Matt Gallagher was born in Reno, NV, the son of attorneys Dennis and Deborah Scott Gallagher. He and his brother Luke attended Brookfield School and Bishop Manogue High School, where Matt edited the school newspaper and ran cross country and track. He graduated in 2001.

In the fall of 2001, Gallagher entered Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He joined Army ROTC the week before 9/11, and decided to honor this commitment after the September 11th attacks. While at Wake Forest, Gallagher was a member of Theta Chi Fraternity and served as the sports editor of the Old Gold & Black. He graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, and was commissioned in the U.S. Army as a Second Lieutenant of Armor.

Gallagher's military training began at Fort Knox, KY, where he attended and graduated from the Armor Officer Basic Course and Army Reconnaissance Course. He was subsequently assigned to the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, HI. He deployed with his unit in 2007 as a Scout Platoon Leader with 2-14 Cavalry to Saba al-Bor, a sectarian village northwest of Baghdad. Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In July 2008, Gallagher was promoted to Captain and reassigned to 1-27 Infantry, part of the famed 27th Infantry Regiment, where he served as a Targeting Officer. He and his unit returned to Schofield Barracks in February 2009, and Gallagher left the Army later that year. He earned the Combat Action Badge during his deployment to Iraq.

Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal

During his deployment in Iraq, Gallagher wrote about his experiences there on a military blog. Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal was a popular blog from November 2007 to June 2008, before it was shut down by his military chain-of-command. Gallagher went by the pseudonym of LT G and wrote about his front-line experiences in the Iraq War as a U.S. Army soldier. A scout platoon leader, LT G often incorporated the trials and tribulations of his platoon in his writings, offering a brash and brutally honest perspective of modern warfare. Kaboom was shut down, and subsequently deleted, after Gallagher made a post detailing his turning down of a promotion in an effort to stay with his soldiers.

Before Kaboom was shut down, it was one of the few military blogs to garner attention and press coverage from the print media. This can be attributed to Gallagher's literary writing style. In a nationally published story chronicling the rise and fall of Kaboom, LT G was revealed to be Gallagher, who had been promoted to captain soon after his blog was shut down.

Post-Military Life & Career

After leaving the Army, Gallagher moved to New York City and wrote his war memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, which was published in April 2010 by Da Capo Press. It received widespread critical acclaim, garnering Gallagher a speaking invitation from the prestigious Pritzker Military Library in Chicago.

Post-Kaboom, Gallagher has written for a variety of magazines and publications, to include The Atlantic, Boston Review and The New York Times. He then became a Columbia University MFA candidate in Fiction.

In March 2012, it was announced that Da Capo will publish Fire & Forget, an anthology of Iraq and Afghanistan-based short stories edited by Gallagher and Roy Scranton. National Book Award Winner Colum McCann will write the foreword to the anthology.