If you buy only one book of short stories this year, make it “Don’t Mean Nothing.” If you don’t usually purchase short stories, then make this your exception. This is no ordinary collection.

Susan O’Neill waited thirty years to tell her story. She graduated from nursing school in 1968, and her first nursing job was in 1969 as an Army operating nurse in Vietnam. She did a 13-month tour of duty in three different facilities, Phu Bai, Chu Lai and Cu Chi. From her experiences in that enormous, multi-faceted reality of hospitals, casualties, sexually hungry soldiers and bizarre lifestyles, she has constructed a sublime fictional account in eighteen stories.

There have been many combat and recovery stories about Vietnam, but no one before has written from a woman’s perspective such profoundly disturbing and darkly humorous insights, with a tough and unsentimental grasp of the horrors, ironies and psychological pressures of a war that still haunts America.

The title “Don’t Mean Nothing” was an actual expression in ‘Nam which the author explains as “an all purpose underdog rallying cry—a sarcastic admixture of ‘cool,’ comedy, irony, agony, bitterness frustration, resignation and despair.” Whatever appalling events crossed the paths of these people, they responded with a feigned indifference, the shrug of the hipster, ‘don’t mean nothing.’ And the title aptly represents the mix of characters coping on a daily basis with insanity, trying to save lives, and surviving with the hope that they will get home.

However, these are not “war stories” in the usual sense of the word. These are stories of people outside of the combat zone. Outnumbered women revered for sex alone. The rich and textured life of misfits, displaced professionals, Vietnamese orphans. Drugs, black marketeering, chicanery. Compassion, anger, stupidity and gallantry. And in a unifying thread of humor, O’Neill gives us one hilarious flea bitten, flatulent pet monkey who is as hated as the Viet Cong, but when a “hit” is put out on him, he refuses to die much like the loathsome war itself.

Susan O’Neill met her husband, an Army medical officer in Vietnam in 1970. She began her debut book after their three children were grown. They reside in Andover, Massachusetts.

“Don’t Mean Nothing” is a heart wrenching and masterful exploration of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. You owe it to yourself to read this compelling collection of literary gems.