By Andy Tisdel, Staff Writer
Matt Gallagher leans forward in his folding chair, eyes flicking through the crowd passing near his bookstand, then returning to his hands, clasped across his knee. A pile of literature lies jumbled on the table, copies of “Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War,” waiting to be sold to readers. Their author is whipcord-lean with darting eyes and ink-dark hair, kempt but mussed, like the fine-cut suit and shoes he wore to promote his first book. Wedged into the ballrooms of the National Press Club with 50 other writers worth of literary acumen, Gallagher stands out because he doesn’t stand out. A casual browser would have to sidle up to his table and tease apart the images in his speech, images of sleepless patrols and long nights in Iraq, to understand quite why.
“Well, I hadn’t slept for about 36 hoursÖyou’re that strung out, you’re on patrol, constantly ó your senses are on overload,” said Gallagher, 27, of one particularly raw passage from “Kaboom.” “I was keeping myself awake by writing. It was straight stream of consciousness, like whatever was coming to my head. So I was just trying to remind myself that I had things I cared about, people that I cared about, things I wanted to do. And that life would exist after my present, which was strung out, sleepless in Iraq.”
Gallagher spent 15 months in Iraq, one tour of duty, after graduating from the ROTC program at Wake Forest University. For the first six months, he was the lieutenant in charge of an armored cavalry platoon. A writer all his life, Gallagher started posting an online blog called “Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal,” originally as a “communication tool” for friends and family, back in what he called the Old World. “Kaboom” was eventually taken down by Army officials and the young lieutenant transferred away from his men, but Gallagher’s prose and his urge to write remained alluringly intact.
“I had various literary agents and publishers actually email me in Iraq, asking me if I’d be interested in publishing,” says Gallagher, his words articulate, quick and focused. “I said ëyeah, but you should know that I’m still in Iraq for nine more months and have a couple more pressing things to do like, you know, try to stay alive, try to get my soldiers home, try to accomplish the mission. So we’ll talk when I get back’.”
Matt settled on Da Capo Publishers, consulted with an editor and eventually released the upgraded version of “Kaboom” on April 1, 2010. He’s been on an extended book tour ever since, roaming up and down the East and West Coasts to his home state of Nevada, with pit stops seemingly everywhere in between. The National Press Club is on the last leg of his sometimes grueling journey. “The book tour has been great, but I’m pretty drained,” says Gallagher, who sports purple crescents underneath his eyes.
The book tour will finish up in early December in Pennsylvania, but Gallagher isn’t waiting until then to start his next project. He says he’s now working on writing a second book, this one a novel about a young man living in New York City, where Gallagher currently resides with his fiancÈe. “I’m currently writingÖ about a group of young veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan living in New York City. New York has the lowest [veteran] to citizen ratio, so I think it provides an ideal backdrop for the disconnect between vets and citizens in general,” says Gallagher.
It comes as no surprise to those close to Gallagher that he’s found success in writing. He had been writing short stories and keeping a journal from an early age, and became the editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper during his senior year. There were hints even then of the acerbic, insightful writing that would become his own trademark.
“Matt would be called into the principal’s office to talk aboutÖ subjects [in the newspaper] that the administration would prefer not to be addressed,” said Debbie Gallagher, Gallagher’s mother. Gallagher took both his talent and attitude to Wake Forest University. He enrolled in the ROTC program there as a way to pay for college, and planned on being a military lawyer. Both of his parents are lawyers, and his grandfather was a career officer in the Navy, so it seemed a fairly natural course to take. But in Gallagher’s first year, 9/11 galvanized him onto a different path. “I just kinda decided that if I was gonna do this Army thing, might as well really do it. It was this unique opportunity to really participate in history. And even though I had some personal misgivings about Iraq, I didn’t want to be somebody on the sidelines criticizing people and ideas Ö I hadn’t seen, or hadn’t experienced myself,” Gallagher said.
That determination took Gallagher to Kentucky after college, for further training as an officer in the Armored Cavalry, and then on to Hawaii for a long pre-deployment sabbatical. It was during this time, with Gallagher feeling bored and restless and waiting to ship out, that “Kaboom” was born. “I started doing some research online, about what counterinsurgency was and what it would mean to me and my guys, ëcause a lot of the PowerPoint presentations weren’t making sense. And I stumbled across military blogs,” says Gallagher. “It would be a good outlet to communicate with family and friends, an online destination for them. Nobody likes those group emails when people travel,” he says wryly.
Over the next six months, though, the blog became much more then that. Gallagher developed a knack for finding dark humor and meaning in everyday life, as well as in the sometimes Catch 22-esque actions of his superior officers. Stream-of-conscious ramblings from long, sleepless patrols and stories about Mojo, the porn-selling son of the mayor of the town Gallagher policed for six months, shared space with angry excoriations of bureaucratic superiors. The latter proved to be “Kaboom’s” downfall, after Gallagher posted about an attempt to transfer him away from his platoon without clearing it with his superior officer, as per Army policy.
The blog’s demise called up a storm of support from a sympathetic blogosphere, including an article in the Washington Post, as well as the aforementioned outpouring of publishing personnel. Gallagher chose literary agent William Clark to represent him, and after completing his 15-month tour in Iraq, he accepted Da Capo’s offer and started putting together the new and improved version of “Kaboom.”
20 months later, he’s a published author, a critical success and a man with a new project already underway. What comes next, he doesn’t know. “I have no idea where I’ll be in five years, but as long as I still have access to my laptop to write, I’ll be okay. And a fridge for the occasional Guinness,” he says.