So one thing led to another, and I began building an openly imperial America that had never suffered defeat in Vietnam, that had been allowed to maintain its myth of invincibility.

How did this happen only a generation or so after Vietnam? I knew already that I wanted to write something speculative, something different, as my first two books Kaboom (2010) and Youngblood (2016) had been written in the tradition of hard realism. The seed for Empire City, or “germ” as Henry James would refer to it as, came in 2016 or so, as I was brooding over how America’s become mired in these endless, post-9/11 wars, with, to my eyes at least, a military fighting them separate and apart from the citizenry as a whole. What inspired your idea for Empire City, which takes place in an alternate present when the U.S.

The more I do of both, the more I find they complement one another, for floaty, ethereal reasons I have trouble giving a concrete explanation for. Fiction takes more work on the prewriting front, is often a more difficult beast to wrangle in revisions, but ultimately more fulfilling once I get it right. I find nonfiction a bit smoother to write, if not easier, because the contours and limits of a piece are naturally shaped by the knowns of the world. You have written both nonfiction and fiction. He was an asshole, but I was a bit of a punk, and you can’t make fun of your boss on the internet, whether you’re a circus trainer or a junior officer in the military. I was very mindful of that! Of course, then it got shut down anyhow, after I detailed an unpleasant conversation I had with our squadron commander. Everyone I served with knew about it, some of them shared it with their families – it was anonymous in that I used nicknames for everyone and obscured our whereabouts in Iraq, but that was done for operational security reasons. In the moment, though, it was just something I did every few days when I had a free hour or two, to update family and friends. Years later, I’d liken it to a jigsaw puzzle – writing helped put the pieces together of our various patrols and interactions with Iraqi locals. The blog was an escape from our day-to-day travails, something I maintained to make sense of the strangeness and violence and contradictions of life as a counterinsurgent. Did the people serving with you know you were the author? What was their reaction? It was shut down when you wrote about how you turned down a promotion so that you could stay with your soldiers. When you were deployed to Iraq, you wrote an anonymous blog, Kaboom, about your frontline experiences.

Kaboom by Matt Gallagher