Angry Planet - Americans in Ukraine Looking for ‘Daybreak’

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Luke Paxton and Han Lee know a good cause when they see one. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, the American vets know what they need to do. Their time in Afghanistan has given them the skills to help fight a war and the moral clarity needed to know when a cause is just.But are they going to fight in Ukraine for the right reason? Do Ukrainians want them there? And does either matter when bombs are dropping all over the country?On this episode of Angry Planet, author Matt Gallagher returns to the podcast to talk about his novel Daybreak. It’s the story of Paxton and Lee as they travel to Ukraine to fight. It’s a work of fiction that strikes at deeper emotional truths about the conflict. It’s also pieced together from Gallagher’s own experiences in Ukraine, some of which wouldn’t fit neatly into a work of journalistic non-fiction.What fiction can do that non-fiction can’t.Exploring Lviv’s mystical toy barter alley.The contractually required Joan Didion quote.Why Ukrainians are suspicious of Americans who say “I want to help.”The structure of a Daybreak movie.Recorded 4/23/24Go here to buy Daybreak.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Matt Gallagher, welcome back to Angry Planet. Thank you for coming on. Last time you were on, it was all about controversy and not a whole lot about your book. I thought you deserved and the audience deserved to actually hear about the new novel.

And it would perhaps give me a chance to read it, which I have now. done. It's excellent. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thanks. Can you tell us, it's called Daybreak. Can you tell us what it's about? Sure. It's a, it is fiction. It's a novel, though certainly heavily influenced by real world events. It follows two U.S. military veterans of Afghanistan into Ukraine at the onset of the renewed Russian invasion in early 2022. one of those American vets, Han Lee, is Soldier Soldier.

He's found life working at Best Buy deeply unfulfilling and wants to get back into the thick of things. Says, you know, tells a Ukrainian recruiter in Chapter 2 of the book, he wants to shoot a fucking Russian invader in the face. And he means it. And frankly, Ukraine probably needs people like that. You know, that's when Zelensky put out the call asking for military veterans from the West to come join their defense. People like Conley are probably who he was hoping to attract. The other veteran and kind of our book's main character is named Luke Paxton. He's served in Afghanistan with Lee, but he's going over for more muddled reasons.

He has kind of vague notions about wanting to help, but he's not kind of obsessed with getting back into the fight the way Lee is. his life has really been stuck in neutral ever since coming back his tour in Afghanistan. And he kind of wants to shake that. He suffers from pretty severe PTSD, I'd say. And you know, like a lot of people with that diagnosis, whether they got it from combat or a car accident or whatever, he's just kind of been trapped there. Part of the reason he decides that Ukraine might be able to shake him out of this is an old love. a Ukrainian woman named

a Fittlana Dovebush who he lost touch with 10 years before right around the same time he deployed Afghanistan and now he's hoping to seek out there's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that she does become a character in the book

We'll do some light conversation around themes up here at the top but I do Maybe in 30 minutes or so we'll give a spoiler warning and then kind of dive in some other stuff, if that's all right. I think it's a more interesting conversation. And like when you've actually, when you've read the book,

I find myself wanting to talk about the last 50 pages more than anything. But we can get to that. Okay. So what inspired this? Why did you want to write this? So I've been over to Ukraine myself as both a volunteer and a journalist three times now. And over the course of those trips, I became keenly aware that I was. meeting people who wouldn't go on record, hearing anecdotes second or third hand,

just maybe stories or encounters that I couldn't necessarily source for a magazine fact checker, but were real interesting, and they were interesting because they were messy, right? They weren't, it wasn't white in that here's this pure noble defense of a democracy, which it is, but it also wasn't black either in terms of, you know, Pick whatever conspiracy theory you want from the interweb. In many cases, the Westerners I met over there, in whatever capacity they were working in, were complicated. They were flawed. Wasn't it coincidence that many of them brought up their experiences in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq or even a couple other places as really the seating for why they felt they needed to be in Ukraine?

that here maybe was a just cause, a necessary cause that they'd been neglected from sometime over the last 20 plus years. I found that really compelling. And there were different versions of these people. Some were very deeply practical, you know, the retired Green Beret medic knows exactly how he can contribute to the cause and help the Ukrainian people. then there were some people kind of like PACs. Maybe they're hearts in the right place.

Maybe they're even able to contribute in some small way once they find the right people. But they're kind of looking around for that. And in some cases, just getting in the way and clogging up the pipeline. And so I just kind of, I don't know. I'd written fiction before.

I'd written two novels before this one. So I knew I could do it. and it just kind of felt like the better place to kind of explore these messy braes that I, you know, fascinate me as both as a writer and as human being. Was it that you can do with a novel that you can't get away with, with a piece of journalism? Oh, I think in some ways it has to make more sense. The story has to be cleaner.

it needs to be smoother than the hard jagged edges that reality allow for. You know, the easy writer answer here is to talk about emotional truths. And yeah, that's all true. But I think really good journalism and really good creative nonfiction can find that. What I find compelling about fiction, at least for me, is it's harder. It really is. I can't just end this section saying, well, that's, that's the way it is.

