Youngblood
Matt Gallagher, 2016
Atria Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501105746
Summary
The US military is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and newly-minted lieutenant Jack Porter struggles to accept how it’s happening—through alliances with warlords who have Arab and American blood on their hands.
Day after day, Jack tries to assert his leadership in the sweltering, dreary atmosphere of Ashuriyah.
But his world is disrupted by the arrival of veteran Sergeant Daniel Chambers, whose aggressive style threatens to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish.
As Iraq plunges back into chaos and bloodshed and Chambers’s influence over the men grows stronger, Jack becomes obsessed with a strange, tragic tale of reckless love between a lost American soldier and Rana, a local sheikh’s daughter.
In search of the truth and buoyed by the knowledge that what he finds may implicate Sergeant Chambers, Jack seeks answers from the enigmatic Rana, and soon their fates become intertwined. Determined to secure a better future for Rana and a legitimate and lasting peace for her country, Jack will defy American command, putting his own future in grave peril.
Pulling readers into the captivating immediacy of a conflict that can shift from drudgery to devastation at any moment, Youngblood provides startling new dimension to both the moral complexity of war and its psychological toll. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1983
• Where—Reno, Nevada, USA
• Education—B.A., Wake Forest University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Matt Gallagher is an American author, former U.S. Army captain, and veteran of the Iraq War. He has written on a variety of subjects, mainly contemporary warfare, becoming widely known for his 2010 memoir Kaboom, an account of his platoon's experiences during the Iraq War. His debut novel Youngblood, also set in Iraq, was released in 2016.
Background and education
Gallagher was born in Reno, Nevada, to attorneys Deborah Scott Gallagher and Dennis Gallagher. He and his brother Luke attended Brookfield School and Bishop Manogue High School, where Matt edited the school newspaper and ran cross country and track. He graduated in 2001.
Gallagher went on to Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He joined Army ROTC the week before 9/11, and decided to honor this commitment after the September 11 attacks. While at Wake Forest, Gallagher served as the sports editor of the Old Gold & Black. He graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, commissioning into the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant in the Armor Branch.
Military service
Gallagher trained at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he attended and graduated the Armor Officer Basic Course and Army Reconnaissance Course. He was subsequently assigned to the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He deployed with this unit in 2007 as a scout platoon leader with 2-14 Cavalry to Saba al-Bor, a sectarian village northwest of Baghdad.
He was promoted to the rank of captain in July 2008, and was then reassigned to 1-27 Infantry, part of the famed 27th Infantry Regiment, where he served as a targeting officer. He and his unit returned to Schofield Barracks in February 2009, and Gallagher left the Army later that year. He earned the Combat Action Badge during his deployment to Iraq.
Kaboom blog
While deployed to Iraq, Gallagher wrote about his front-line experiences there on a military blog—Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal—which ran from November 2007 to June 2008. Using the pseudonym of LT G, Gallagher offered a brash and brutally honest perspective of modern warfare. The blog was widely read by the national media before being shut down by the writer's military chain-of-command after Gallagher wrote a post detailing his rejection of a promotion in an effort to stay with his soldiers.
Books and other writings
After leaving the Army, Gallagher moved to New York City and wrote his war memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, which was published in 2010 and garnered significant praise by both New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others.
In 2016 Gallagher's first novel, Youngblood, was published. Like Kaboom it, too, received wide acclaim in the national media and has been compared to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and other classic war literature.
Gallagher also co-edited, with Roy Scranton, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (2013), an anthology of literary fiction by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition to his books, Gallagher has also written for a number of magazines and reviews, including The Atlantic, Boston Review, New York Times and Wired.
Other
In 2013 Gallagher attained an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He works at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature—and has appeared on PBS NewsHour in this capacity.
In early 2015, Gallagher was featured in Vanity Fair alongside Elliot Ackerman, Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Kevin Powers and Brandon Willitts, as the voices of a new generation of American war literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/7/2016.)
Book Reviews
[P]rovides a visceral sense of what young American soldiers experienced during their Iraq deployments—the camaraderie, the fear, the exhaustion and boredom, and the sheer discomfort of being encased in 60 pounds of body armor…in triple-digit heat while keeping an eye out for snipers and roadside bombs…. Mr. Gallagher…writes here with the same verve and humor that made Kaboom such an engaging [memoir], but the story he tells in Youngblood is a tragic one…Mr. 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. Jack…insinuates himself immediately in the reader's mind, as does his interpreter, Qasim…The Iraqi characters…step briskly off these pages…Mr. Gallagher leaves us with an appreciation of how war and occupation have affected Iraqi families for generations, and how the losses incurred after the 2003 American invasion remain day-to-day realities for the people who live there. With Youngblood, he has written an urgent and deeply moving novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Showcases the manifold strengths of the author's writing, most prominently a gift for evoking the feel of contemporary soldiering in faraway places.... Evocative and [written with] stirring sympathyfor and surprising friendship with local civilians and soldiers.
