Decades after coming home from Vietnam, a West Virginia native and WVU graduate used his experiences from childhood and service overseas to write a novel. “I never expected this to be published,”said author John Brown. “It was a bucket list item. I was doing it for myself and family.”

“Augie’s War” follows Augie Cumpton from the fictional Jewel Town. Brown said the name is inspired by a song from the ‘40s or ‘50s which described Clarksburg as the Jewel of the Hills. Clarksburg’s Northview neighborhood, where the 73-year-old grew up, became Riverview. Brown worked in his grandpa’s Italian bakery as a kid, and Cumpton draws on memories from his childhood spent in an Italian bakery to help deal with the traumas of war.