Matt Gallagher
Matt Gallagher
Matt Gallagheris an American author, former U.S. Army captain and veteran of the Iraq War. Gallagher has written on a variety of subjects, mainly contemporary war fiction and non-fiction. He first became known for his war memoir Kaboom, which tells of his and his scout platoon's experiences during the Iraq War. He works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
'Shortly Thereafter' chronicles all the aspects of an Afghanistan deployment, from the terrors of the unknown that await before leaving, to the perverse thrills and adrenaline rushes found in combat, to the return home to a land and a people now more foreign than the war itself was.
I wanted to be a writer, but I kind of wanted to be a fiction writer someday, like 20 - 25 years down the line. I never thought I'd write a nonfiction memoir about Iraq.
Though the publishing industry swears the market is oversaturated, books written by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and by embedded journalists keep on coming.
There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.