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Matt Gallagher: An Author and Authority On War
Matt Gallagher: An Author and Authority On War
By M.J. McAteer
Matt Gallagher is not a morning person, but six days a week, he’s up at 5 a.m. anyway, because that’s his best time to write. That reveille schedule has worked well for the 41-year-old author, whose new novel is the rather aptly named “Daybreak.”
The book is the story of love and remembrance set in war-ravaged Ukraine. He has been on a book tour which included Tulsa, where he’s had a fellowship for several years, New Haven, Buffalo and at Middleburg Books on a recent Saturday.
Middleburg is a place Gallagher knows intimately, because his mother, Deborah Scott Gallagher, has lived in town for a decade. During Covid, the writer and his wife and their two young boys spent an entire summer in Middleburg, and he and his mother used that time to read “War and Peace” together. Taking an annual photograph of his sons with the fox statue in front of the Community Center has become a family tradition.
Gallagher’s personal knowledge of Ukraine is at the heart of “Daybreak.” In 2022, he traveled to Lviv, where he helped train civil defense forces, and he returned twice more last year to talk to Ukranians and foreign soldiers about their lives under siege, experiences that he chronicled for Esquire magazine.
The writer’s interest in how people cope during wartime harks back to another brutal conflict—the counterinsurgency in Iraq, where he served as an Army scout platoon leader. He saw a lot of horror and inanities during his deployment, and he posted his mordant observations about both in a blog called “Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal.”
“I had stories to tell,” he said, “but I didn’t know what I was doing.”
For a few months, before military powers shut it down, “Kaboom” was a popular read with his fellow soldiers. When he was a civilian again, Gallagher tapped his blog postings for a memoir that The Washington Post called “at turns hilarious, maddening and terrifying.”
Two novels followed, the 2010 “Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War”; “Youngblood,” which also is set in Iraq; and “Empire City,” an alternative history in which America won the Vietnam War. “Daybreak” was released this year.
On the day that he did his reading in Middleburg, Gallagher also talked about what he called “the difficult, often impossible choices everyday people must make when a force as powerful as war comes to them.
“In my own small way, my writing this book was an attempt [to get] Americans to engage with the subject,” he said. “People don’t have a full understanding of the costs.”
Gallagher will be leaving Tulsa soon and moving to Colorado Springs, where he’ll teach writing at the Air Force Academy. He’ll also be getting up at 5 a.m. six days a week to work on his next novel, which will be set in Nevada right after the Civil War when the West teemed with veterans, Unionists and rebels alike.
“It will be liberating to look back at another time,” he said. Though that era seems so distant from 21stcentury life, just like now, people then “were trying to figure out what America was,” he said. And that’s what he wants to write about.
“I have a lot to say about my country,” he said.
