To Be Someone: A Review of Matt Gallagher’s DAYBREAK by John Coats

Daybreak
By Matt Gallagher
Simon & Schuster/Atria Books (February 20, 2024)
256 pp.

It was this slowly cooling, absurd drop “I” that refused to give up its fire, its tiny glowing core. -Robert Musil

Matt Gallagher is a former army officer and Iraq war veteran, and one of the exceptional writers to emerge from America’s 21st Century wars. He is the author of two previous novels, the critically acclaimed Youngblood, and Empire City, and his powerful memoir Kaboom, Embracing The Suck In A Savage Little War.

Daybreak is a novel in ten parts, and though written by an American about a Ukrainian city at war, its gritty legitimacy is rooted in what gives Youngblood, Gallagher’s novel of the Iraq war, its power. He was there. Since the Russian invasion began in February 2022, Gallagher has been to Ukraine three times, once to Lviv with other American veterans, to train a civilian defense force, then as a journalist in October and November of 2022 and August 2023. He knows the people and their city, where, as he writes in his Esquire magazine article, “Notes from Lviv,” “War-adjacent life comes with its edges. Nothing was simple. Nothing was clean.”

We meet Luke “Pax” Paxton and Han Lee, American combat veterans, on a bus bound for Lviv, Ukraine. Their intention is to join the International Legion, to fight for Ukraine. Why would they want to go back to war once they’d escaped it? Why would anyone? Pax had nothing better to do, he’d been drifting since his return. And there was the woman, Svitlana, his former lover, whose address in Lviv he still carried with him. Maybe she’d still be there. Maybe they could start again. He wasn’t there for the action. He didn’t need it. Lee did. Despite the story he’d told his family and himself, one might suspect other, deeper, unspoken reason—the grip of war, itself, “how it baited those who survived it, seduced them, deluded them, trailing them like an old loyal dog until of course you turned around and said, come on boy…That's what Pax had been feeling since crossing the border the absoluteness of war’s force.” War as an addictive force? An entity? So it seems. Quentin Aanenson, in his documentary, “A Fighter Pilot’s story,” said, “The dynamics of war are so absolutely intense, the drama of war is so absolutely emotionally spellbinding that it is hard for you to go on with the normal life without feeling something is missing. Now, I have had a wonderful life, I have a family that just is ideal, and I've enjoyed my life. I find there are times when I am pulled back into the whirlpool. I find that the intensity of that experience was so overcoming and almost intimidating that you can't quite let go of it.” While Pax could feel it, he could let go of it. Lee could not.

Once home from the war, Lee could not stop being a soldier, evidenced in part by “the old compulsion to inspect and reinspect his equipment,” a tic his daughters hated. His elation, at being back in the “whirlpool” is palpable, but his mantra, “I’m not the killer man. I’m the killer man’s son. But I’ll do the killing till the killer man comes,” while impressive, overlays a secret. Despite multiple deployments, he has yet to kill anyone. “Lee’s kill had eluded him through all his deployments which had left him with “the sense of lost purpose in the homeland so now he was here, to again carry the gun.” But a soldier with multiple deployments, armed with a modern assault rifle and countless engagements with enemy combatants who never had the opportunity to kill? He did have his reasons why—“always seconds late to the firefight, a hesitant lieutenant at his shoulder, or a vexing, oblivious citizen standing between him and his chosen glory.” Well, okay, but why Ukraine? Was it something about this struggle? Something of what motivated Americans to fight for the Spanish Republic during Spain’s civil war? In his Esquire article, “A Soul in Bakmut,” Gallagher is interviewing Yarko, an American Air Force veteran: “‘Brotherhood is brotherhood,’ he says. ‘You still have the same dynamics and personalities…’ When I ask what's not alike, he echoes the refrain of damn near every Western vet I've encountered in Ukraine since last March: ‘This is just way, way different…there's no question that you're fighting for good versus evil. It's not a question as to why you're in the war which was usually the case for us [in Iraq and Afghanistan].’” A righteous cause? Lee is of Korean descent, and when Bogdan, the Ukrainian recruiter, asks Lee, “‘Why are you here?” his first answer is, “War made my grandparents refugees. If strangers with guns from the other side of the planet hadn’t gone to Korea? Shit.’” At least, that’s what he’d told his ex-wife and kids. Then came the deeper answer. “‘But maybe I just came here to shoot a Russian invader in the fucking face."‘ A dark relish clambered out of Lee, pervading the table, then the entire back room. ‘So I can finally look at myself in the mirror and know, fucking know, that I'm the killer man.’” Still, if all he wanted was to loose that dark relish on an enemy, there were private military contractors who’d likely pay him quite well to do just that. So, again, why Ukraine? I think of Rilke’s haunting poem:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And other man, who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot

