one, like tonight's. And the guys were putting the flag to bed. "I was just standing there, watching them take the flag down, folding it up into that little triangle. Just another day. Business as usual." She shook her head. "I looked down at all that blood on my scrub dress, and I thought about the boy from Montana. How I heard his last words--they were nothing special, nothing profound, but they were his last words. His last words, and I heard them. Not his parents or his girlfriend back home or maybe even his wife, if he had one. Me. A complete stranger. "And I thought about Tewksbury." She squinted as she took the last drag, then dropped the butt. "Just another day for the flag." She stood and ground out the cigarette. "Business as usual." Agnes Reedy bent over and picked up the flattened filter. "Between you and me," she said as she dropped it in her pocket, "I haven't saluted the flag since then." Excerpted from Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam by Susan Kramer O'Neill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.