Harry Steed

This library exists because I got tired of watching experienced people take detail on faith. A rifle in a paperback carries the wrong magazine; a film squad clears a room in a way that would get half of it killed; a pocket knife is described as standard issue when no army ever issued it. None of that ruins a good story. It does tell you who did the homework.

I spent my working life in uniform, and I have been retired long enough to notice what I miss: the habit of checking. Reframing Victory is that habit pointed at the things I care about. How a service weapon was adopted, and what the date on a history page actually records. How the men’s adventure paperbacks of the seventies and eighties turned a named hero and his equipment into a publishing machine — I own more first editions of one of those series than is strictly reasonable. How a film makes an event feel real, and where the realism stops.

Everyday carry sits in the middle of it. People choose what goes in their pockets for reasons, and those reasons deserve better than a product list.

Each article keeps its sources close and says what the evidence can and cannot establish. My novel of the same name follows a journalist and a cameraman embedded with the wrong unit of the French Foreign Legion. Explaining what is going on turns out to be harder when you are standing in the middle of it.