Author interview: From Alaska to Afghanistan, and the Marines to a PhD in writing

Christopher Bryde trained for a time to be a monk, but ended up joining the US Marines. Deployed to Afghanistan, he lost both legs below the knee due to wounds

Lasha Surmanidze of Georgia, left, and author Christopher Bryde, compete in the men’s IR4 four minute endurance indoor rowing event during the Invictus Games in Vancouver in Canada, in February. Picture: Derek Cain/Getty

• Upgunner 
• Christopher Bryde
• Independently published, Amazon hb €25.40
• Interview: Mick Duggan

To say that Christopher Bryde has lived a life less ordinary doesn’t really come close to the truth.

Born in 1988, he grew up on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, which “at the time, probably had more bears and wolves than people. Maybe still does”. 

He trained for a time to be a monk, but ended up joining the US Marines. Deployed to Afghanistan, he lost both legs below the knee due to wounds sustained from a Taliban IED.

He recently published an unforgettable first novel, Upgunner, based on his war experiences, and is now pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at St Mary’s University in Twickenham. 

He is also an athlete and recently went home from the Invictus games in Vancouver with medals for sit ski and wheelchair rugby.

“My unit, the 2/7, has the worst suicide problem of any military unit in the States.

“A bunch of us was trying to throw together reunions and do stuff to motivate the guys who were struggling, and I thought I could just set an example.”

I’m more fucked up than most of them, at least physically. And it seemed to work.

Christopher is the first Alaskan I’ve met. Life in that far-flung territory was life stripped back to its essentials: 

“The winters are so harsh, and the environment is so deadly,” he tells me. 

“There weren’t that many problems to deal with, apart from … you’ve just got to survive.”

Survival chased out most other concerns, including politics. 

On going to live in the “Lower 48” — a colloquial term for the US minus Alaska and Hawaii — Bryde was surprised not only by the number of children who couldn’t fish — he had been fishing since an early age to help store up food for the winter — but by “the whole polarising political thing. I rarely heard about politics in Alaska”.

In his teens, Christopher briefly went to a Benedictine seminary in Canada: “I actually very much would have liked to be a monk, but I felt like that wasn’t my vocation.” 

So when and how, then, did the idea of becoming a Marine enter his head?

I finished out my last couple of years of high school in Portland, Oregon. When I was there I knew I wanted to join the military.

“It was not American patriotism that made me want to go, or the whole 9/11 thing, or anything like that. It was more like I saw that I was able to do it. I also thought it would be good for me.

“I remember looking around, seeing a lot of the other young men my age, and I thought these are a bunch of losers.

“I don’t want to be one of them. Growing up in Alaska and then seeing the average American is just, you know … ” Christopher’s words trail off as he shakes his head.

Initially, Bryde told his uncle, an ex-Marine, that he wanted to join the army infantry, “because I thought it would be the toughest”.

“I’d be on the frontline and I’d really prove myself. He told me that, if you want the toughest, you should join the Marines and have the bragging rights forever.

“You get sent these propaganda pamphlets in the mail. Unlike the army recruiters who are begging you to come, the Marines asked you why you deserved to be a Marine.

“I just told them the same thing: I don’t want to be one of those guys. I wanted to have the honour of service and all that.”

Is this where the attraction to being a monk and to being a Marine meet? In this notion of the honour of service? 

Yeah, definitely. Frankly, aside from some of the less pleasant things that happen in the Marine corps, it’s actually quite a similar life.

“It’s very regimented. You wake up early at the same times. The same sort of duties. A little different, but, you know…”

Christopher has a softly spoken, understated demeanour, and may be understating things here. 

In the novel, when the central character Brodie meets his team leader for the first time, he is asked whether he is ready to die for the Marine corps. 

His assent causes an explosion: “Fuck that, Boot! Die and fuck over your Marines? Don’t fuck up and don’t fucking die!”

A lot of Upgunner is in dialogue form with a maimed and hospitalised Brodie conversing with an Anglican chaplain, a Catholic priest (his confessor), and a despised psychotherapist. 

Yet according to Christopher, “I’ve always hated dialogue. I hate writing it. I hate reading it. And, unless it’s the right person, I don’t really like talking to people, honestly.”

But his creative writing MA workshops led him to see the value dialogue could have in telling the story he wished to tell.

Being part of a 'death cult'

Upgunner shows us a man estranged from home and family, with a religiously formed conscience and intellect, in pursuit of violence, honour, and glory in an organisation utterly devoted to fighting and killing, a “death cult”. 

One chapter records an incident where Brodie resists a command to fire at an approaching truck because he correctly senses something is not quite right.

Like much of the book, it is based on real life: “These kinds of things happen all the time, where you technically should kill someone, but you know that they don’t know what’s going on, or they’re being stupid, or they’ve already been checked, or something like that.

“On the one hand, you’ve done the right thing. But, on the other hand, now you have some of your guys being like ‘Oh, you’re a pussy, you should have done it anyways’.”

The novel will convince you in new and horrifying ways that war is, indeed, hell — and that the Afghan war was its own peculiar form of hell. But Bryde recounted for me at least one event of a different order.

“Once, way, way out into the mountains, we found a few mud huts. This guy came out. He had only one cow and he was trying to offer to slaughter the cow to give it to us.

“He kept trying to offer us stuff, even though he clearly had nothing. That’s their culture, the Pashtun Malik culture, that dates back way before the Taliban, way before Islam even.”

Becoming a writer was not always on the cards for Bryde. As our conversation drew to a close, he recalled how he discovered literature in the first place, unknowingly embarking on the journey that would see him become a writer.

“Until we moved down to the Lower 48 when I was around 14, I could only read at, I don’t know, eight-year-old capacity.”

Things changed when his aunt read The Hobbit to him, making him want to read The Lord of the Rings in turn.

Tolkien “largely motivated me to learn to read, frankly”. Christopher travelled once to Oxford to visit the pub where his hero drank pints with CS Lewis and their friends, the Tolkien family home, and then his graveside.

“I don’t cry. I’m a pretty hard person. But it actually brought me to tears, seeing his house and walking over to the grave.

“All those memories came back. I had not thought about it that way before then, that he basically turned me into a reader. And also, potentially, a writer.”