It is both illuminating and shattering to read Matt Gallagher’s novel Daybreak—the story of a troubled American former soldier volunteering in Ukraine in the face of constant Russian bombardment—even more shattering and significant following the President of the United States’ scolding of Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House last week and subsequent withdrawal of U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Matt Gallagher

Gallagher, a U.S. Army veteran and author of four books, places readers directly in the middle of Lviv, amid blown-up cathedrals and apartment buildings, daily air raids and regular citizens trying to maintain normalcy while sacrificing beloveds to the battlefield. Daybreak’s main character, Luke “Pax” Paxton, and his traveling buddy, Han Lee, both American veterans of the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan, have come to Ukraine with different personal motives, believing that this is a just war in a country united by its urgent need for a strong national defense against a blatant aggressor. That contrasts with the unclear mission they served in Afghanistan that started badly and ended badly. In Pax’s view: “Dumb wars get dumb endings.”

Pax has struggled in the decade since his deployment, moving around with little direction, thumbing a strand of prayer beads (a souvenir of Afghanistan) he wears on his wrist, taking lots of deep yoga breaths to calm himself and consuming even more mood stabilizers and alcohol. He arrives in Ukraine somewhat willing to fight if the legion of foreign soldiers will take him; Lee, however, is hungry to see action. Following an interview with the legion’s recruiter Bogdan, Lee advances to the front and Pax is left behind in Lviv to figure out what’s next. He carries with him a street address and a head full of haunting memories of a Ukrainian woman from Lviv, Svitlana, whom he loved for a brief time in Vicenza, Italy, before he deployed to Afghanistan and a suicide bomber’s bloody checkpoint attack left him traumatized and feeling powerless.

There are no soap opera reunions in store for Pax and Svitlana; Gallagher is too firm a realist for that. But he appreciates that love and human connection are often the things that save a soldier, and he deftly draws that injured but lasting connection in delicate strokes. His restraint has been compared to Hemingway’s by some critics and his prose to Fitzgerald’s, and that praise is not excessive. This is surely among the finest fiction written in English about this 21^stcentury eastern European war.

Pax is introduced to a band of civil volunteers, friends of Svitlana, who can use his skills as a mechanic to help them deliver supplies to the front lines and to evacuate wounded soldiers when needed. This alignment leads him into dangerous territory and a face-to-face accounting of himself and his past war experience.

That’s all that needs to be said about the plot of this fine novel that doesn’t waste a word or take a wrong turn. Gallagher weaves in subplots and minor characters deftly, and with purpose. The ending is literally explosive. What readers need to know is that Daybreak is a deeply moral book focused on the universal conflicts of conscience and duty. Gallagher is a practiced warrior and thinker who went to Ukraine after the Russian invasion as a volunteer and as a journalist. He came back to write a memorable on-the-ground piece for Esquire and, ultimately, Daybreak, based on that experience.

He is a meticulous observer and brings the sights of Lviv to vivid life against Pax’s state of mind, in scenes like this one with Pax and Lee sightseeing on their first day in country:

      “The horizon sat low and smothering, blotted by gray thunderheads. Flurries began to fall scattershot against the day. They stopped at the gate of an Armenian cathedral so Lee could take a photo, then again under a bell tower of an Orthodox church. It’s funny, Pax thought, how the older man [Lee] was drawn to these holy relics but swore if there was a God he’d punch Him in the mouth. Along the church’s façade were homemade memorials, dozens and dozens of portraits of young soldiers in uniform, some children’s drawings in crayon, too, tributes to dead daddies and uncles, a few mommies and sisters, little flags tucked into corners of the wall, horizontal bands of blue and yellow flickering against the gray.

     ‘Can you imagine?’ Pax couldn’t help himself. The fallen always turned him a bit maudlin.”

Matt Gallagher, who currently lives in Colorado Springs where he is writer-in-residence at the Institute for Future Conflict at the U.S. Air Force Academy, is a trustworthy witness to the often unreliable but deeply human instincts of his flawed protagonist, Pax. He’s also a steady guide through the daily terror that abuts and surrounds every Ukrainian, in real time and in this powerful and important novel.