5 Questions with Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood
Matt Gallagher joined the Army ROTC the week before September 11th while attending Wake Forest University. After graduating in 2005, he commissioned into the Army, going on to serve in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, including time in the famed 27th Infantry Regiment. After leaving the Army, Gallagher published his memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War to widespread acclaim. Youngblood is his first novel, published by @atriabooks.
1. The New York Daily News has named you among writers like Elliot Ackerman, Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Kevin Powers and Brandon Willitts as heralding a new generation of American war literature, much like Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Joseph Heller or Graham Greene did during past military conflicts. What do you think of that comparison? What do you think characterizes this generation of war literature?
Well, it’s very nice to be placed in such esteemed company. Those names made an entire career of writing deep, incisive creative work, work that still matters and resonates all these years later. Those writers were an inspiration, certainly. But I think the writers of my generation are still just focusing on one book, one story at a time, at least I know I am. As much as I respect the work of the Hemingways and the Cranes, as much as their work has mattered to me as a reader and as a thinker, I’m not interested in being the next whomever. I want to be the best Matt Gallagher I can be as a writer, just as I want my work to be its absolute best when it reaches readers.
As for what characterizes this generation of war literature — the American military is made up of an all-volunteer force now. What does that mean, in terms of how wars are carried out and how it looks to those in foreign countries living in the midst of it? How does it impact and affect American society at large? How does it impact and affect soldiers and citizens individually? These are important questions that deserve the literary treatment, and thankfully are now starting to get it.
2. Youngblood is about a young lieutenant deployed in Iraq, leading his platoon and navigating the complications within the Army as well. You were a Scout platoon leader, a captain, and a targeting officer for the US Army during the Iraq War. How much of Youngblood is influenced from or inspired by your own experiences? What other sources inspired the work?
I’d already written a book from the perspective of Matt Gallagher (my memoir Kaboom) so I’d been freed from that first-time author-as-narrator impulse. Early on in the drafts of Youngblood, I decided I wanted to utilize a first-person narrative to get at a deeper emotional texture for this story, but I also knew that my narrator needed to be engaging than I am, more interesting, too. Enter Lieutenant Jack Porter.
Over the course of developing Jack, I realized he’d be much more conflicted than I am about Iraq and the war, for better or worse. He’s very slow to burn, but things stick with them, and he chews them over and over again, sometimes to his detriment. I’d be worried if Jack was my friend or son because of this, but he makes for a heck of a narrator, I think!
That said, of course there are pieces of me in Jack. There are pieces of me in every character of Youngblood, from the Machiavellian Sergeant Chambers to the Iraqi mother Rana. An author’s duty to his/her characters is to give them human fullness and dimensionality, and if that comes at the expense of oneself, so be it.
As for other sources that inspired this book … there are so many. Youngblood is set a few years after my unit was in Iraq, so I read a ton of journalism and nonfiction to get a better feel for how the war and country had changed. A variety of oral histories helped me get a deeper sense of the war’s impact on everyday Iraqis.
3. While there are several narrative threads throughout Youngblood, what are the main issues you try to examine and bring light to?
If I had to pick one thing, it’s that the consequences of armed violence can never be anticipated, and resonate in those unanticipated ways for long after those involved are around.
4. You started writing about your military experiences through what came to be a very successful blog, called “Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal”. It gained national attention, which was a big deal, but was eventually shut down in 2008 by the military. How did that sit with you? How did you react?
Yes, I’d been keeping the blog for about six months before it got shut down by my chain-of-command. Before the post that brought it down, it’d been met with support by my superiors and peers; it was just a thing to do to unwind, twice a week or so. Writing those posts was a way for me to try and make sense of a world and place where sense was very difficult to find.
Then sometime in June 2008, my battalion commander and I had an ugly conversation, the type of conversation that can only happen in the military. I blogged about it, perhaps naively thinking it wouldn’t go anywhere. It, well, did go places. The blog got shut down as a result, and some readers pushed back, reaching out to their congressmen and the like. There were some congressional inquiries into the matter, etcetera.
The whole thing was sort of silly and overblown, and there weren’t any real consequences other than losing the blog — that same battalion commander still promoted me to captain a month later. Should they have shut down the blog? Naw, that made it a much bigger deal than it would’ve been otherwise. Should I have made fun of my boss on the Internet? Naw, that can’t happen either, especially in a combat zone. (Even if what I wrote was the God’s honest truth!)
5. The New York Times has praised the humor and “verve” in your writing, but also notes how Youngblood is ultimately a tragic story and points to the “Sisyphean” nature of endless combat. Do you agree? How do you think writing during deployment influenced your experience of it?
I do agree, and was ecstatic to see that mentioned in the review by The Times. I’m no pacifist, but I am greatly concerned with how our nation is utilizing our military during these murky times. And I say that as a citizen first, a veteran second.
What’s the end purpose, the end goal? There’s a difference between working toward lasting peace and working toward temporary calm. I joined the Army to work toward the former, like a lot of young service members in my generation. I’m not sure our military strategies since then have matched that intent.
How did my deployment influence that thinking? That’s a great question, and one I’m still figuring out, I think. That’s a lot of the reason why I write: to figure out exactly how I feel about the things that interest me, that wake me up at night, that burn within even when I try to think about something else.
Bonus: What books or writers are you crazy about right now?
Lynn Steger Strong’s novel Hold Still. It’s an amazing, amazing book about life, love and family, and it’s out in March. Everyone should read it.
Youngblood is out today, February 2nd, and is available for purchase here!
