Matt Gallagher On Fictionalizing the Real Stakes of the Ukrainian War

Matt Gallagher, a U.S. Army veteran and author of the novels Youngblood and Empire City, first traveled to Ukraine in February 2022 to train civil volunteers how to defend themselves against Russia’s invasion. He had joined fellow veterans and scribes Adrian Bonenberger and Benjamin Busch, flying “there on our own dime and volition,” he later wrote for Esquire, “because we saw a sovereign democracy under assault and believe that is wrong.” He returned to Ukraine a year later with Benjamin Busch for Esquire to interview foreign fighters—many of them veterans—who had left the safety of their homes and were risking their lives for the “core belief that this is a fight worth fighting, that Ukraine is worth defending.” Toward the end of 2023 he was back in Ukraine, again for Esquire, this time traveling “the country to pose a fundamental question to the Ukrainians I met: How does this end?”

Those three trips inform Gallagher’s newest novel Daybreak, which follows U.S. Army veterans Luke Paxton and Han Lee’s arrival in the weeks after Russia’s invasion. 

When we first meet the pair, they are on a bus, pitching “east through midnight black…rumbling into an alien unknown.” Paxton (Pax to all who know him) was persuaded to trade his job as a mechanic at an AutoZone in Tulsa for war in Ukraine by Lee, whose brash, unwavering confidence could crumple the front slope of any Russian tank. “Something worth fighting for,” Lee says of the war. “You know how fucking rare that is?”

Pax, on the other hand, is much less certain. One Ukrainian after another scratches their chin at his being in their country while it is under attack. “Why are you here?” The question comes at him from all sides, as ceaseless as machine gun fire. Each time you sense the emphasis on a different word. “This is not normal behavior,” his would-be military recruiter tells him. 

Part of Pax’s motivation is Svitlana Dovbush, a Ukrainian he once loved and lost during his time in the military and who he hopes to now locate. However, he is also searching for the sort of purpose and meaning that he had only found before in the military. War is a force that gives us meaning. “It baited those,” Gallagher writes, “who survived it, seduced them, deluded them, trailing like an old loyal dog until of course you turned around and said, Come on, boy.” 

Gallagher has created a fully formed character in Pax, but one sees a lot of America in him—spiritually and morally wounded by our Forever Wars, causeless, adrift, desperate to be of some help. “I might be broken,” Pax says, “but I’m not useless.” This desire to be of service is the novel’s beating heart. That impulse which led him to volunteer for the American armed forces may have resulted in his brokenness, but in Ukraine, with the world’s attention on it, he is given another chance. “It was thrill. It was fear. More than anything, Pax felt like himself again.”

In Daybreak, Gallagher provides readers with a nuanced, polyphonic, tender, and violent portrait of a country and its people rallying together to repel one of the world’s bullies for the sake of democracy, normalcy, and their very existences—ideals that Americans have historically gone to the mat for. 

However, since those early months of the war, our attention and support for Ukraine has waned. In the age of polarization and calcification, Ukraine’s existential fight against a tyrannical aggressor has become yet another wedge issue in America. But in Daybreak, through multiple points of view, Gallagher puts into human drama what the stakes are for the free world. “This fight belongs to us all,” one of the novel’s Ukrainian characters says. “It will find us all.”

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since Russia’s invasion, you have traveled to Ukraine three times, as both a journalist and a volunteer. How was it that Luke Paxton’s story came to be the one you’d tell in fiction about those experiences? 

Matt Gallagher: I think that with each trip to Ukraine I became aware that there were interesting stories there I couldn’t necessarily source, interesting people I was meeting who wouldn’t go on the record, maybe just anecdotes being told that were second or third hand, that all carried the right ingredients for good fiction. So into the notebook they went for further contemplation and complication.

Luke Paxton and Han Lee in Daybreak are troubled men in some ways. They haven’t been able to shake Afghanistan. They haven’t been great at being contributing members to society in the States. But they still want to do some good, right? They still want to help people in a meaningful way. And you know, that’s most people in everyday life. Not necessarily literary life, where a lot of folks are afraid to go outside and get their hands dirty, but real, everyday life. They’re messed up in some ways. But they’re not bad. They’re not evil. They’ve done decent things and they’ve made mistakes, too. They regret them. They’re going to continue to make mistakes and have regrets. They possess emotional and moral nuance that’s very much not easy, nor tidy.

