Kissing Kevin: An American Nurse in the Vietnam War by Sara Berg
War is hell for men. We’ve always known that. As you read this book, you will discover that war is hell for women too. Sara bravely walked into that hell and made a difference. Then she bravely wrote her deeply personal memoir. I applaud her raw honesty, her courage to relive the mud and blood of the Vietnam experience exposing the emotional price paid by her and her sister veterans while documenting the immense contribution and sacrifice of women in military uniform during the Vietnam War.
— Diane Carlson Evans, Captain, Army Nurse Corps, Vietnam 1968–69. Author of Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C. and Founder, Vietnam Women’s Memorial
In this compellingly readable narrative, Sara Berg describes improvising tools in a wartime field hospital to ease the pain of badly wounded American soldiers and helpless Vietnamese orphans. Her searing account would be almost too much to bear if it weren’t for the emergence of an extraordinary counter-narrative: the constant struggle by Berg and some colleagues to hold onto compassion and love. She tears her heart out and shows it to you. These memories of war pulsate with the fierce glow of life itself.
— Tom Kizzia, author of Pilgrim’s Wilderness and Cold Mountain Path
Sara Berg’s inspiring story, Kissing Kevin, shines a light in heart-wrenching detail on the arc of a young woman’s life fresh from nursing school to a warzone in Vietnam. Her story takes us from northern California to the painful learning grounds of the 24th Evac Hospital in Long Binh, Vietnam, in 1970–1971. With clarity and urgency, Sara captures the experience of the kisses, touches, and losses of her time caring for her soldiers. She honors in every page the dignity and humanity of the young boys afflicted by the cruelty of an unpopular war… Sara Berg reveals to us her determination to help everyone from babies to families of the dying, to the young man asking for one last kiss. She knows the reality of war and its lingering damages…
— Diane Carpenter, author of In the Winter of the Orange Snow
Cirque Press Author — Sara Berg
Sara Berg was born in Wareham, Massachusetts on August 2, 1948, and grew up around the U.S. and in Germany as part of a large military family. The Army recruited her while she was in nursing school in Maryland. Sara had no idea how her life would change as a result. Sara, then 22, was posted for a year in Vietnam, 1970–71, where she tended to injured and dying soldiers, in many cases sharing the final words or being the final face a soldier saw before death.
Sara never knew she could write a book. But in the midst of the summer of 2023, during a period when she could do little else than endure a series of intense medical treatments, she wrote Kissing Kevin in three months, the words bursting out of her between doctors’ appointments.
Sara passed away peacefully at home in Homer, Alaska on January 24th with her family at her side.
Sara writes: I have been blessed with an interesting life, filled with fun and adventures, and sprinkled throughout with sorrow. I recently wrote a short book called Kissing Kevin that takes you on one of my earlier adventures as a US Army nurse in Vietnam during the war. It is quite good but might make you cry; it did me.