See The Light, Kiss The Ground. A Docu-Novel of the Vietnam War - Steve Andrews

"Welcome to our nice little Vietnam conflict, meatheads! Now sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up and listen like your life depends on it... 'cause it does!"

March 1970. Staff Sergeant Mike Mitchell steps off a helicopter into the suffocating heat of Vietnam's Central Highlands with 355 days left on his clock. He is a green infantry grunt. His firebase is called San Juan Hill. And the bad guys in jungle surrounding it want him dead.

One year. Two wars. Every day counted.

See the Light, Kiss the Ground follows Mitchell across a full year of war, from his first fearful days as a replacement through frontline combat, elite reconnaissance operations, and the long surreal journey home. On one track, Mitchell and his fellow grunts fight their way through ambushes, booby traps, firefights, and the slow grind of jungle patrols where the enemy is everywhere and nowhere. On a parallel track, the political world collides with theirs: Nixon invades Cambodia, four students fall at Kent State, the antiwar movement explodes, and back home the body count climbs in newspapers these men will never read.

They didn't all come home. Many who did were never the same.

This is a novel about what the war did to the men who fought it. The brotherhood that kept them alive. The black humor that kept them sane. The medics who stopped the bleeding, the point men who walked into the unknown first, the good lieutenants who led from the front, the bad leaders who didn't listen, and the draftees who never asked to be there but refused to let their brothers down. It is about the slow transformation of a young sergeant who does not believe in the war but believes completely in the men beside him. And it is about what happens when those men finally come home to a country that does not want to hear what they have been through.

Based on real letters. Real reports. Real war. Written by a veteran who served in the unit and place depicted, See the Light, Kiss the Ground blends historical fiction with actual events from 1970 in a dual-track structure unlike any other Vietnam War novel. The characters are fictional. The terrain, the tactics, the fear, and the price paid are not.

Best for readers who love visceral, ground-level war fiction in the tradition of Tim O'Brien, Karl Marlantes, and James Webb. For veterans, their families, students of history, and anyone who has ever wondered what it really felt like to be young, afraid, and 8,000 miles from home in a war your own country had stopped believing in.