Your Happy Hour - The Stack Series ~ "See the Light, Kiss the Ground" ft. Steve Andrews

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Welcome to The Stack Series! ✨The Stack Series features new books and emerging authors sharing their stories, inspirations, and journeys with us. In this special episode, we celebrate the launch of a new book into the world by author Steve Andrews discussing his journey of writing 'See the Light, Kiss the Ground,' a docu-novel about the Vietnam War. 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.He shares insights on the creative process, the themes of moral injury, and the importance of sharing stories to foster understanding and healing.Check out Steve’s book here.🎧 Stay tuned for stories that inspire, uplift, and spark your abundant life!The Stack Series is produced by swartkat.co - captured via riverside.fm & shared via rss.com.

Welcome back to the Fields podcast and this is another Fields session and it is an episode as part of the Stack series, which is a new series that we've been running, celebrating new authors, new books. And today I am so privileged to have a conversation with an author who has worked quite an interesting journey and it's something that I don't think about often. It's something I don't know much about. And it's been so wonderful to discover this new world. And I'm really a big welcome to you, Steve Andrews, to the feel space, to the Stack series. And yeah, just really excited to have this conversation with you. So you've written a book. First of all, how does that feel for you to have put that out there?

In years to get it in print from when I started. So it's a relief. and it feels like an accomplishment. I'm still uncertain of the quality of the product. That'll be up to readers to decide, but it feels good to have it in print. Amazing. Amazing.

It's such a journey to write a book, right? And just to sit down and actually to do that. And I know that when Parker publishers shared your media kit and you shared your press release with me, it read a young American ghost to war. 50 years later, he finally tells the story. And so that's just such a long journey that you've kind of accumulated a lot of stories and feelings about this. So a big congratulations for putting it out there.

And I know the book is called See the Light, Kiss the Ground. And it's a bit of a docu novel about the Vietnam War. But you can tell us a little bit more about that. And I'm really quite curious about the statistics behind it and what led to you writing this book and what it's about. Well, when I came home from the war back in 1970, early 1971, I sort of burned to write a book that was in the tradition of, frankly, the anti-war novelists.

Catch 22 was the best example. And Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. And Johnny got his gun. These were real classics. And I made the mistake of thinking, I could walk in their footsteps without a whole lot of effort. Not so. After a few years of studying, writing and this and that and the other, I really put the book to bed.

I realized I didn't have what it took at that time to pull it together. Fifty, you know, 45 years later, I picked it back up again. This time with a bit of a different angle that I thought might perhaps catch some attention and help people see the war in a different light. So what I did was I created a two-track novel. One track is 19 chapters of short history about the events that were transpiring back in the United States during the war, and specifically during the year 1970.

Then I have a much longer track of 38 chapters that are historical fiction that tell the story of the protagonist and his fellow grunts, as they, you know, battle with the jungle and leeches and heat exhaustion and all the trials and tribulations of a war, let alone with the so-called bad guys that we're fighting against. And mixing those two creates contrast and context for both. It gives the reader a feel for the time and the era.

And it also, frankly, sheds some pretty irons. light on what people are being asked to do in the jungles on behalf of the country, while what's going on in Washington, D.C., in power struggles between the various players running the show. It's not something that the guys in the Bush feel when they're fighting, and it's not something that the politicians directly relate to when they're making decisions. So the divide between the two is sort of brought together when they run side by side. That's very powerful. I've never really thought about writing a book in that way, and that's now, it makes sense why it's a docu novel, and, you know, I think it's really amazing that you could

tell these two stories and these two sides. And so I'm curious about the title. What was the choice behind choosing these words? Well, Kiss the Ground is what you do when artillery and mortar rounds are falling on your head. Kiss the ground is also what my protagonist did before he left the country, just before he got on an airplane. He swore, I'll be back. He made it back, but in different shape.

And he said, and I'll kiss the ground when I get back, which he did. But on the way, he kissed the ground while artillery rounds, sadly they were friendly fire, were falling on his head and his fellow grunts. So that's the kiss the ground part. See the light was also a double entendre. It was in the air of the day,

the Secretary of Defense said he could see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Vietnam conflict. And it became a catchphrase, the light at the end of the tunnel. You know, it also became a sort of butt of jokes. The light at the end of the conflict. of the tunnel is a train that's just about ready to run over you. And this and that and the other.