You know, find some pithy quote that, you know, a Ukrainian or American volunteer gave me and, and, you know, let it linger in the ether or whatever. No, everything has to align. You know, I'm pleased to hear that, you know, the last 50 pages you found compelling. The book is intentionally structured to be a slow burn until those last 50 pages or so. and then it kind of really shifts into overdrive. That was intentional. You know, I had to chip away at that structurally to make it work.

Whereas, you know, journalism, you know, most of my pieces from Ukraine have been more kind of profile pieces. And I'm glad to do it. I love writing it. It's challenging in its own way. But it's more like a puzzle. Whereas this is, I don't know, cutting a diamond or something. There's a sense in both this book and Youngblood, which is the first novel, right? That was the first, okay.

Of an American soldier out of their depth and doing archaeology, if that makes sense. Like exploring this country and trying to strike, like trying to get an answer to some question that maybe doesn't have one. And I was wondering if you saw those parallels between Youngblood and Daybreak. I did. You know, I don't know how intentional it was from the beginning. I did an event a couple weeks back up in Buffalo and my friend and fellow author, Brian Kastner, and gave a real kind of introduction and said that the thing that he likes about my work is that I write about the every man. Right.

You know, we kind of live in an era of special operations and specialized war. fair and experts and all this stuff. And I'm fascinated by that as much as the next reader. It's certainly not my background, though. You know, I'm kind of interested in the regular, you know, in the Youngbloods case, the regular lieutenant or the regular private that found themselves in Iraq trying to make the best of a really deeply messed up situation years into the war. You know, in Ukraine, but, you know, as a journalist, I was drawn to kind of the everyday people

that found themselves over there. You know, on a practical level, they were more willing to talk to me. You know, the, uh, finding the, the black shadow got, you know, they don't want to talk to Esquire magazine. They got, they got, they got a business to get, they got guns to run.

They got clandestine operations to conduct, you know. The every man, uh, yeah, he'll tell me a story over a pint of beer at the, at the expat bar. And it's also, uh, I think it's just what I'm drawn to as a writer. The technical details of war, the weapons and all that stuff, again, it's just not my strength. You know, if I have one as a writer of war, and I've been doing this 10 plus years now,

I think it's like, I think it's the human stories. What made people go over there? What are the real reasons? What are the real reasons they went over there, I suppose are the reasons they tell people? What's it like being received into a culture and society? society that you're not super familiar with. From the Ukraine perspective, what is that experience like when most of the men in your neighborhood or town go to the front and then all of a sudden there's a bunch of strange

Westerners walking around saying they're there to help? There's a lot of different answers to these questions and then teasing them out of people. I don't know. I enjoy it. I enjoy it. And then I enjoy reshaping it and then trying to make it. cohesive and coherent for readers back home. Yeah, Pax and Lee are both very interesting because they are.

Pax, he worked at like an auto zone. I don't think you call it an auto zone, but he worked at a, like a chain mechanic shop. Lee worked at a Best Buy. Their war has gone by, right? Yep. And civilian life is not everything that was cracked up to be. I think as a Marine once put it to me, he was so happy to get out of,

he was so happy to get out of the force, or he was so happy to get out of the Marines, so he was so tired of all the military bullshit. Then like a couple years into civilian life, he realized that the civilian bullshit was much, much worse. Yeah, that's a, it's a tried and true trajectory. And I've had moments where I've felt similarly, you know,

finding a purpose, I think is something a lot of veterans, particularly combat veterans, talk about once they get out. I speak that language. I know the story. I can kind of viscerally connect with it a bit. But,

you know, I've been able to be a writer, you know, my blog got shut down when I was still a punk lieutenant, right? So, you know, I've been doing this even before I got out of uniform.

It gave me that purpose. I haven't had to, you know, you know, on the meter of needing, needing new purpose missing the military, you know, Lee is at 98, Paxton's at 90, I'm at 12, you know, personally. But I can speak, I know what, I know what that feels like. I can talk to those people. I can, you know, pull out the complexities of that to form a interesting story for civilians

who don't know anything about this. So, you know, in some ways I've been very blessed. to not make that journey or to make the journey just enough that I can recognize its contours. Do you think America does a bad job of giving people that purpose after they get out of the military? Is even their responsibility? That's a fine question. I've gone back and forth on this over the last 10 plus years. I don't know if it's, you know, I think life is difficult for us all,

finding purpose in life is difficult for us all. Becoming a civilian isn't a bad thing. It's not necessarily a good thing. It's just a thing. It's a thing that we're all going to have to do, whether you do a three-year stint or you retire after 30 from the Pentagon. I just think it's difficult because there is just that immediate sense of purpose in the military deployed or otherwise.

And you get used to kind of working within a team that is really foreign in a lot of civilian jobs. You know, I've been out for so long. I couldn't talk about what the state of the transition is like. It was bad when I got out of the Army in 2009. It's probably better now. It's probably still not great. Is it America's responsibility somewhat?

