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Kissing Kevin

By Alan Batten (reviewer)

Kissing Kevin, an American Nurse in the Vietnam War
by Sara Berg
(Cirque Press, 2024)

This compelling memoir of a nurse at the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh in 1970-71 is organized as a series of vignettes, events with particular emotional impacts that have stood out over the years. After 50 years of silence about her Vietnam experience, the author wrote this book in three months in the midst of a series of intense medical treatments, the words "bursting out of her" between appointments. She died early in 2024 from cancer related to Agent Orange exposure.

Medical people are often in the heartbreaking position of caring for severely wounded people, many of whom are going to die. Sara describes that heartbreak, and also the pain of young men trying to process the idea that there is no more that can be done for them. Many did die while under Sara's and her colleague's care, or shortly after being sent on to a more sophisticated hospital in Japan. One of these people is Kevin, the subject of the title vignette. He had massive wounds, but was very sweet, and the whole nursing staff fell in love with him. Near the end, he asked for a kiss from Sara and received it. The next day, he was gone. The kiss got her in trouble, but her colleagues vindicated her.

The hospital received American and Vietnamese civilians as well as military personnel. Many Vietnamese babies and children spent time there. This was partly because, on slow days, doctors and nurses would sweep through local orphanages looking for kids with medical problems that could be easily fixed. A particularly slovenly-run orphanage in Bien Hoa was often visited. Babies with a potential for survival were taken back to the hospital, nursed back to health, and then delivered to an immaculately run orphanage in Cholon. That orphanage, like all civilian facilities in Vietnam, was short on medical supplies, so Sara requisitioned critical supplies from the well-stocked shelves of her hospital and sent them over. With the help of a corpsman and other accomplices, she was also able to deliver a couple of badly needed oxygen tanks. She also made a point of carrying a handful of baby pictures in her pockets and talking up adoption to every GI she met, finding half a dozen takers over the course of the year.

Sara presents us with a caring team of medical providers who work hard under extreme circumstances, provide extraordinarily good care to patients, care for and support each other to process the losses, and yes, sometimes the mistakes. The top priority was always compassion for patients, regardless of rank, nationality, or age. Although a couple of doctors and one or two nurses who "didn't like Vietnamese, or babies" receive criticism, Sara mostly has high words of praise for her colleagues: doctors, nurses, and corpsmen. Even the patients who weren't too badly injured would readily volunteer to hold a baby, or talk with a child, or run errands to help out. The family members of injured Vietnamese also come in for high praise.

One long-term patient was a six-year-old Cambodian boy who had been injured in an American military engagement and scooped up by helicopter before any of his relatives could find him. He had an infectious personality and was much loved by both patients and staff. After a month or so, his grandfather showed up at the hospital, having walked from somewhere in Cambodia to Long Binh. Another patient had a severe and untreatable brain stem injury from a bullet wound. A patriarch of a large and highly respected Vietnamese family, he willed himself to death after Sara welcomed his extended family into the ward to hold a small wake for him.

The Bob Hope Christmas show turned out to be a disappointment. Hospital patients and staff were pushed back from their viewing area at the last minute so that a stand for TV cameras could be hastily built there. The hospital contingent's view of the show was entirely blocked. So who, exactly, was this show supposed to be for?

One of the more moving passages involves a doctor (Dr. "Rocky") who developed a special interest in a 16-month-old Vietnamese girl suffering from severe burns. He needed a space where he could care for her full-time, and arranged with Sara to set up a crib right outside her nursing station door. Here is Sara's account: "I peeked out my window constantly that night to see how they were doing. Mom on one side of the crib and Rocky's large form leaning over the other. In the morning, heading to bed, I stopped there first. I knew Rocky had moved the baby from its bed to his lap several hours ago. I didn't know why. As I came out my door, I saw the tableau before me; huge Rocky sitting in a chair, baby on his lap, his hand on the mother's head, the mother on the floor at his feet, her head resting in his lap, one arm hugging his legs, the other caressing her dead baby. They were both crying, the mother wailing. I approached them, putting my arms around them, kissing them all on their foreheads. Without a word, I walked out into the heat, heading for bed. There were no words for that scene, only tears."

It wasn't all work. Sara describes hitchhiking to the Officer's Club and getting a ride in a tank. On another occasion, she and her colleagues took a mini R&R to Cam Ranh Bay, got badly sunburned, and barely made it back on time. One of life's little problems was underwear disappearing from the laundry. The solution was to use the most boring underwear possible.

In the last section of the book, Sara relinquishes the pen to her friend Patricia Hill-VanderMolen, who describes a key experience in her own Vietnam nursing career in which she becomes exhausted by hate. Patti also summarizes her long pathway of coming to terms with it all over the following 50 years and gives us a moving prose poem, an ode to those who didn't make it, entitled "Upon This Wall."

This is an excellent book, and anyone interested in the full spectrum of experiences in the Vietnam conflict will benefit from reading it. It also serves to remind us of the importance of keeping a steady moral compass in turbulent times and maintaining the courage necessary to follow it. The book is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the ABEbooks.com network.

Alan Batten was in the 34th Engineering Battalion at Phu Loi, Viet Nam, in 1968-69, and is a lifetime member of VVAW.