So I think the fashioning of these characters was deeply rooted in encountering their real-world counterparts, especially during that first trip into Ukraine when we went as volunteers. We arrived in late February 2022, alongside the first wave of international legionnaires. Many were rough and tumble personalities. Once we got [to Lviv] we kind of went off and did our own thing, working with Ukrainian civilians, were kind of in our own little silo, but even as we were busy with that I couldn’t help but think of the Americans and Brits we met on the bus ride in, wondering what they were doing, how quickly they were getting to Kyiv to participate in the fight there. I’m sure you’ve read many of those early dispatches of the international fighters. It was chaos. They were handed a rifle, maybe pointed in a direction with a team of five or six, and told to go kill Russians. The organization that we see now from the international fighters and units was a long way away.

I did not go to Ukraine with the intent to write a novel, I went to help some people in a small but hopefully direct and meaningful way. At the same time, I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I think about and experience the world. Everything I saw or did, every conversation, notes were being taken in my head, whether I was conscious of them or not.

JZ: Throughout the book, though, Paxton is pummeled with the question by locals: “Why are you here?” Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe a lot of Americans would think, like me, that the answer would be an easy one. “To fight for democracy. To fight against one of the world’s big bullies.” And that Ukrainians would be congratulating him for having made the sacrifice. But instead they eye his decision with a lot of suspicion and skepticism. You’ve written about this for Esquire, but can you talk a little about that suspicion, about that skepticism that people like Paxton would face in Ukraine?

MG: In the book there’s both a kind of internal and external awareness of America’s role in the world, and that big, heavy question of “Why are you here?” is being experienced by Pax on the ground level. Lee is able to give a very clean, firm answer to that which is, “I’m here to fight. I’m here to kill Russians,” and that is exactly what the Ukrainian recruiter wants to hear, and that’s frankly probably what a lot of Ukrainian people want to hear, too. That’s what Zelensky asked for. Pax isn’t able to give that kind of full, clean answer, and it’s almost to his detriment that he’s honest about that. 

Getting there as early as we did, we arrived with some true believers and idealists, but we also came in with the shady business types that feed off the fringes of any war. Also some pretenders and lost souls who would only get in the way in the months to come. So the “Why are you here?” skepticism was more than warranted. We were able to answer, “Hey, we’re here to train civilians on basic self-defense. We’re not playing. We want to stay as long as we can. But we’re going back to our families.” 

That was a direct answer that also happened to be an honest answer, and it generally passed the sniff test for most of the Ukrainians who asked. Putting this question into the fiction and having these characters wrestle with it in divergent ways… was just very natural. I think it’s related somewhat to your earlier question about including Ukrainian perspectives, and how the world’s changed. Through many blunders and failures, America has earned people’s skepticism. Simultaneously, though, we can—and do—contribute and help in very real, meaningful, substantive ways. It’s not black or white. It’s very, very gray. And I love the messy grays of existence, both as a writer and as a human.

JZ: And it seems you’re drawn to these sorts of conflicts that require one to throw their body and soul into. In your novel Empire City, Mia attends a baseball game. She finds professional sports bizarre. “It was tribalism without purpose. Expression for the sake of nothing but itself…Why devote so much,” she wonders, “to something you couldn’t impact?” You see this in your characters throughout your three novels and your non-fiction, possibly even your tweets, the desire to make a difference. If you care about a thing, contribute to it. 

MG: I think you’re onto something there. I’m going to generalize now, but I did live in Brooklyn for a decade and swam in those literary waters, so I’m not talking out of my neck or anything: to a lot of people in contemporary American literary culture, the literati or whatever, they want military vets to be victims. Or dumb, simple-brained monsters. Or losers, just really old stereotypes that fulfill easy preconceived notions. But of course it’s more complicated.