You know, I mean, the VA's motto is, you know, from the Lincoln, the old Lincoln quote for he or she who born the battle. But it's frankly, it's also on the vet, on the individual wet vet. Nobody's going to, it's tough. It's right or wrong, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's going to have to do it yourself more often than not.

And, uh, finding something that gives you purpose, whether it's on a family level, whether it's another job, whether it's giving back and serving, you know, I, I think there's a lot of really great service organizations out there that, that, that have kind of harness veteran veteran's instinct and energy in a real substantial way. Team Rubicon comes to mind. The mission continues as another.

But I don't know. I do have a slight streak that wants to, maybe I'm just getting old and cranky as I get in the middle age, but like it is kind of on us too. What is it that drives of the people that you talked to? what is it that drives people to go over there to go to Ukraine, I mean.

Is there a profile of the vet that goes over there and does that? Are they all saying the same kind of thing or the reasons as varied as they are? One constant. I mean, there's a lot of different reasons. There's a lot of different types. There's the guy willing to go to the front line.

There's the guy who wants to work with a humanitarian organization, handing out tourniquets or working, you know, teaching combat medicine. there's the guy that, you know, just wants to hang out in Lviv and kind of sniff the fumes of, of war from afar. Consistently, though, consistently, what happened in their deployment, their previous deployments when they served, and not just America, I met Brits and Canadians and Australians, Spaniard. what happened varied but they always brought up some lingering thing from their previous war right so that's part of what makes it complicated what it makes it messy what i wanted to explore in fiction was is it fair to be bringing baggage from another war to this war and there is no easy answer to that because sometimes that baggage uh makes this person very useful and uh has

making them a very driven individual. You know, there are ex-operators very near the front, serving in a myriad of ways directly and pragmatically. And the Ukrainian, it's a small part of it, but the Ukrainian defense has benefited from them. And then there's the other types. And there's probably a bit more of them who are kind of getting in the way, or they're just trying to make money,

or there to meet a woman. And they give everyone a bad rap. And what has been interesting is each trip, observing how much better Ukrainian, the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian society has gotten at cursing those two groups. You know, our first trip, we were there so early. You know, they were just grateful for anyone who's, you know, you could say whatever and they would believe you.

And, you know, there's some harrowing accounts that emerged out of like the Battle of Kiev, for example, in early March 22, where if you were Western, they gave you a gun, they just told you to point it in the right direction. And some of those guys were up for that. And some of those guys were completely overwhelmed. So, I don't know. There was an answer somewhere in there. I'm interested in this idea of, I mean, this is definitely at the root of what's going on with Pax, of being haunted by your last. war. Is it a sense of meaning to have a do-over to make something right that happened in the previous

war? I'm guessing the answer is always different, right? But I've been thinking about this sense, thinking about my friends that served and thinking about the fall of Afghanistan. Sorry about the cat, if you can hear that. That maybe not as a sense. that like our generation

was cheated, but that they got the wrong war or the war was handled in the wrong way. And it's not the same as Vietnam because it feels like the tragedy is different, but there's this sense that you had one soldiering life

to give and it was used incorrectly. Does that make sense? Yes. Yes. And I got that, you know, it's a self-selected in group, obviously, because they're over there. But that is exactly. what I heard in chorus from Western veterans in Ukraine. You know, there are people that disagree with that, but they're not going to be in Ukraine.

And, you know, say they joined, you know, they joined up in the aftermath of 9-11, or even if they were already serving that, like, it's impossible to describe to people who weren't alive yet or don't remember that, but like the sense of, like, a clear just cause was very real and very palpable, and it all disappeared. very quickly. And I think a lot of us, to include myself at some degree, will be chasing that

high until we croak. And, you know, what does that mean for, is that Ukraine's problem? Not at all. But that doesn't mean that they can't benefit from some of these hard-earned experiences. that everyday people can help in a meaningful but small direct way. You know, I'm an Iraq guy, but it's not a coincidence I made these guys, Paxson and Lee, rather, Afghanistan vets. Kabul fell six months before you pray. I wanted their hurt. I wanted their, at least in Lee's case, their sense of moral injury to be very fresh. I was struck when Kabul fell talking with my friends who were Afghanistan vets.

That's how shocked they were, how hurt they were. And I had just a little bit of maybe emotional distance as an Iraq guy to be like, are you really that surprised? You know, shouldn't like, maybe you didn't think it would be happen so quickly or just like this. But didn't you think some version of this was, you know, that's, and I lambasted myself for thinking that because it's very harsh, harsh and judgmental. Because then I went back to, you know, 2014 when ISIS rolled into Iraq. And a version of that, not maybe not quite as pronounced, because it was.

