At Some Point You Just Have To

We're Often Told That We Live In A Globalized World, And We Talk About It All The Time, But People Don't Stop To Think About What It Means.

Would We Be The Heroes Or The Cowards Of The Piece? Would We Follow Orders Or Stick To Our Principles, If Those Two Things Ever Conflicted? Would We Be The Brave Ones Who Still Found The Capacity For Love - And For Laughter - Even While We Were Terrified?

I Write In The Novel's Afterword That Our Recent Wars "finish Not With Victory Or Defeat But With A Calendar Draw-down Date And A Presumption That We Shall Never Be Reconciled With The Enemy".

This Thing With Being Lovers, It Isn't Like Being Married.

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.