Author Matt Gallagher and Lea Carpenter Talk Sex, War and Writing

From the field of combat to the field of kickball, Playboy fiction author Matt Gallagher discusses his deployment, literary influences and more

- By Lea Carpenter, Cliff Brokaw, Brad Jamieson

Matt Gallagher’s bright green Chucks stand in sly contrast to his low-key demeanor. He’s a writer from Reno who now lives in New York City, and a former U.S. Army captain who turned his wartime blog into a memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. He also writes fiction, including Babylon, his short story for PLAYBOY’s July/August issue, about a lesbian kickball umpire and Marine named Marti who’s still adjusting to post-deployment life in Brooklyn.

We met for the first time five years ago in a coffee shop by Columbia; he was completing his MFA, rather rare—I thought then—for a former Cavalry officer trained at Fort Knox and stationed in Iraq for 15 months. And though he comes across at first as a little shy, he’s actually anything but. On anything intellectual or literary he is clear and confident and fierce.

Gallagher is central to a new generation of veterans writing fiction, using literature as a lens to process their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ability to ride a horse across Baghdad doesn’t preclude a person from producing heartbreaking prose, as Gallagher did most recently in his novel Youngblood. Writers Richard Ford and Colum McCann and Ben Fountain and Tim O’Brien have all praised his work. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called Youngblood “an urgent and deeply moving novel.”

These days, Gallagher spends his mornings writing and, after lunch and a trip to the dog park, his afternoons revising. We talked about everything from kickball and character development to conflict literature and counterinsurgency.

PLAYBOY: Tell me about the inspiration for your extraordinary story, Babylon.