 Could it be that Lee’s “church,” his calling, is to be the man who stands up, not the one who forgot? And not just to war, but to this war? Curiously, while Lee’s bravado comes in a steady thrum, it is not tiresome, and never overshadows the affection he feels for Pax. He has a kind of oafish likeability inviting the reader to root for him. And there’s depth, not an opposite force from the ‘dark relish,’ but part of it. The morning of the interview, when Lee uses the expletive fuck and Pax suggests they should watch their language, Lee says “raw profanity is sometimes the only expression of human decency left to us.” I love him for that.

When Lee leaves for the front his presence remains only in the occasional news from the front—we learn he’s been wounded—and Pax’s memories and worry about his friend.

 Pax, thirty-three, an army-trained mechanic from “a small town in the middle of nowhere,” where “the biggest, nicest buildings were the Methodist church and the National Guard armory” is the protagonist of the larger story. One of the first things we learn about him is “I’m washed up and broken,” though “He didn't actually believe he was washed up. He was less sure about the broken part,” a valuable clue, a hint that there’s a self-claiming self in there somewhere, not broken, I suspect, just never fully formed. It is Pax’s evolution that moves the story forward, this evolution brought about by two crisis moments, crisis in the deeper sense of ‘decision’ or ‘separation,’ ‘to cut’ in order ‘to choose.’

Coming to Ukraine had been Lee’s idea: “What else you got going on?” The truth is that he had nothing going on, the same nothing he’d had going on before the war, but now he’s weighted with war memories, guilt, and longing for a Ukrainian woman, he’d loved ten years before. Vagueness seems to have been the theme of his life. When the woman on the bus asks why he’d enlisted, his response was, “Wish I could remember, fuck,” followed by an apology for swearing. “Wasn’t patriotism or anything,” he told the woman. “More like, a way to do something.” When she asks, “Why are you here?” he replies, “Wish I could remember that, too.”

Why is he there? As if the author-intermediary has stepped aside, in a fine example of Gallagher’s use of free-indirect style, we’re suddenly inside Pax’s head: “Be honest with yourself, at least. You came because of her and only her and everything else that isn’t her is a diversion, and you came because everything has gone wrong, and nothing has gone right since the world took her from you.” He hears the lie in that last bit: “That wasn’t how it had happened, not exactly, but Pax didn’t like thinking about that part.” On the bus to Lviv, he “feels like someone again,” which tells the reader he’d felt like someone before, and “the only way to be someone again, was to come here, now, like this.”

He says he wants to be chosen to serve with the International Legion but fails to take enough antidepressant to make sure he didn’t blow the interview. He hopes to find Svitlana, the woman he’d loved ten years before, who’d scribbled her address in his notebook, and when he finds the house and sees evidence that it might not be her house, seems almost relieved. He’d already made plans: “And when I confirm Svitlana’s not here, it’s on to Barcelona.” Again, vagueness. Was it commitment he lacked, or certainty? Or was it that mostly missing sense of self?

Following his rejection by the Ukrainian recruiter, he is awash in self-recrimination and hopelessness. “His own mind had done this to him, not the enemy, not a land mine, but his own consciousness, some defect in his nature…This had been his last chance, now he had nowhere to go but the tunnels of infernal memory…Ukraine had nothing for him. He had nothing for it.” It’s worth pausing a moment to read that again: His last chance? Nowhere to go but the tunnels of memory? Nonsense? Of course it is. But it fits a self-image he’d long before adopted.

He wants to “feel like someone” but waits for someone-ness to be bestowed on him from the outside. He wants love. I think of Midori in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: “I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it, to be fed so much love I couldn’t take anymore. Just once.” But for Pax—or anyone else, for that matter—to take in that much love, he must believe himself worthy of it. And he doesn’t. Ironically, ‘Pax’ is the Latin word for peace, which he won’t find, not in the way he is seeking it.