That was just not my experience in uniform. By and large, both on the enlisted and officer side, I saw a lot of hard-working, pragmatic people whose faith in their country was constantly tested by the wars we were sent to, if not outright broken. But they sought to contribute to something bigger than themselves with everything they had. After we got back, people arrived at various answers to what it is we did, what our wars meant. There’re people that I spent every day with in Iraq for fifteen months who came out of it with different politics and a very different worldview than mine, but you know, fuck it, they earned it. And I think in my small way, with my writing, I’m trying to push back against those easy, lazy stereotypes that I see spread by smart people who should know better, who claim to believe in emotional nuance and use all the right buzzwords about complexity, but for whatever reason, find themselves unwilling or unable to apply that kind of generosity and nuance to military vets. Or maybe it’s just not for people in general found to be the wrong type of different.

I don’t know. I’m 40 years old now. I’m less compelled to play nice for the sake of it, have become more comfortable letting fly my cantankerous flag. I don’t want to be part of that club anymore, and regret ever trying to be part of that club. With my work, if I can push back against some of that and defy it… then good. Though of course I must be careful. I can’t be too on the nose with my frustrations, because then I start preaching too much, and it gets in the way of the story and characters and the messy, beautiful contradictions I mentioned earlier. But I’m being honest, that kind of stuff makes me angry, and anger can be good for writing. It gets you out of bed in the morning and puts you to work.

JZ: Sticking with that and with Empire City for a moment longer. In Empire City, citizens pay the war tax to not have to think about war. In Daybreak, Lee tells Paxton, “It’s all part of the social contract. We put our bodies and lives on the line when no one else would. Fucking civilians pay the tax man so they can ignore what’s done in their name.” It reminds me of something in Phil Klay’s collection of essays Uncertain Ground, “Our military is a major part of who we are as a country; it is the force that has undergirded the post-World War II international order.” Yet, as he writes later on, “though we’re still mobilized for war, [we are] in a manner perfectly designed to ensure we don’t think about it too much.” Read our military veterans, and one encounters on the page this determination by you and the others to wake the rest of us up to, in Lee’s words, “the whole puppet show.” Why do you think this is so critical for not only America but, perhaps, what it means to be an American? And how might this tie to our waning support for Ukraine.

MG: It’s a hell of a question. I think if there’s one thing that unites post-9/11 writers, whatever our style or genre or perspective, whether we’re a veteran or civilian, it’s a kind of desperate howl to get people to pay attention and care. 

The [American] war literature that came before didn’t face this challenge. Crane, Hemingway, Gellhorn, Heller, Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien … all incredible writers, transformative writers, but they could correctly assume that their subject already mattered to readers. The foreign wars that made up their worlds were so impactful on American society. They could focus on the story and created timeless literature, as a result. Whereas I do think that that our generation has an additional hurdle which is to get people to even engage with the subject to begin with, then engage with the story and engage with the writing.

Whether this is all by design or an unhappy accident of the all-volunteer force, that’s a separate question. But it’s the reality. And I don’t think it’s surprising to anybody who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and wrote about it that many Americans can’t be bothered to pay attention and care about Ukraine only two years into this thing. Outside of occasional humanitarian volunteers and occasional legionnaires, Americans are not dying there. It feels very intangible because we’re sending weapons and money and munitions that 98% of Americans will never see, never touch. It’s all very vague and ethereal.

And as frustrating as that is to me, because I would view us turning our backs to Ukraine as a deep, ugly betrayal, I can’t help but also understand that this is a byproduct of the American defense complex boxing out the American people’s attention spans and focus on war and foreign policy. People’s priorities aren’t a faucet to be turned on and off. And after years in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, too, when the powers that be in the defense complex decided it was easier and smoother to not wrestle with these hard questions that Phil is so excellent at posing to us, and then trying to get us all to engage with, well, it’s no surprise that people switched off from Ukraine. We’ve all been conditioned to do exactly that.

JZ: To that, a recent Gallup poll has 43% of Americans thinking the U.S. should help end the war early, even if this means ceding territory to the vicious aggressor. Which is interesting because, as you say, the war isn’t impacting us in any material way. Money isn’t being taken out of our wallets, money that could be put to work here in America, to support Ukraine. This is deficit spending. Do you think that lack of support is as simple as political identity? 55% of Republicans and 49% of independents feel this way, while only 19% of Democrats do. What else might contribute to it? 