Wall Street Journal
While [Gallagher's] nonfiction was visceral, immediate and reportorial, his fiction transforms direct experience into something more layered and complex. Gallagher’s voice is vital, literary and sometimes lyrical...smart, fierce and important.
Washington Post
A vivid and introspective chronicle of Gallagher’s fifteen months in Iraq…. Its aim is simple: to explain what it is like to wage an unconventional war…. Unlike a journalist, whose Heisenberg-like presence inevitably distorts, Gallagher is able to candidly depict the lighter moments of war…. Evocative prose, convincing dialogue, and, especially, telling vignettes of life as an American soldier in Iraq.
New Republic
A powerful fiction debut…a gritty, tragic, realistic look inside the failures of America's invasion and occupation of Iraq told by someone who lived it.
Huffington Post
As funny as it is harrowing.
Entertainment Weekly
[A]bout the futility of keeping the peace in Iraq, where it seems almost impossible to identify friend from foe. [Gallagher] imbues the struggle between Porter and Chambers with a moral heft while never reducing these two powerful characters to mere symbols of a military mission gone terribly wrong.
Publishers Weekly
Never have more veterans expressed the full depth of their war experience by turning to writing, and former U.S. Army captain Gallagher joins their ranks with this debut novel. Even as he anguishes over the U.S. military's cooperation with bloody warlords...Lt. Jack Porter breaks all the rules to help a local sheik's daughter.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Gallagher’s riveting combination of gritty military jargon, sharply drawn characters, and suspenseful story line adds up to one of the best modern war novels since Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam classic, The Things They Carried (1990). Highly recommended.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A complex tale about the Iraq War, intrigue, love, and survival.... A fresh twist on the Iraq War novel adds depth to this burgeoning genre.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Take a look at the epigraph, Stephen Crane’s "In the Desert." Why do you think the author chose to open the book with this poem? How does it set the tone? Discuss how the poem affected you before you began the story, and how your understanding and appreciation of it have changed since finishing the novel.
2. On pages 78 and 79, the American soldiers gather in the compound to witness a fight between a camel spider and a scorpion. Watching his soldiers, Lieutenant Porter thinks "I looked around and didn’t see jaded boredom anymore but something else" (p. 77). What is it that Porter sees? Why do you think he chooses not to stop the fight?
3. Consider the fight between the scorpion and the spider. What can you say about this moment in the novel, both as a storytelling device and for its significance within the plot? What is the author trying to say with this scene?
4. After the fight, when Porter, having lost the bet, stands with Alphabet and the other soldiers drift away telling one another to "be the scorpion," Porter thinks to himself: "I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just lost something important, something that mattered, even if it was just a pretense of that something" (p. 80). What is the narrator referring to, and how does this shape his character both as an individual and with respect to the other characters?
5. The narrator recounts the story of his experience in training alongside his friend Randy Chiu, whom we later learn lost his legs in Afghanistan. Why does the narrator tell us this story? What is its significance in the greater context of the novel?
6. On page 135, when the Barbie Kid is detained for assaulting Chambers, Porter thinks: "Our grandfathers had pushed back the onslaught of fascism. Just what the fuck were we doing?" The narrator’s words are an interesting commentary on the evolution of American military identity, or at least the narrator’s perception of military purpose. Do you think it’s valid to assume that purpose in war is ever clearly defined, or is it more of a psychological mechanism?
7. Driving through the desert countryside outside of Ashuriyah on page 204, Porter thinks to himself:
This is the desert...free and true. I took a gulp of Rip It from the back hatch and breathed in baked air and laughed because it didn’t feel so strange anymore. None of it did.
What is this change that comes over Lieutenant Porter, and what causes it? Is it simply the passage of time, or do you think it’s triggered by a specific event?
8. At the beginning of Ramadan, the narrator says: "I fasted through the holy month, alone among the occupiers" (p. 215). Why do you think Porter chooses to fast? Do you believe there is irony in his use of "holy month" or "occupiers" here? How?
9. As the story progresses and Porter becomes more in touch with the local community, his thoughts on the war and his role in it start to shift. Discuss this transformation: Do you think his affection for Rana leads him to make excuses for people who would otherwise be considered dangerous? Or does his attitude stem from a more fundamental change in himself?
10. Elijah Rios, or Shaba, is a phantom presence throughout the novel, and as Porter digs deeper into the mystery surrounding his death, the true nature of his character is frequently called into question. What do you think of Shaba’s relationship with Rana? How would you define his relationship with Iraq? How do you distinguish the man that Rana knew from the one who fought alongside Chambers?
11. Do you think Porter’s dishonesty is justified in his attempt to help Rana and her sons, or does the crime involved negate the good intention behind the act? Is moral relativism symptomatic of war?
12. Do you believe that Rana and her sons made it to Beirut? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)