wasn't quite so sudden. It wasn't the totality of Iraq, you know, the Iraqi military dug in. And actually, the exact village we were stationed in is where the Iraqi army dug in and finally pushed back ISIS and then, you know, spent the next few years taking everything back. It was deeply unfairly. But that was my initial reaction. And so I kind of wanted to play with that and give, in their different ways, Pax and Lee, that kind of fresh rage, fresh baggage that they haven't even begun parsing through, even though, even though their war, or at least their part of the war, ended 10 years prior. Afghanistan is so, the reactions to Afghanistan are so fascinating because it's one of these things where like, it was like there was a certain amount of the American populace that had walled itself off and just assumed that that was going to be forever, that we were going to be

there forever, that it was just going to be kind of a status. quo money in personnel sink forever to keep that thing going. Then coupled with the shock of how fast it all happened. And what a piss poor job America did at getting people out safely. So I'm wondering if it had been more of a slow unwinding instead of just a brutal rapid shock, if it would have played differently in people's consciousness? Probably, at least for some people. The comparison I remember being bandied about in the month,

I mean, just the arrogance of withdrawing around the September 11th anniversary, right, when there's an actual fighting season just a couple months away that would have at least given the Afghan government a couple months to stabilize. It's like we learn nothing. but the comparison I remember being bandied about early August 2021 was well you know even the South Vietnamese military held on for about two years right we withdrew our last combat forces from Vietnam 73 Saigon didn't felt in 1975 and I'll admit that I personally probably bought into that even though it has nothing to do with it's a whole

different war it's a whole different country it's a whole different country it's It's American hubris at its finest and its most shallow, right, that we compared these things 45 years apart. Be like, oh, okay, that'll work. They can hang out in two years. And that didn't happen for reasons that I think we're all kind of pretty familiar with. You know, I can't even agree. You know, a lot of Afghan military units fought very bravely. and they weren't enough.

And other Afghan units, as the Domino started to fall, had to make a decision. And I don't know. I've never been standing at a gate, checking my phone, seeing the rest of the country fall, seeing the neighborhood kid that I hadn't seen since I was 12, show up with his Taliban buddies and say, so are we going to kill you or not?

You know, I can kind of wrap my head around, even if it's a bit of a betrayal of soldiering. So that's a long-witted way of saying that I think you're probably on to something, at least back here, that had it been more of a slow burn, the withdrawal would not have stung so many connected to Afghanistan, not just veterans, but aid workers,

even journalists, government workers, And the sting for all of them was very pronounced, and I think remained so. Let's get back to the novel. Give all these interesting things. A large part of the book is kind of packs wandering around and interacting with Ukraine and the cities and its people in kind of seeing things on the periphery. And I wanted to ask about a couple of these periphery characters that are things. that kind of like, it's like Paxa butts these strange worlds and then retreats from them as like the complexity of whatever's going on like starts to rear its head.

The ones, one of the scenes kind of earlier on that strikes me is I believe it's after he's been, he and Lee go to sign up. They take Lee immediately. They can tell that Pax is perhaps not best suited to go to the front and they tell him no. He ends up wandering, kind of doing a walkabout. ends up in a like an expat bar, or maybe it's a cafe, where he overhears these guys talking in English, and before he sees them thinks that they're fellow soldiers.

And then it's very obvious that something else is going on there, like when he sees them and when he actually starts talking to them. And I was wondering if you could kind of tell me about that kind of Western character in Ukraine. Sure. Yeah. So that scene takes place at a KFC. is a prominent feature, at least in the big cities in Ukraine. And yeah, they are somewhat nebulous characters. I don't think Pax really ever definitively figures out who they are. In my head, they are salesmen, business people, probably unaffiliated with the American government.

But they are there to make money. and they are there to sell services, equipment, perhaps even weapons, to Ukrainian units in need. And early on in the war, it was pretty decentralized. You know, Ukraine, I think, has gotten better from what I've observed in terms of keeping things, everything above the board and controlling all this. you know, for both legal reasons and to appease, you know, the Western governments that it needs to continue to support from. But, you know, getting there as early as we did, we rolled in with these kind of weird, mysterious characters.

Men in their 50s or 60s, clearly too old to fight, wearing very nice watches, very nice wingtip shoes, talking openly in English unabashedly in English. And we talked to a few of them and, you know, they, I don't know, oh, well, I'm a contractor. It'll be very vague with what they do except one conversation we did have and they didn't know we were, they didn't know we were writers, certainly. And I had to basically sit on my hands to keep myself for pulling out my notebook. but you know

American said he was a military vet said he had a connection to a warehouse in Romania with 5,000 AK-47s and he was just looking for the right partner I believe is the term he used

I never got out of him if he was just there to get those weapons out of the goodness of his heart or specifically had a price in his mind but as I was sitting there and I walked home with with my friends. I realized how little of that world.

I was just a junior officer 10 years ago. I never encountered that world. I vaguely understood that this stuff goes on in existence, its entire ecosystem. And of course, like bugs to a zapper, these forces are going to be drawn to a conflict like Ukraine. But still sitting at that table, trying to keep it together,

trying not to betray, I had no poker face. I'm sure it took him very, all of five minutes to realize we were not worth his time. But yeah, you know, I mean, so that scene is lifted directly from, you know, kind of personal encounters

of like, and much like PACs, realizing that my understanding of global armed conflict is just a very, small piece of it. But hey, here's a peep hole into a whole other world. And it's worth thinking about it, if nothing else. Yeah, there's a whole other world of black market logistics that goes into these things, right? Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, by giving this interview, I'm probably going to, probably going to give up any future job prospects in that world.

