When Jeanie Shields, grandmother of the late Andrew Shields, first found out that Kolina Topel was writing a book to honor her grandson, she said it just simply made her heart melt.
“It’s like you’re (Andrew) still going to be remembered,” Jeanie said. “What an awesome thing for Andrew. He just influenced everyone he knew, everybody wanted to be his friend. He was the most positive child I’ve ever seen in my life. Andrew knew from the time he was little that he wanted to be in the Military, but you know grammy, I always told him ‘you don’t really need to go.’ But he always said, “no grammy, I’m going to be fine. I’m going to get money for college and I’m going to help people. Nothing is going to happen.”
On May 31, 2008, while serving with the 173rd Special Troop Airborne Battalion in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Andrew was killed when his vehicle was struck by a suicide car bomb. The 19-year-old was a 2007 graduate of Battle Ground High School.
“He (Andrew) had always said when he came back he hoped to be half the man his dad is,” Jeanie said. “He wanted to be a paramedic, or a firefighter, or a sheriff’s deputy.”
Kolina Topel met Andrew when they had AIT (Advanced Individual Training) together in San Antonio, TX. Topel, who lives in Indiana, spent a lot of time with Shields during the fourth months of their training and saw him periodically for about three months after that.
“Andrew’s death impacted me a lot,” Topel said. “He was the first person I really knew who was killed. Then the idea for the book came to me. I wanted to do something for Andrew and I wanted to do something different. It started building itself.”
Topel’s book, Behind Shields: The Shields Legacy, is the first book in which Topel hopes will be a series of at least three books. She said the book is sort of a biography of Shields’ life, covering most of the events that happened in his life from the time he was deployed to the time of his death. However, the book does have one major twist – Shields is killed in Afghanistan in the book, but he comes back as a vampire.
“The whole point is that in the book he doesn’t die,” Topel said. “He gets to stay alive, even though he’s a creature of the night, he gets to continue his life from where it left off.”
Topel said she made the majority of the book as true to Shields’ life as she could, using his real name and also using the real names of most of his family and friends in the book.
“Every person in the book, with the exception of his fiance and her best friend, is someone he knew in real life,” Topel said. “His parents’ real names are used, the ‘bad guy’ in the book has the name of one of his best friends from the Army, all the vampires and most of the people in the book are friends and family he had in his life.”
Topel said she started writing the book towards the end of 2009 and said she had about 10,000 words written when she ended up getting engaged and her life became a bit more busy. She said didn’t do any writing for about a year, but this past January decided she need to get it done. The book was finally published and available on Amazon.com at the end of March.
“They (Shields’ family) were all very excited in the beginning,” Topel said. “The family was very supportive, I’ve talked with his grandma a lot. They are all very excited for people to learn about Andrew. I also have an excerpt in the book about him and a photo so people can see who he was.”
Topel said she has already figured out her timeline for the next book and knows how she’s going to tie the books together. She said her hope is to possibly have the second book done by this May, but she said that is only a tentative date at the moment.
Behind Shields is available exclusively at Amazon.com for the first 90 days of its release, but will be available at all other online sources starting in July.
