Celebrating his promotion.”Īs I ate, I listened to the soldiers argue about whom they’d rather have sex with, Jessica Alba circa 2006 or Shakira circa 2008. “Smell that meat? I heard it’s ‘cause one of the cooks is old friends with Sergeant Chambers. “Welcome to family dinner, sir,” Alphabet said. I saw Chambers at a far table, so I took a seat at the nearest one. Each squad had been assigned a wood table, forty men in sweat-starched uniforms ready to eat. Squatty two-story buildings across the dirt road were about a hundred feet and a world away the entire block was dark and abandoned and had been since America made this place an edge of empire.Īt the base of the patio, I cleared my rifle and stuck the muzzle into a tin barrel, jerking the trigger with a quick squeeze.

Pale, blinking lights in the distance helped guide me to the back patio, beacons courtesy of the few locals wealthy enough to purchase generators. I circled our outpost, navigating the razor wire and blast walls that surrounded it in layers. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia and has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and Boston Review, among others. Gallagher is a former US Army captain and the author of the acclaimed Iraq War memoir Kaboom, based on the popular and controversial blog he kept while he was deployed. Gallagher subtly weaves throughout this excellent, brutal tale intrigue, a mystery, and two compelling love stories… A fresh twist on the Iraq War novel adds depth to this burgeoning genre.The following is from Matt Gallagher's novel, Youngblood. Gallagher follows up on his successful first book, the memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War (2010), with a smart Iraq War novel that adds something new to the genre-new genres. “A complex tale about the Iraq War, intrigue, love, and survival. “ writes about war like you’ve never read before … in its emotional nuance, Youngblood codifies the fact that this is a voice to be reckoned with.” Gallagher’s voice is vital, literary and sometimes lyrical…smart, fierce and important.” “While nonfiction was visceral, immediate and reportorial, his fiction transforms direct experience into something more layered and complex. Gallagher has a keen reportorial eye, a distinctive voice and an instinctive sympathy for the people he is writing about, and he uses those gifts here to immerse us in his characters’s lives…With Youngblood, he has written an urgent and deeply moving novel.” “On one level, the novel is a parable - with overtones of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American…On another, it’s a story about how we tell stories to friends and strangers, trying to convey experiences they will never know firsthand, and how we tell ourselves stories to reckon with the past…Mr.

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Youngblood by matt gallagher