Road not taken. All right, angry, plaintiff, listeners, want to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. The scene, what would I even call this? The mystical barter house? With dog? No, with the passport. Oh, yes. Okay.

Yes. So I love that sequence. That is also based on a real place, though it's actually no longer open. But for years in Lviv, there was this very strange alley where kids mostly but anyone could was encouraged to bring toys to and you could take a toy out

and I found old pictures of it I was just I honestly can't even remember how I encountered it first because it in reality no longer it existed in 2020 and you were there. So I might have just been reading like an old guidebook

something like that and I was just really fascinated by it and I think I found some reviews online, maybe Google reviews or TripAdvisor or something. And a person went on and on and on, you know, I visited on this very foggy day and it was really creepy. And I was like, I can tap it.

I can, I can use this. So yeah, you know, I just took that glimmer, you know, a shard of research and just kind of maximized it. So that when Pax goes there to retrieve an item very dear to him that has been taken,

he has nothing to offer except for his past board. And, you know, that is, like a lot of things Pax does, it's lifted from something Lee had said in a different context earlier. But, you know, Pax is just kind of, Pax, Pax wants to be likely in some ways and wants to be there and wants to show that he's committed. So he has to, you know, and this is, this is at a time when the American Assembly has fled Ukraine. So it's not, not so much matter if he can just go report and get another one. So, yeah, it's kind of, I think that's Pax's first. One of the themes in the book, I think, is choice. And when we get to really make one and when we need to pretend to make one just to go on with ourselves. But that's first, that's Pax's first real choice that I think he makes in this story. Let's talk about Pax a little bit more.

Can I first get you to admit that liking in an aeroplane over the sea and telling a woman that yes, in fact, that is your favorite song, is a giant red flag. Yeah, I intentionally picked a pretty obnoxious hipster song, both kind of as an Easter egg for myself. I mean, the timing worked out for when they would have been young people and listening to it. But I also needed it to be somewhat popular enough that, like, you know, Spintana speaks pretty good English, but it is, it's not her native language. So what's the song she would have encountered an American song that would have stuck her with her all these years?

And yeah, I think it is a key sign of who Pax was 10 years before. And maybe why Svetlana took off for Lviv 10 years prior, too. Right. So at the center of this book is this relationship between Pax and Svetlana. This woman that he'd met, this Ukrainian woman that he'd met, and I would say he fell in love with 10 years earlier. The nature of that love and the maturity of that love, I think, is in question throughout the novel. Yes. But can you kind of tell me about their relationship and why you decided to use that as kind of this motivation for Pax?

So I think it started with, I mean, there's something, I'm certainly far from the first writer to find the contrast and dissonance of love, of a love story in the midst of a war, compelling, right? And just great, great fodder for storytelling. I knew I wanted a prominent Ukrainian character. I needed it, you know, because Paxton Lee kind of came to me first. But I also just, you know, I didn't want to do it kind of like, I wanted to be dark. I needed, I knew Pax was already stuck in Afghanistan in a very severe way. So getting him at least psychologically to braid his memories of their relationship, which was though fleeting, was intense. And having him braid in a way, I have seen a lot of, not just veterans, but people stuck, stuck in their memories, stuck in the past. Everything in that moment was so momentous for him.

And he made choices. And he spent the 10 years since believing that they were all the wrong choices, both in the Gunners Kupola in Afghanistan, when there's a large suicide bomber attack. And then what went wrong with this Ukrainian woman who, he's thought about a lot, even if it was a fleeting intense relationship. And at some point over the last 10 years,

all of that has braided together. So, you know, like you recall, and anybody listening recalls when anything that was on the news in mid, late February, 2020 was Ukraine. And is this actually happening? Right. It was dislocating. was surreal for any of us,

anybody bothering to pay attention that, like, oh my God, like the possibility World War III is actually here. That's intensified for him. And he finds himself thinking about this woman even more. And then Lee calls

someone out of the blue and says, hey, you want to come? Again, a choice. though I'm not sure that one is one Pax could have walked away from. He had nothing. He worked at, he works at AutoZone in Oklahoma.

He's miserable. This is at least something different. This is at least something new. And maybe, just maybe, there's somebody over there that needs his help. So it's a, it's messed up. It's messed up. It's not a healthy relationship by any means.

you use the word braid when you're talking about the reconstruction of memory can you go into that a little? Why braid? Why is that the word?

So the epigraph of the book is taken from Conrad's Lord Jim and it's about memory and kind of like the lurid tricks, vanity plays on our memories you know, to give some pretense to make it live, right?

And it basically, you know, it's the way we all kind of bend time, warp memory to be able to go on, to be able to endure. The memory, there's a couple short sections in the book set 10 years prior that explores Svetlana's memory of their relationship, which is very different than Pax's memory. There's a couple of moments of overlap, though. There are a couple moments of overlap. And maybe, you know, I still believe in objective truth. It is out there. It's just often hard for us to find, both in the moment and certainly in our memories. So that is something I think we all do with people we care about.