But also the light in this case is explosions going off. Just while there are illumination rounds being fired at night. These are like bright candles floating down in the sky to light up a combat zone. And so you're watching these night float. players, night candles, bright, brilliant things fall down and then suddenly there's the light from an explosion right beside you. So it had to do with circumstances and it's double entendres for sure. Yeah, well, it's, yeah, I feel like you've obviously experienced so much and, you know, it's not something that I know much about in terms of war. And my, you know, growing up, I know that my

dad went to war in South Africa as well, but it's not something that's really talked about often, you know, and I think this is why it's so important that you wrote the book, because especially from what I understood, like, it wasn't something that was dealt with, always in the best way, you know, people going to war and then coming back and feeling certain things about what you've experienced there. And I remember kind of reading the stats and it was saying, you were in 1970 alone, 6,000-odd Americans in uniform died, and nearly three times that number were wounded. And so two-thirds of this were about 20 years old and younger, which is just incredible to me. I mean, it's such a young age to experience so much of what you guys did.

Well, sadly, in society, it's older men and now older women send younger men and now younger women off to fight their wars. Not a lot of thought is given to what happens to those young people when they go off to war, but especially what happens when they try to come back and reintegrate. One of the major difficulties of the Vietnam War was that it was a replacement war. You didn't send units, companies and battalions and platoons and so on. You didn't send them overseas together. You sent a plain load of replacements and one got sent here and one got sent there. You knew no one that you were going over with. You knew no one in the unit that you joined. You were the look down upon new braw rookie. And this was a real challenge for guys who arrived.

How do you get accepted? How do you bond with people who are looking at you like, you don't know anything. Conversely, when they pick people came home from that combat zone, they came back with a plane load of strangers one at a time from a unit. I have my protagonist look at the flight manifest and he doesn't recognize a single name of the 150 people he's going home with. There's no joy of camaraderie and celebration of having made it, at least not that one can chair other than through sort of an enabriated flight back home with complete strangers. But the lack of forethought into not only preparing soldiers for the trauma that they're going to face pulling the trigger and shooting at other people, and then returning home after they've

done that on orders from their commanding officers, the lack of preparation. both briefing and debriefing about the mental and emotional side of the war, as I think to this day, a shortcoming in how our armed forces treat our soldiers.

It's really unfortunate. Think about it today. There's discussion of sending boots on the ground to the Middle East. That boots on the ground is a generic phrase. They're real feet of real people in those boots that are sent over there. They need to be, the issues surrounding their service, I think, need more attention than they've

gotten. And I'm certainly far from the only one who thinks that way. Yeah, 100%. I think that there's, it feels like there's very little kind of humanity, the aspect of humanity and like you said, like the human experience of that whole, you know, know, that experience of going there and being so isolated and then having to, I'm sure you get to know yourself very well. I'm sure you learn a lot of self-trust and all of that, which is wonderful, but then it's really difficult. And I know when we spoke earlier, you mentioned this concept of,

and you mentioned in the book, of moral injury, which is really interesting to me. So maybe you can just explain a little bit about, like, one, how you heard about that. term and then what that means. Well, it's interesting. The term doesn't refer to physical injury, which so many suffered

overseas, it refers more to the mental and emotional side of combat. I recently read a book called On Killing. And it's a it studied the impact of sending men to combat and what it was like for them to readjust to life after combat.

And for some it was extremely difficult. One of the things that seemed, according to the author, one of the things that seemed to help separate those who adjusted better than others, was a circumstance in which they could share, probably with colleagues, not with a psychiatrist necessarily, not with friends and family, but with colleagues in a semi-organized way

that helped them offload some of the burden of going to combat. In the case of my book, I actually had not heard the phrase moral injury until just after I sent it to the publisher. I was directed to somebody who had set up a small nonprofit called Coming Home Haunted Foundation, as in soldiers coming home haunted from combat. And he read the book and he said, well, it's right here on the back cover. it said, it weaves together everything that comes with one year of warfare, including the ghosts of moral injury. So the book does delve into it, the feelings that are experienced by several of the characters, not just one, but several of the characters in these, you know, the

challenging circumstances and tragic outcomes that they have. have to deal with. And I appreciated hearing about the term and knowing that I had contributed to the dialogue. I'm actually now volunteering to be to serve with that small nonprofit and whatever way I can. So, but it's, moral injury is not the same as PTSD. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is is, is more that that's more tied directly. Well, they're linked. They're linked. because you can have PTSD and not have been wounded. It is a slightly different way to look at and talk about the issues involved by using the term moral injury. I've seen full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal on moral injury.

I was quite surprised to see it. There is some awakening about this issue that slumbers but can pop up many years later. at a time that can surprise, you know, the person affected. Definitely. And I think that's often what happens when we go through these experiences in life. And sometimes we suppress them and then later you kind of get to quietly unwind and realize what on earth you've experienced and what's happened and deal with those. How is that for you?

