This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Matt Gallagher, a writer whose new novel, “Empire City,” will be released in April. Gallagher is the author of two other books and co-editor of a third, all of which deal with America’s post-9/11 wars and their long term effects. Gallagher’s first book, “Kaboom,” was adapted from his blog of the same name, kept during his time serving as a US Army officer in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

The hardest problem I try to solve in my work — and this has been an ongoing problem for me as I made the transition from Army officer to nonfiction writer and essayist to novelist — is how to make the American people care about the foreign wars being waged in their name. For decades preceding these wars and 9/11, Americans have been conditioned to not take ownership of foreign policy, leaving matters of war and peace to experts and volunteers to handle. And I think that’s just a deeply unhealthy way for a republic to conduct itself. If you’re a thinking person, these issues belong to all of us.

A really early lesson for me about shared responsibility for foreign policy was going on patrols in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 and being reminded that we weren’t just wearing the patch of our unit but we were wearing the patch of the American flag. Everything that we did, good, bad, and ugly, at any moment, would be representative of that. I get why, in these times of great peril, of coronavirus, of a tanking economy, of people just trying to make sure they can pay their rent or their mortgage or put enough food on the table, that one more thing to care about that seems so far away and distant for them might be too much to ask for, but I take it as a kind of an intellectual challenge to try and connect with more people and get them to engage with this stuff. Even if they read my stories and novels and arrive maybe at a different conclusion about these things than I personally feel, that’s okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Just care. Just read. Just think. Something tells me this’ll be something I grapple with for as long as I walk this earth, to be honest.

Through a lot of trial and error, I’ve learned to start at the human level. Each passing year, as I write about conflict, I write far less about my own experiences — what I saw, what I did, what my platoon saw or did — and instead focus on other people’s experiences. As part of the veteran writer community, I’m able to meet people and learn how these wars have affected them, including younger veterans, younger people who’ve gone abroad with the State Department or as journalists, and even friends here in the States who interface and interact with these wars through the news.

I’ve found that a lot of being a good novelist about these wars is probably a lot like being a good reporter — being willing to go ask people questions, knowing when to interrupt and push, and knowing when to just shut up and listen. That’s been super helpful — I consider it research. But on a personal level, I find it really engaging and stimulating because it allows me to take kind of my hyper-focused, myopic experiences during the surge and the counterinsurgency effort in 2007 and 2008 and see how it relates to these wars and our republic’s foreign policy in the macro. And as I learn more, I try to use those inputs to produce new writing that is broader, different, and hopefully more interesting than what I’d written before.