And it's also something that I think anybody who's been around armed conflict probably has a version of. You know, the first dead body you come across. the first artillery fire you, you know, first bomb blast, you hear. It elevates us, our senses. And yet it also instantly reminds you how fragile we are, that we are, we are just kind of animals. And very fragile animals at that. how do veterans with PTSD and taxes case, but even ones that are doing fine, how do we, how do our, how do our minds make sense of that? How do we contain that to be able to go forward? How do I fashion both in nonfiction and fiction?

How do I fashion these these moments of real brief sudden violence surrounded by, you know, gross boredom and waste and ruin? How do I fashion that into narrative? My mind, my memory, my imagination is bending events to be cohesive, to be coherent. We all do this. and Pax has done it with two very formative experiences in his life. His relationship with Fittlana that ended poorly and suddenly, and then his time in Afghanistan, which also ends suddenly and poorly. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Yeah, I kept thinking about that while I was reading this Because it's very I always like I wouldn't say that Pax is necessarily an unreliable narrator But I like that there are these You're so in his head for so much of the book But then there are these moments where you pull out and you see what's going on From another person's perspective and it is not Being interpreted or remembered in the same way at all

Yeah, yeah I knew I wanted to end on a Ukrainian note, so that was important. And then I think I got that, the original idea for doing that, James Salter's first novel, The Hunters, which is about dog fighters in Korea, does something similar. And I thought it was really cool. And so I was like, well, I can do it too. Nobody reads that book. There's a great moment where kind of earlier on that's a tell, we're packed. is very taken with

a pair of earrings that Zavlana wears to a dinner that they go to and he's like, those are the earrings I gave her in Milan. She dug them out. Why is she wearing them?

And then you get this, he mentions this to her. And then later you have Svetlaana thinking, from her point of view, just like, you know, my husband gave me these

like six years ago as an anniversary gift or something, right? And it's like they're not, these are not the earrings you think. they are. You're seeing what you want to see. Yeah, that was, you know, just as I was thinking about their differing memories and how they view their relationship 10 years before the way they did.

Yeah, I mean, the arrogance of men came up a few times. You know, Pax's not a bombastic type, but he's still a dude. And he still wants to think that he's lived on in her life more than, more than he really has. And he's an American dude. I think that's a very important piece of this. I kept thinking about that as that too as I was reading this. So he keeps, he kind of goes from place to place, uh,

repeating almost like a mantra, I want to help. Let me help. I want to help. Um, and everyone's reactions to him are very interesting. Uh, because nobody quite believes him,

uh, when he says that that's the reason he's there, right? Right. I mean, Because when we, our first trip, we got that question consistently. And we had a very clean answer. Hey, we're working with this small group of civilians on just real basic self-defense. And that seemed to kind of satisfy most of the Ukrainians who asked us.

But I was interested in, you know, there was like a random Canadian there that we encountered who wanted to teach meditation. And he was like, oh, well, let me come to your group and we'll work on meditation. I was like, man, you seem like a really good human being. what are you doing here? You know? And so I think that was the seed for that. And yeah, I mean, you're absolutely like the power dynamic between Svetlana and Pax is something.

I enjoy kind of making messy and muddying up. And, you know, in many, you know, he's the American. He can leap, come and go whenever he wants, you know, eventually he'll find a passport again or something. She's, she feels somewhat trapped. Yeah, she's a, you. Ukrainian woman so she can leave, but she has an estranged husband who's fighting at the front. More importantly, she has a young son who she wants to raise Ukrainian and she wants to raise near

his father. But, you know, this war is threatened to trap her the same way Afghanistan trapped packs. So, you know, there's that paradigmic. On the other hand, socially, she kind of comes from a bit of a higher social class. He kind of comes from a working class background. He fell head over heels in love with this Ukrainian woman in Italy who was on her gap year, right? She comes from a little bit more money. She ends up marrying a lawyer.

She's up until this war, she's lived a life of relative comfort and ease. Pax has not. Pax has been struggling for 10 years. So in that way, she actually had. has a bit more power and control of the situation. And I think she's more aware of that disparity than taxes of his. And I don't know. I think it makes, if nothing else, I hope that kind of helps readers understand their attraction to each other, at least when they were young people, because they were so different.

And oftentimes, no, maybe it was probably never going to work out, but that doesn't mean it wasn't memorable. that doesn't mean that it didn't mean something in the moment. Yeah, the only reason these two people met is because they were both kind of lifted out of their circumstances, right? They had to meet each other in completely different contexts. Yes. Yes. No, I mean, he's a, Pax was an enlisted guy stationed in Italy, completely out of his depth, serving his country. But, yeah, in no normal circumstances.

do they cross paths, but they did. And what does that mean, both for their past selves and then their current selves when they find each other and need to at least work together to try to help someone? Let's get to some end of the book. Spoilers, if we can here at the end of the conversation, if that works for you. Mr. Graves. nice moment there at the end.