MG: I think that’s a huge aspect of it. When we first came back in March 2022, there was a rare kind of bipartisan support. People that I’ve had a real hard time talking politics with over the past couple of years reached out and were very supportive. That didn’t last, maybe couldn’t last. Political tribalism is real and potent right now.

It’s strange, because here’s a conflict where America’s doing something right by and large, in my estimation, and a lot of Americans seem to not know how to handle that. On one hand, I get it. I’ve held a rifle in an Iraqi living room apologizing for raiding the wrong house. I know what wrong looks like. I’ve been part of it. This, though?  It requires some intellectual humility to accept that this is completely different. And also just listening to actual Ukrainians.

Being there in the east as a journalist, and having native Russian speakers come out of their houses to thank us for being there, even thanking our translator, because he’s from western Ukraine … it was fundamentally different than my experience in Iraq, where the only people genuinely glad for our presence tended to be the wealthy tribal sheiks cashing in on the nation-building contracts. So much of my journalism is trying to convey the human experience of life over there for people back here. And I’m pretty good at it, I think. Yet there’s just such a reflexive anti-Americanism ingrained in aspects of our culture and society, I can tell that sometimes even my best efforts are absolutely futile.

Life is more complicated than blanket reflexes. Interventionism isn’t inherently good or bad. Isolationism isn’t inherently good or bad. We have to take things on a case-by-case basis, because the world is too complicated to do anything else.

JZ: I’m going to quote Phil Klay again. This past November, being interviewed by The New York Times, he said, “Ukraine represents not a good war—because the closer you get to war, the more obvious it is that a phrase like ‘a good war’ has no valid meaning—but rather a necessary war. The clear moral case for Ukraine is about as straightforward a case of a just defense against a vicious aggressor as you could find.” 

MG: Here’s an anecdote I keep returning to. Our second trip, October 2022, we ended up outside of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, driving through a village that had been liberated maybe a couple months prior. It’s about ten miles from the Russian border, we could hear artillery in the near-distance, and people are just—the whole village has been absolutely trashed. People are rebuilding their roofs, rebuilding their lives, best they can. We came across this family. We ended up talking to the wife’s mother, as well. She was an old woman, maybe 75 or so, and kept on insisting on speaking in Ukrainian.

Even to my ears, it was clear she was not comfortable in it. But with our Lviv-born translator there, she knew it was a way to practice. She was from this area, had spent her whole life here, had always spoken Russian. She admitted that most of her life, she thought Ukrainian was a language for peasants or troublemakers from the west. But now, she was trying to learn it, trying to rely on it, because it was the best way she could think of to honor her grandson, who’d been killed fighting in the border guard early in the invasion.

One person’s small act of change, of courage, even of patriotism, perhaps, that’s no small thing at all. She’s absolutely the type of Ukrainian that Putin says wants to be Russian, wants to belong to Russia, and maybe at one point in her life, she did. Definitely not now.

She’s just one person, sure. But she’s indicative, I think, of something that’s happening across the country. It’s something I put in at the dinner party scene in Daybreak. One of the characters says, “If we weren’t a real country before, we are now.” That’s very real. 

JZ: I see it as a great act of defiance and resistance, too. You put it in Daybreak so well, with Svitlana saying of her son, “An entire generation of children will forever have [Russians] as the enemy, and they’ll be right to. This war will not be a short one. He will grow up in it. They all will.” Should Putin get his way with Ukraine, there will be no peace. You see it today in the occupied territories.

MG: These people are going to keep fighting. So what can we do as an American to actually support these people who are living the ideals that we claim ownership of, that we claim inspire and motivate us? These are innovative, freedom-loving people. Nobody should support them more than flag-waving Texans, but for domestic political reasons, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. And yeah, you know that section you read from Svitlana, it’s very true. Based off of conversations I’ve had with young Ukrainian parents, friends that I’ve made over there who have kids about the same age as mine, this concerns them greatly. And, to be honest, I intended it as a stick in the eye for American readers. We’re so comfortable. We’re so spoiled. War for us is always something that is over there, something that we can come and go to as we please. If fiction can do anything, it’s to maybe get you to consider what it would be like to be living as somebody else, some other place, and I hope, when readers come to that section that they don’t have to agree with Svitlana’s decision, but I hope they at least understand her calculus behind it. 

