I don’t think I’m either a hero or a dickhead, but I’ve been described as both by complete strangers in newspapers and on the Internet. That should’ve been self-evident ahead of time, of course, but it didn’t really hit me until the reviews, be them positive, negative, or indifferent, started showing up. It’s been a slow adjustment realizing that a slice of my life – a seminal slice, but still just a slice – is out there for public consumption.
“It changed my life” is a bit dramatic, but the truth is, it has. Has that event made any significant changes for you and – how do you cope with if it has? (But maybe we will have covered the ground here.)Ĭongratulations on your achievement in this book, which to my way of seeing it, breaks fresh ground in war memoirs, especially concerning those semi-undeclared hard-to-define campaigns in a number of Middle East countries.įirst then, it’s some time now since the hardcover edition of Kaboom was released. When I am back on deck, we could chat by phone, if you agree.
I hope in the interim, that you won’t mind considering these questions and comments of mine and then sharing some of your insights, either as email text or audio-recording, say MP3, if that is practical for you. I am feeling a little battered right now, after several small medical procedures and more to come next week. Here is an un-edited account of the interview via email. In the process of preparing his review, Germany-based McPherson was allowed to interview Matt Gallagher who was in New York, pursuing further studies in creative writing. But what divides it from most other eye-witness accounts is that, in the end, Gallagher has drawn out a precise, pungent mini-view of a cruel, relentless, wasteful encounter between two cultures who will, seemingly, never understand one another or the reasons for their conflict. His blog-like episodic account grabs unique descriptive episodes and sometimes treks through overblown bursts of wordy mind-mapping. Under daily war pressures, Matt manages to stand back far enough to sketch a view point that lifts conversations that were swirling his firebase and on the rutted scarey road remants of the triangular space, that enclosed his forty-five men. ( see the review posted on this blog, below)Ī clear, honest and ironic confession of his and his comrade’s fears and hopes, the text crams in the experiences of the young American platoon leader whose motivations in-part drawn from meandering through beer binges and ‘war games’ sessions. The book dives directly and completely into its story. Kaboom, written by a serving US soldier, Matt Gallagher is an account of battle, gleaned from experiences during sixteen months in Iraq.
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