Book review: A nurse remembers the year that changed her life forever

“Kissing Kevin: An American Nurse in the Vietnam War”

By Sara Berg; Cirque Press, 2024; 114 pages; $15; Black and white photos by the author.

In 1970, Sara Berg, a 21-year-old straight out of nursing school and encouraged by recruiters to be patriotic and save lives, enlisted as an Army nurse. Her assignment was to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, Vietnam, just south of Saigon. In her new memoir, she describes her work during that year and how it changed her life forever.

Berg, a Homer resident, died earlier this year of bone cancer she attributes to Agent Orange exposure. In her final months, when she was also reeling from the murder of her daughter, she chose to use her time to compose her memories of Vietnam, to bring the reality of that tumultuous and traumatic year to today’s readers. Her goal, she says, was not only to find comfort and meaning for herself from a distance of more than 50 years, but to “finally share my Vietnam truth.”

Berg, the daughter of an Army officer, was adventurous and a rule-breaker from the start. The book title and first chapter make that point in detailing her experience with one of her patients, a young American soldier she cared for in the ICU unit for three days, until his death. When he awoke enough to speak, he asked her for a kiss, and she gave him what she calls the “most heartfelt kiss I had ever given anyone.” She was reprimanded for such a blatant, unprofessional act, just one of many times that she used her own compassionate judgment in caring for patients.

The need for compassion is perhaps the overwhelming message of Berg’s small book. The Vietnam War — as perhaps all wars are — was dehumanizing and tragic beyond the knowledge of most Americans. Berg and other young nurses, traumatized by the carnage and giving their all to the effort, played significant roles perhaps not so much in saving lives as in comforting the dying. Berg’s service was mainly in neurosurgical units dealing with head and spinal injuries; some soldiers were further evacuated to hospitals elsewhere, but many simply died there. She later worked in a burn unit that she says had a 100 percent mortality rate.

Berg ends one passage, “A third of our patients were put out the back door in body bags.” She wondered, even as she wrote the book, what became of the men sent home in comas and/or paralyzed. “We never learned their fate. Is someone still caring for them?”

The doctors and nurses in that time and place had limited supplies and equipment. Berg describes how they invented and jury-rigged what they could to help their patients. They improvised humidifiers by cutting the bottoms out of plastic jugs and hanging them over patients. They invented catheters from condoms and tubing. They were all so young! She tells one story of sending a young corpsman to get boxes of condoms from the exchange and discovering that he didn’t know what condoms were. (The corpsmen, she says, were usually “sweet” farm boys from the Midwest, conscientious objectors who wanted nothing to do with the war but “took the best care of their patients that was humanly possible.”)

Surprisingly, the evacuation hospital admitted not just members of the American military, but South Vietnamese soldiers and even members of the Viet Cong (who were shunted to the back of the line when conditions were crowded.) Civilians, including children, were also treated.

Berg was very much drawn to the children. She tells of one in particular, a baby with a head injury from being “thrown away” because the father had been a Black American. Lee Ahn lived in the intensive care ward, “a little spark of light, fat cheeked and smiley.” When a certain kind of shunt was needed to drain fluid from her brain, and no hospitals in Vietnam had anything like that, Berg called her mother, who called a factory, and the shunt was delivered two days later. Lee Ahn was later sent to a local orphanage with appalling conditions.

Berg soon got involved with that orphanage, taking babies from there back to the hospital for care, especially for the repair of birth defects like cleft palates or injuries that could be easily treated. She later arranged for Lee Ahn and others to be moved to orphanages with better conditions. Moreover, she encouraged American soldiers to adopt and helped them through the required paperwork.

Berg also recounts events that were memorable for friendships, travel, and hijinks, including a trip to a Bob Hope show and adventures with underwear. One of her fellow nurses, Patricia Hill-VanderMolen, who became a friend for life, is mentioned several times and contributed to the last chapter in the book, detailing her largely parallel experience with the war but including her post-traumatic stress 20 years later, the way she dealt with it, and her return to Vietnam in 2000 to adopt a baby from Hanoi.

In “Kissing Kevin,” Berg has given today’s Americans a true sense of the Vietnam War as she lived it. The compassion and love she offered to so many — not just American soldiers but Vietnamese and the families that often accompanied them, babies, and her fellow workers — should remind readers not just of the horrors of war but of the rightness and values of caring for others. Berg understood, as we all should, that the victims of every war deserve respect and dignity.

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