I'm wondering if that grave that he finds, is that real? It is. It is. I took some liberties with kind of the how it's described. But yeah, that Edmund Pike Graves

is buried at that cemetery in LeVee. When did you know that Pax was doomed? Unlike, you know, this is my third novel. The other two I really had to wrench out of me. I, probably at the very beginning.

I didn't want to write keeping him alive just would have felt cheap in some way. It almost makes him a tourist more than so than he already is, right? Exactly, exactly. Like if I wanted, if I was going to end with him actually

finding a way to help, there need to be some consequence. There needed to be real cost. Otherwise, it's a redemption story and a clean redemption story. And I didn't, want to write Christ, that probably would have sold a lot more copies. So maybe, but it just wasn't the book I wanted to write.

That's it when I got to it, I'll all admit, I was like, oh, man, I've been really hard on him already. Am I really going to do this? And it just, I couldn't, any other avenue, it just didn't feel right. Whereas this, you know, the story, the whole book kind of tumbled out of me in a much cleaner way than my previous books had. So I just have to see it through. The, like, if he goes, so for, for people that maybe need a refresher or, or just listen to the episode,

Svetlana's husband is wounded in the east, in the southeast, and they have to go, she needs someone to go get the body. They assume that he is dead and they're going to go get to pick up the body. It's a little bit unclear. He's been wounded, but presumed dead. They get there. And, well, Pax essentially is volunteered by her friends and accepts the role of driving. He's going to, he, he's a mechanic.

He knows cars. A lot of the cars in the area are crappy. So he's going to drive. He will get her there. Let him do this, I think he says. They get there and husband is alive. It was a miracle. He pulled through.

Now they got to get him back. And in the process of getting in them back, Pax is shot and dies rather quickly. And I'm thinking, like, if he had, if all of this stuff had happened and he had gotten out, it almost would have felt like a weird American exploitation novel, right? Like, this is the American experience of the Ukrainian war. They've come and they've done their tour and then they get to go home and he learned something that he gets to take with them. And maybe he quits and goes to college instead of continuing on it. AutoZone, right? And that would have felt less serious, I think, as a novel. And it would have kind of and it would have kind of encouraged this idea that, you know, an American man that can do a re-do on his war and go and pick up another war somewhere else and then come home and be healed in some way, right?

Yeah, I did not want this to be read. It's just interesting because because we came back so early and we did that scene. in the spot with Anderson Cooper. You know, we all filled a lot of queries from other vets on should I go. And I was like, I can't answer that for you. I don't want to encourage you to do it. You know, over 50 Americans have been killed there. The vast majority of them are military veterans. This is very real and not to take away from whatever you saw or did before, but this is,

this is different. I mean, there's cruise missiles. There's artillery. It is breaking hardened, hardened soldiers. Same time, I don't want to, it's not for me to discourage because it would be completely hypocritly, be like, oh, you can't do it. There's no way you can help because there might be. I just, it needs to be an educated choice. So I was keenly aware, maybe I think, from having dealt with all of that, that if I'd written at the way,

you put it and, you know, he comes back with brizzled, hard-earned wisdom from the front and, you know, starts campaigning and, you know, telling congressman to pass Ukraine aid, blah, blah, blah. It would be cheerleading. It would be cheerleading. And, you know, trying to maintain the balance between encouragement and discouragement, you know, having them. be killed in a brutal and violent and sudden way was it just seemed more honest than than the other choices and you know it fit i think it fit into the story right um he he dies and and uh to ross lives dennis gets to keep his father um svidlana uh will always remember him in a way that she

probably wouldn't have had he not gotten on that plane and gone to ukraine um that's really sad it's really dark. It's pretty cool for a book. How have reactions been to the ending? That's the first thing people want to talk about. Some really like it, some hate it. I've come to realize it means it's memorable. I got nailed at a church last week for it by an old lady who also didn't like all the curse words. but you know good on her you know good on her 75 year old Oklahoma Presbyterian reading a book like this

and then having having the confidence to come up and tell the author I read it parts of it were good here's what I didn't like so it does seem to be not you know when you said the last 50 pages were especially memorable to you I've heard that a lot really it's chapter 9 chapter 9 is the biggest chapter in the book and I kind of designed, I just wanted to pack everything else before

that is kind of a slow burn up to it. And then it kind of takes on a different momentum. And, you know, if it's memorable, that hopefully means I did something right. Yeah, all the characters that are in that car get clarified in a way in that last chapter. Roman and, is it Brodigan? Bogdan. Bogden.

Bogden. Yeah. and unknown, like, these, this surreal road trip that they go on could almost be, like, that could be the whole film if you were going to make the movie, right? Would just be that, like, 90 minutes of that journey back and forth is how I would structure it.

Oh, interesting. And then you'd like flash back to the other chapters. Oh, I like that. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, you start off with them just in the car going, And then, yeah, you build everything else through flashback and conversation in the car. Would be how I would do the screenplay.

Anyway, one more side character I did want to talk about before I let you go. You already mentioned him. Dog. Did you meet a dog? Did you go to a museum with a little green man statue? We met versions of dog. and I think it was important to include him. He's a nationalist, you know, right-wing leader.