I mean, I assume that a lot of what you've written is, maybe it's been a bit of a release and healing for you too. Well, by the time I got to writing the book, I had completely made peace with the after effects of the war. In fact, I did that within four or five years. Turns out it was just what I described, a sharing experience, that which the author of the book on killing said was helpful and useful, and it turned out to be useful to me too. So perhaps it was a function of not being in the heaviest combat. I was in relatively speaking, I would call it moderate combat circumstances, not in big pitched battles the way some were.

Perhaps that was part of it, perhaps the sharing. And then also, I wrote a lot of letters home that in retrospect sort of shocked me at how much I shared. And I think what that did was it was like a pressure cooker. It provided some relief off the top. It didn't build it up as much. The combination of those factors probably helped me be where I am today, which is I'm not plagued by the things that happened, the things that I participated in, the things that I saw

and feel more fortunate than some of my fellow vets who weren't quite so fortunate. That's amazing. I'm so happy to hear that. I mean, it's really great that you could work through that. And I love that you wrote letters. I think like writing is just such a beautiful expression of emotion. And I know you also have a poem in the book, which is just so wonderful.

And what was that like writing a poem? And I know you said it was the first one that you've ever written. Well, the poem was to honor. a medic. The medics and the chopper pilots and the point men's, these are the three guys. If I had to pick any characters, I admired their courage and bravery and sense of sacrifice and contribution to the whole more than any other. In this case, this medic wrote about his experience in Vietnam, but in particular it highlights a major a major loss of life,

a booby trap, and this is, I'm reflecting at a real event, 10 men killed and 20 wounded, just like that. And he had, he was confronted with enormous blood, guts, carnage, and he had to do the best he could do along with the other two medics, in the company as fast as he could to save as many lives as he could.

And he did save some. And then he had some slip right through his hands right there. So this is honoring his efforts. I had him actually write the poem from his perspective and then share it with his sergeant, the book's protagonist. And I have him, in fact, the medic say, it's his first poem. He's never written one before, which was in fact my case. My poem actually won a little award when I submitted it offline, apart from the book, to a little poet competition.

I feel pretty good. It's a basic poem. It's not a literary poem. It's a very basic poem about a combat medic and what he had to deal with. I love it. And that's amazing. You know, poetry, it's one of my loves in my life. It's how a lot of things started for me in my artistic journey. And poetry can be so powerful. It doesn't have to rhyme. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. It can just be three lines even, you know. And it's great that you could share that in that way in the book. Actually, I have my protagonist when he picks it up and starts reading the poem, he stops and looks at the medic. He says, what? You both wrote this in meter and rhyme and what is it, IAMIC pentameter or whatever, they called it in high school when I read it. So, yeah, it was fun to have the interaction between the two characters about the poem.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's so, like, unusual and interesting. And I also really love how you ended the book. It comes with an invitation to the readers, which I've never really seen before. And yeah, maybe you can just explain it a little bit about the ending, the fact that you're leaving an email address, the invite for people to engage with you on the material in the book. Sure. Well, in the afterward to the book, I talk about moral injury, the episode that I shared earlier where I met with this gentleman. He sent me an essay about a moral injury. I clip that and put it in the back of the afterwards.

Prior to that little clip, I explained that most of the book is based on real events, but the characters are scrambled, and it is fiction, but very much based on real events. And then at the very end, I talk a little bit about my long trail from first starting this many, many decades ago to completing it with the two-track, fiction, of the two-track structure in mind. And I do call out the fact that I was trying to walk in the footsteps of some pretty great authors. No, I didn't come that close, but to the extent that

I succeeded or not, I'm a little uncertain about, and I welcome readers to send me a note. And I include an email address for them to do just that, should they choose to take advantage of the opportunity. Yeah, I think it's so unique. And I love that you, you know, you're opening a dialogue, you're opening a conversation about this. And exactly like you were mentioning earlier about sharing is healing. And I think more people can talk about this topic specifically. And the fact that they can reach out to you easily is, is amazing that you're accessible. And so I really applaud that. They're very, they're very welcome to. Readers have different experiences. They come with different experiences. You know, some of these readers are vets. And I had a vet the other

day, send me a note saying, spot on, you hit it. I can still smell the garbage dumps on San Juan Hill. And others, some women in particular have had some very interesting responses. Clearly, of course, no combat experience from women of my era. So it's, it's been interesting to see what people have had to say. It'll be even more interesting when people, I don't know, provide some feedback and some insight as to what they experienced when they read the book. Yeah, absolutely. And I also want to read a quick review that I know you was shared with me by Mortendine. And you can maybe explain a little bit more about who he is. And it says CBS News correspondent. But he reported in the Vietnam War, as I recall correctly. And he said, yeah, a young American