JZ: Putin has unified Ukraine in a way that it never was before. You have some wonderful moments throughout the novel that illustrate this. It’s also in your reports from Ukraine. In many respects, they are a far more unified country than the United States is these days. Yet, you also show, despite this unity, that there are various factions with various interests, some of whom get in the way of this grand effort to repel Putin’s forces. Why was it important to include this aspect?

MG: I’m glad that resonated, because these are real people. This is a real society. Of course there’s friction. Of course there are factions. Of course there’s internal politics at play. Take Pax’s encounter with the Nationalist leader, Dog. I was very intentionally showing that some bad people are, in fact, fighting on the side of good, because that’s real life. We sometimes have very simplistic views of war. Is this a battle of democracy versus autocracy? Yes. But also, there’s more. The reality is soldiers are oftentimes very gruff people with ugly worldviews. They’re rough men willing to do violence on our behalf, to paraphrase Orwell back in the day. They’re not always going to be people you want to take home to your mom to have dinner with. So what does that make you feel, you know? Dog is an extreme example of that. But even Lee is a version. I think he’s a fun character. I think he’s an engaging character. But he makes people uncomfortable, and he’s kind of proud of that, and I know a lot of soldiers like that. They have a purpose in this world, are proud of it, and it’s not to talk in neat little platitudes at cocktail parties. So giving Ukraine the country and Ukrainian society the respect it deserves, to show it in its various flavors, in various hues, was vital, because otherwise I’m not writing seriously about a real war. I’d be writing kind of hollow fairy tales. Which, hey, would probably sell more copies. But then I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. 

JZ: Elon Musk receives an uncritical and unironic shout-out here, for how his Starlink satellites have allowed Ukraine to repel Russian forces. “Maximum cool” is how a Ukrainian describes him. It’s also what a Ukrainian volunteer said of you and Adrian and Benjamin to Anderson Cooper. Explain yourself.

MG: It’s kind of a funny little time capsule, because during the early part of the war, because of Starlink, he was viewed as a hero [in Ukraine.] And now he’s kind of viewed more as a traitor, due to some of his choices since then, some of the things he’s said. I wrote it to add some cultural flavor and it ended up becoming darkly ironic because, history being history, another layer revealed itself with the passage of time. 

As for the “maximum cool” line—I will absolutely cop to lifting that from the CNN piece. When he said it, I was standing right there, and it was awesome, you know. Anderson laughed at it, and of course, it made the final cut. You just have to be careful sometimes with broken English, because God knows these people’s English is way better than my Ukrainian. So you don’t want to be making fun of it. At least I don’t. I don’t wanna be doing the thing that Jonathan Safran Foer did years ago with Everything is Illuminated, kind of turning the translator into a joke because of the broken English and all the pop culture references. On the other hand, it can be a very real part of modern eastern Europe, right? So splashes of it here and there seemed okay. But I didn’t want to make it a crutch, and I didn’t want to have it done by the more prominent Ukrainian characters. Either they speak no English or they’re fairly fluent, like Svitlana and Bogdan are.

JZ: Where do you see things going in Ukraine in the near future?

MG: A lot hinges on if our Congress in the next couple of weeks can shake itself out of this funk. I do know that Ukrainians will keep fighting with or without international support. They’ll keep fighting, even if they’re losing ground. I am beginning to suspect that some kind of fake peace treaty is going to be forced upon them by the international body. And then both Ukraine and Russia will prepare for the next phase of the war … but when they say Crimea is Ukraine, they mean it. When they say Donbas belongs to us, even if it’s been in Russian hands since 2014, they mean it. I understand the Western instincts to want peace, to want this to go away, to get off our news. It’s not our land, it’s not our history. But I do think that a temporary ceasefire, and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do think a temporary ceasefire is something we’re barreling toward, even as both major players know it’s temporary.