Maybe not Azov exactly, but certainly Azov aligned around Azov. And I think it was important to include him, A, you know, there's a lot of Western obsession with that aspect of the Ukrainian military and culture, even if it is small, it is there. And I, you know, for the same reason I didn't, you know, I've talked kind of at length about keeping my American veterans complex and not not staring into a hero story or or jingoism or whatever it dog was a way maybe for me to complicate the Ukrainian people right like yeah this is a this is a sovereign democracy um that deserves our support and uh deserves to defend itself

but it's flawed it's dealt with corruption issues uh those are real um it's it's it's trying to figure this out in many ways on the fly. And that is hard when you have power brokers like dog, influential leaders in their community who have been and are using the war for personal benefit. They're also proud Ukrainians. They're proud nationalists. They hate the Russians. They hate Putin.

As we saw in Mary Util at the Steelworks, sometimes those guys make really excellent soldiers. You know, that's a weird thing to reconcile. I mean, Ukraine itself is, you know, there's kind of a war for memory going on there. Because what those guys did was legitimately heroic. And every, you know,

every recruiting or reporting trip I've taken since, you have to know, Ukraine has to trust you a lot and know you already to be willing to deal, at least as an American, that's American writer. to talk to about the nuance in all that. 99% of people, whatever their politics, and most people's politics are not like that.

They showed us the way forward. We are here because of them. That's going to be something whenever this war ends after, decades after, Ukraine is going to be sorting through. So, you know, putting my dopey American, ignorant American in conversation with dog in his museum. Dog thinks he's like some other Americans he's encountered connected, more willing to work in kind of the black market.

So dog is almost unintentionally honest with Pax and thus the reader in a way he never would be if he actually understood who Pax is and how little connected Pax is. I can't say he's based on a dog is based off. of one guy we met maybe a composite a composite and you know the museum is just I think was just kind of a

clean, neat, physical way for me to show these types obsessions with history and nationalism, right? Like, you know, having a map on the wall allows me to describe it

in scene rather than an exposition. Yeah, and there's something fascinating about having a museum like that and then having what is effectively a trophy for what dog tells packs is like his kill like this is the guy I killed here was his sniper rifle here's all of his armor here's the story of me killing him and I have placed this monument in this museum as part of this continuity of history yeah he's a he's a disturbed individual only only you know and uh uh uh he disturbs readers

but I'll admit like it was a like you know maybe intellectually important to include him for all the reasons I already said he was also just a lot of fun

to write you know he's he's kind of he's kind of psychotic and yet there is this kind of I leave readers with this question this discomfort of like is he actually good for the war effort

he's certainly bad for his country but he might be good for the war effort and sometimes those things conflict and what does that be going forward? Oh, that's the kind of note I like to end on. That kind of ambiguity. Matt Gallagher, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through daybreak.

Glad to have you on again. What are you working on now? Oh. Selling daybreak? No, no. My six-year-old, who has not read the book, wants to write a sequel. I don't have the heart to tell him. I don't think there's anybody left to do it.

with, you know, maybe, maybe a couple of side characters. But, um, uh, well, I could read a, you know, I wouldn't hate reading a Maryman book. Ooh, you know what? That's, you're on to something there. Yeah, that was another character I really kind of enjoyed writing. And then, you know, there's that one section that I think deepened sim tremendously from his perspective. Yeah, a wonderful, that's such a wonderful scene.

That's a really great and telling scene, I thought. And that one I will let people discover in the book. Appreciate that. As for what I'm working on now, I am sick of writing current affairs. I've really only just started, but started research and sketching out ideas. But I'm writing about 1860s, Nevada. I'm originally from Nevada. And the state really was built up by folks, veterans and civilians from the Civil War

that were just looking to start a new life. and I don't know. I'm wondering maybe there's some answers in there about what America is trying to figure out what we are in the 21st century. And not the first time we've had had to do a real deep reckoning with ourselves. So I'm hoping, A, I'm excited to write about my old home.

And then B, I'm wondering maybe there's some answers, some of my questions in the past. So, but it's really, it's, it's really vague. I'm not even just staying vague because we're on a podcast. It's, it's all very, uh, barely sketched out at this point. But I'm excited about it. I look forward to reading it. I like that era of American history.

So I will definitely be there when it comes out. Appreciate it, Matthew. Always, always pleasure talking with you. Always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. All right. That's all for this episode. Angry Planet listeners is always Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gull.

Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, if you really like the show, please go to Angry Planetpod.com. Give us $9 a month. It gives you instant access to all the bonus content. There's a really great Matt Gallagher episode from about a month ago that is about some literary controversies that people have really loved and responded to you very well. So if you want to listen to that, go to Angry Planetpod.com and sign up. You will also get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes.

So if you are hearing this and you heard commercials during the episode, go to Angry Planet Pod. You can get a private RSS feed into whatever app that you use to listen to your podcasts and skip those commercials. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. I've got some really great stuff recorded. Really amazing reporting out of Russia that I'm excited for you all. to hear four subscribers only that one though so again angry planetpod.com will be back soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet stay safe until then