and goes to war, authentic, extraordinary, compelling, different from any war story I've ever read. So I feel like that's an amazing review to receive for your book. Well, it's interesting, Morton Dean, the CBS News correspondent who wrote that note, I met him at a reunion with an Army division where he was the keynote speaker. We didn't know each other, but the minute we were at a bus stop, and the minute I heard, heard his voice. I knew him from television. I had heard his voice. We hooked up there. I told him I was reading a book. He read it. He said, send me some chapters. I sent him some chapters. He gave me some feedback. That was eight years ago, seven years ago. I then sent him the completed book. He's 90 years old

now. He read the book and said it and was so kind in his remarks. that it was clicked and put on the front page. You know, from the people of the era, Morton Dean with CBS News was a name and a face and a voice that was respected. Sadly, much more than the news media is respected in this era. It's too bad. Yeah, yeah, things have changed quite a bit. And what I'm really curious about, though, is, I mean,

besides the reader's experience, what was it like for you being a writer? and like what did it feel like to write this book and publish it and editing process? Like, what did that feel like for you? Well, it was long and hard. Now and then it was very satisfying. At other times, it was very challenging. I got feedback now and then that made me really think and go back and revise. That's what's great about a computer keyboard you can revise so easily now.

It was a hard and challenging process. I had written nonfiction before. This is my first primarily fiction. book. I needed some coaching and was receptive to it. At the end of the day, it feels good to have have it in print after a really long effort that involved trying to tie these two tracks together, the historic dates, the actual dates of, say, May 4th, 1970, when the Kent State Massacre happens and four students are shot on campus and nine are wounded. And what happened May 4th? in Vietnam to our protagonist and his mates.

And so there was a lot to the design of the book and the challenges to blend those two in a way that wouldn't be too distracting that would in fact be reinforcing. And there were actually moments when I laugh, when I wrote some stuff, I came up with some good material, you know, some whistling past the graveyard, gallows humor stuff.

to lighten what is otherwise a fairly intense situation you're writing about. Yeah, absolutely. And I can only imagine it's like it's so much research and it's very specific, you know, but also with the personal story is kind of woven in there, which makes it very unique. Yeah. The research took a lot of time. And on the history side, I wanted to be very careful to get it right. I do weigh in with the occasional comment about, you know, wonder how this statement or this

perspective by President Nixon will hold up over time and so on, because I am writing at the day of. So I'm not writing with retrospective on May 4th, at least not overt. I'm writing about what happened on May 4th and the Kent State Massacre. So the lack of being able to have, share retrospective, deep retrospective. was kind of tying one hand behind my back, but I managed to slip in some zingers now and then. That's amazing. Yeah, no, I think it's just, it's incredible for you to have kind of gone through that journey

and kind of teleport us back into time, you know. And I wonder if you have any advice for authors who are kind of starting out and wanting to be an author from your experience now. what is it that you would say is something that any author should go through or do when they're kind of busy with their process? As a guy who's no spring chicken, having just put out my first book, I don't know that my advice would be that relevant to somebody trying this at a much smarter and younger age. I guess you've got to partly write about what you know and write about what is going to be a passion.

If you want to follow a story such as I did, I'm. I dug down deep and it became a passion to get it done despite all the years that it took to get it done. So if you really are motivated by something, go for it. If you're not quite satisfied, keep working on it. You know, I have a friend of mine, colleague, she's wanting to write a book. And she doesn't know exactly where to start. And one of the things I said was, well, write an article about it first. and then write a series of articles about it, and then move on, you know, move up.

So maybe if you don't feel like jumping into the deep end, maybe you wait in from the shallow end, there are different ways of approaching it. Again, I started this in 1971, put it to bed in 1975, and only picked it back up again nine years ago. So you never know. Never say never. Never say never absolutely I love I love that phrase because you never know what life is going to bring and here you are you you've now published the book and so huge congratulations to that and thank you so much for sharing so openly about the journey with us here it's just it's been fascinating I mean it's just such an interesting topic and it's a hard topic to talk about too you know

but I I love that you've written it with such and shared with such passions Well, listen, thank you for the opportunity of sharing with your listeners. I hope some of them pick up the book and maybe grab some insights from it. You never know. Absolutely. And for those who are listening, I wonder what you're feeling about this topic. Perhaps it's something that's an experience you've had. Maybe it's something that you've seen someone experience.

And I also wonder what you're feeling about writing. Maybe you're an author in the making. But whatever your journey, I hope that you are happy. I hope you are happily reading and reading more books and celebrating authors like Steve. And we just wish all the authors out there the best in their journeys. So thank you so much for being part of that, Steve. And until next time on the Stack Series, where we celebrate more books, and they will all be on the website.

So check it out there.