Kaboom Author Matt Gallagher Tells His Story
Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, joined the U.S. Army in 2005 and received a commission in the armored cavalry. Following a fifteen-month deployment in Iraq, Gallagher left the army in 2009. Originally from Reno, Nevada, he now lives in New York City, and was a featured reader at the Franklin Park Reading Series in Crown Heights. Here’s a little bit of history on the author, from his website:
When Lieutenant Matt Gallagher first arrived in Iraq in 2007, it was all too surreal. In the midst of a shift in U.S. policy from lethal operations to counterinsurgency, he encountered a world where nothing was as it appeared. Friends were enemies, reconciliation was war, roads were bombs, and silence was deadly. But it was all too real, and there was nothing left to do except learn to “embrace the suck.”
And write about it.
Matt Gallagher started a blog that quickly became a popular hit. Read by thousands of soldiers who found in it their war, the real war, the blog covered everything from grim stories about Bon Jovi cassettes mistaken for IEDs to the daily experiences of the Gravediggers—the code name for members of Gallagher’s platoon.
When it was shut down in June 2008 by the U.S. Army, questions were raised in the halls of Congress and even a few eyebrows were raised at the Pentagon.
You can read an excerpt from Kaboom here.