The first crisis moment comes on the day he is rejected. Around his wrist are turquoise beads that he is never without, that he thumbs incessantly as one might a rosary, that rise to the station of a talisman, even a character in the story. The facts are that he found them in the dirt of “some no-nothing mountain village” and put them in his pocket, unconcerned about who they might belong to, a war trophy. But through the story he tells about them, they become mythical, emblematic of a fabled self, longing for expression. His daimon, if you will. “Sometimes, always when he’d been drinking, usually when trying to impress a woman, Pax would say the beads had been a gift from an Afghan child. A boy he’d become friends with, the son of a respected elder, an ally, a man just like him who wanted dignity and purpose and to leave the earth a little bit better than he’d found it.” It’s a tale of something that never happened, yet as revelatory, as much a part of his story as any fact. Walking around the city, he stops to talk to an artist, and a charming little girl steals his beads and runs. “They stole my fucking beads…Ali gave me those.” What follows is eerie, magical, as though the reader is invited into the fable of the beads. The artist knows where the beads will be found. She leads him into a cobblestoned maze thick with fog, down a long, dark tunnel. Finally, they come to a courtyard, “a childish wonder” filled with hundreds of toys both old and new. Toys lost by children? Toys of lost children? A graveyard and a place of resurrection? “[I]t felt holy to him.” When the artist located the beads, he offered her a hundred-dollar bill. But this was a place for barter. Searching his pockets, he found his passport. She smiled, took the passport, and handed the beads to him. The artist looked at him “as though she were seeing him anew.” “I’m goddamn transcendent,” he says. And he was. Why? Go back to the description of the imagined elders, “an ally, a man just like him who wanted dignity and purpose and to leave the earth a little better than he had found it.” That was his secret, the beads its totem. No wonder he gave up his passport for them. They represented more of who he was than did the passport. And when the story is complete, he has left the earth a better place, certainly by the measure of the woman he came to find and the people he came to serve.

When he finds Svitlana, she is now married and a mother. The spark is still there, but dimmed. Still, she invites him to a dinner party at the home of her friend, Yeva. The party, fifty pages long, is rife with interesting, even fascinating characters, but the centerpiece of the evening is his story about the beads: “He held the room’s attention now…felt the crush of judgment all over again, except now Svitlana was here, watching him with utter interest, some residue skepticism, too, her eyes quivering, and he knew instinctually what he needed to do, it was obvious as smoke. He would not let himself stand in the way of what he sought, not again. He took a slow yoga breath and smiled his most American smile, all big teeth and dopey energy, and sat up straight against his chair. “You are a good man, Mister Graves, Yeva said, and Pax couldn’t remember the last time someone had said that to him.”

Hinted at in the beginning of the novel is a tragic incident at a checkpoint during Pax’s war, made impossible to reconcile by his refusal to acknowledge his part in it, placing the blame on Merriman, his commanding officer. Pax will meet Merriman, who will confront him, force him to face the fact that both he and Pax were culpable, which opens the door to the second crisis.

When Schopenhauer wrote that Dante got his fantasy of hell from the world, he meant that Dante’s hell is real, and feels real. So does Pax’s. Imagine carrying the memory of the dead you know you could have saved, the memory of a love traded for a moment of youthful pride. But for Pax anguished memory exists alongside anguished hope for redemption, for personhood, for a place of being known, all entombed by guilt and denial over the deaths at the checkpoint, the lie that the world took Svitlana from him, and his sense of worthlessness. But now, the stone blocking the tomb was cracking, diminishing, letting in the light, making possible a moment in a graveyard, alone, standing in front of an American World War I pilot who’d died in “a uniquely pointless way to go out.” “Then he thought, I don't want this. I can't be buried here, forgotten and alone.” It’s a breathtaking moment, a re-birth. “They're wrong about me, they're fucking wrong. ‘I fix things,’ he said out loud. Something sharp and hot swelled in Pax's chest and that spurred him to keep going…They may not know it…but they need me. I fix things.” And with that, he steps fully into his own life.

In the end, what Gallagher has given us in Daybreak is the story of a man—an everyman—in his search for a place in the world, and a cast of characters who, knowingly or not, aid his search, at times with kindness, at times with hard truth—kindness of another sort. At the same time, through these characters, is the story of a people willing to sacrifice literally everything for love of country and freedom. “I've had enough of people who die for ideas,” writes Albert Camus in The Plague. “What interests me, is living or dying for what one loves.”

John Coats has a Bachelor's degree, an M.Div from Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal), and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. Having served eight years as a parish priest in Texas and California, he joined a startup training organization, The Life Training, now called More To Life. After fifteen years as a principal speaker and trainer in the United States, Britain, and South Africa, John left the program and worked the next eight years as a management consultant. Then the writing bug bit and wouldn't let go. He is the author of Original Sinners, Why Genesis Still Matters (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2009), a non-religious exploration of the characters in the Book of Genesis. From 2014-2021, he was a fiction editor and book reviewer for Consequence Magazine.