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Whether Porter will seize that opportunity or not is the ultimate question as the plot unfolds, and Gallagher makes readers care about the answer. When the violence becomes real, when lives are saved and lost, and when loyalties are challenged, young molazim Porter is ultimately given the opportunity to be the moral hero, if not the action hero. Porter becomes obsessed with discovering the truth behind the myths, and his investigation leads him to Rana, the Iraqi woman who holds the key to unlock all the facts Porter will need to get rid of Chambers. The legends from the locals are whisperings of war crimes, treasons, and murders. Porter learns that Chambers had been in that same village before, on a previous deployment.

Chambers, a salty vet who’s far too ready to commit violence on America’s behalf for Porter’s winning-hearts-and-minds taste.

Porter fears a threat to his authority and ability to command because the men in his platoon are drawn to the new platoon sergeant, Staff Sgt. Unlike his older brother, who led during the height of violence in the war, Jack Porter leads a platoon of infantrymen during the days when Operation Iraqi Freedom ambles toward rebranding itself as Operation New Dawn. Jack Porter, is attempting to live up to the family name as he walks in the shadow of his older brother, the Silver Star-winning war hero. The novel’s first-person narrator, Army Lt. All that experience and work shines through in his debut novel, Youngblood. Since then, Matt Gallagher has hung up his armor spurs and earned an MFA from Columbia he has played a central role in advocating for veterans in his previous position as a senior fellow at the non-profit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America he has been instrumental in advancing veterans’ writing as an instructor for the non-profit Words After War and he has introduced the world to some of the finest fiction to come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the short story collection Fire and Forget, featuring “Redeployment” by Phil Klay before it was published in Klay’s eponymous collection, which was later adorned with the National Book Award. That blog evolved into the critically acclaimed memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. It didn’t seem like “early on” back then, but in what are now considered the nascent stages of the Iraq war, Gallagher wrote a blog chronicling his daily struggles as an armor officer in a war zone that had just recently begun to deal with pervasive IEDs and an explosion of sectarian violence. Matt Gallagher, in a large sense, has paved the way for many of us who draw on our experiences in writing about Iraq and Afghanistan. Matt Gallagher, Youngblood: A Novel (Atria Books, 2016)