Dispatch from the Razor's Edge, the Blog of Michael Stephen Fuchs
Remembrance Day 2012

Remembrance Day, and the run-up to it, is my favourite thing on a long list of reasons I love the UK. That an entire nation pauses to so visibly, and palpably, give thanks to the millions who sacrificed, fought, and died to gift us with our lives, freedom, security, and prosperity, and does so every year without fail, is incredibly beautiful to watch – and to have the privilege of being part of.




The same very cute elderly man was running the poppy desk at our local grocery store every night, and most nights I would chat with him. I had to exchange a lot of pleasantries before I finally learned that he had served for four years as a nurse in the Army. His eldest brother, whom he never knew, had been a navigator in a surveillance plane in north Africa during WWII – and had died when he was shot down over Egypt. Both of his other brothers also served in WWII. ("I was very late, and a mistake," he said. Some of the best are.) I told him about my grandfather who had served in the Pacific; and he told me I ought to plant a cross for him in the Remembrance Garden, in the churchyard of Westminster Abbey. I had never heard of this. He gave me the cross and told me what to write.

And then, being British, we went down the pub.


  family     pops     the military     the uk     london  
about
close photo of Michael Stephen Fuchs

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very  long  walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

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