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Some of it probably has to do with the glowing jacket blurbs from luminaries such as Tim O’Brien and Richard Ford.

Which got me thinking about why it didn’t feel like a war novel. Youngblood covers a lot of ground, from the situation at home to the realities of combat, while managing to avoid stereotypes. By the book’s conclusion, Jack Porter is a man changed by love, death, and passion.

Porter finds them in the end, but in doing so, unwittingly rekindles sectarian violence that threatens the stability of Ashuriyah. The entrance of Sergeant Chambers, a prickly NCO whose murky past is cause for whispered rumor, forces Porter to look into Chambers’ reputation, where he begins to discover hints of a dark history forged in the fires of the good old horrible days of the Iraq Adventure.Īlong the way, he uncovers the mysterious 2006 disappearance of a soldier named Elijah Rios, a comrade of Chambers, but each investigative step results in more questions that require answers. We meet Jack Porter five months into his tour, untested and bored with the lack of kinetics. military payroll, sheikhs playing for power. It’s a “clear, hold, build” kind of place: Sahwa militia on the U.S. Gallagher’s debut novel, Youngblood, revisits that time through the eyes of Lieutenant Jackson Porter, an infantry officer stationed at an outpost in the fictional Ashuriyah. Kaboom, Gallagher’s memoir of his deployment to post-Surge Iraq as an Army lieutenant, was raw: a MFA-pedigreed descendant of Colby Buzzell’s Iraq memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn and works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.Matt Gallagher knows The Suck, and we know he can do a damn fine job writing about it. Petraeus.Ī graduate of Wake Forest University, Matt also holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Among other media, he's appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning and NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, and was interviewed at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan by retired general David H. In January 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren read Matt's Boston Globe op-ed "Trump Rejects the Muslims Who Helped Us" on the U.S. In 2015, Gallagher was featured in Vanity Fair as one of the voices of a new generation of American war literature. He's also the author of the Iraq war memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review and Wired, among other places. Matt Gallagher is the author of the novels Empire City and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.