Parker Publishers is proud to announce the release of See the Light, Kiss the Ground: A Docu-Novel of the Vietnam War by Steve Andrews. This is not another book about Vietnam. It is the book that took nine years to write and over fifty years to be ready for. Part war story, part time capsule, part reckoning, it arrives as a deeply personal and powerfully structured account of what it meant to be young, armed, terrified, and 8,000 miles from home in 1970.
Morton Dean, the CBS News correspondent who reported from Vietnam during the war, calls it: “A young American goes to war. Authentic. Extraordinary. Compelling. Different from any war story I’ve ever read.”
What the Book Is
See the Light, Kiss the Ground follows Staff Sergeant Mike Mitchell and his comrades through a year of combat in the central highlands of South Vietnam. They hump seventy-pound packs through triple-canopy jungle, burn leeches off their necks, swat mosquitoes the size of small birds, and learn that the line between staying alive and dying can be as thin as a split second of hesitation. The fiction track is rooted in real events drawn from the author’s own letters home and battalion situation reports, embellished and scrambled to protect the men who lived them.
Running parallel to the war story is the non-fiction track, a chronicle of what was happening back in the world on the same dates. Nixon’s Cambodia incursion. The massacre at Kent State. The My Lai trial. Muhammad Ali’s comeback fight. Janis Joplin’s last concert. Anti-war protests shutting down 400 college campuses. The juxtaposition is deliberate and devastating. While grunts on San Juan Hill fought for each other’s lives, the country they came from was tearing itself in half.
Andrews calls this format a “docu-novel,” and he is the first to admit the blend of fiction and non-fiction is unusual. In his own words: they seem more like oil and water than chocolate sauce and ice cream. But the combination works. The historical chapters frame the soldiers’ daily slogs through hostile terrain with the broader forces that shaped their war, giving the reader both the view from the foxhole and the view from ten thousand feet.
Why This Book, Why Now
Steve Andrews first tried to write this book in the early 1970s, fueled by 41 candid letters sent from the war zone and 65 pages of notes typed within months of his return. He wanted it to stand in the tradition of Catch-22, Slaughter-House Five, and Johnny Got His Gun. Four years later, he walked away. Life happened. Travel, work, a marriage, children. Only in 2017 did he return to the material with fresh eyes and a new structural idea: weave the war’s daily grind against the larger forces driving it. Nine years of writing later, the book is finished.
The result is a book that never sentimentalizes combat and never lets the reader forget its cost. In 1970 alone, 6,173 Americans in uniform died. Nearly three times that number were wounded. Two thirds of the Army’s dead were 21 years old or younger. These were not statistics to the men who served alongside them. They were the guy in the next foxhole. The medic who stopped the bleeding. The helicopter pilot who dropped them in and pulled them home.
The Briefing and the Debriefing
The book opens and closes with two unforgettable scenes built around a single character: Sergeant Wilson, a combat veteran with mirrored sunglasses, worn-out jungle boots, and a voice that could cut through rotor wash. In the opening chapter, Wilson briefs a hundred rookies on the five deadly forces waiting for them in the bush. In the final chapter, he sits in a circle of returning grunts at Fort Lewis and helps them begin the work of letting go. Both chapters represent something Andrews says should have existed but did not: proper preparation and proper homecoming. The briefings and debriefings the Army never gave its soldiers.
Between those bookends, the book delivers firefights and quiet moments with equal precision. There are nights on ambush where Mitchell cannot see his own hand. There are mornings where the jungle canopy blocks out the sun and the humidity wraps around you like a wet wool blanket. There are mercy killings and monsoons, body counts and blown ambushes, and always the ticking clock of days left in country. 355 and a wake-up. Then 300. Then 200. Then, if you were lucky, zero.
About the Author
Steve Andrews served as a staff sergeant with the 4th Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division, based at Firebase San Juan Hill in Quang Ngai province during 1970. Over ninety percent of the events in the war-story track are based on actual events. He is a freelance writer who spent more than five decades carrying this story before putting it on the page. He can be reached at Steveandrews1970@gmail.com.
Book Details
Title: See the Light, Kiss the Ground: A Docu-Novel of the Vietnam War
Author: Steve Andrews
Genre: Historical Fiction / Military / Docu-Novel
Publisher: Parker Publishers
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