Michael Jerome Plunkett: On the Lingering Wounds of War, Exploring Mythic Voices and Medical Hell, Writing Amidst New Fatherhood, and His Debut Novel ‘Zone Rouge’
I got to know Michael Jerome Plunkett through a writing group I held briefly online called “Snack Time.” I didn’t think anyone would show up to listen to me talk about craft, but lo and behold, a little group formed and solidified over the course of six months. We chatted and wrote and I divvied out little prompts and writers shared their work and it was all very cute. Michael was in the group, and even though we had never met IRL, I could tell he was committed to his craft. He was a “Snack Time” regular. He always shared his opinions. He always asked questions. He and his wife had a baby on the way, and I was so impressed and inspired by his dedication to his work. When “Snack Time” came to an end, I was glad to remain writing pals.
I knew Michael was working on a novel about war, that he served in the US Marine Corps and had worked as an EMT. I felt silly when I recommended he watch Beau Travail because war drama is the closest experience I have to real war. But he watched it, and he thanked me, and a few weeks later, he wrote to me and told me he’d not only found an agent, but that he also had an offer from a dream publisher. One year later, he sent me an advanced copy of his debut novel, Zone Rouge (Unnamed Press, 2025).
Through a chorus of voices, Plunkett reveals how war’s aftermath echoes across generations. The book is a haunting exploration of the physical and psychological scars of wars told through the perspective of a bomb disposal team uncovering a buried past in France’s Zone Rouge. Whole sections are written in the collective voice of the démineurs, “bomb disposal experts,” specialists trained in the removal or neutralization of explosive devices. The novel feels like Greek myth, like an epic poem, but with the internalized reflection that readers crave in literary fiction.
I’m grateful for Plunkett’s writing because it gives me a window into a world I need to see, a reality we all must turn our attention to.
Brittany Ackerman: Congrats, dude! This is such a beautiful book. Honored and thrilled to be an early reader. I have so much to say, so let’s start at the beginning.
“The cows, they suffer in silence.” Award-winning opening line right there if you ask me. And according to Kirkus Reviews: “It’s a bold choice to begin a novel with the image of cows swallowing shrapnel, but it illustrates just how this book juxtaposes the martial and the quotidian.”
Not sure if you’ve ever seen The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), but the opening shot is a woman pulling on the side of the road, exiting her car, and shooting a donkey dead. It’s this very visceral and obviously morbid opening that sets the tone for the rest of the film, as your opening in Zone Rouge does for the rest of the book. Did you always know that this would be your true opening? Did this line come to your first or did it arrive later and get moved up top? And was there any pushback to the gruesome nature of this scene?
Michael Jerome Plunkett: I love The Lobster, I’m flattered by the comparison! This wasn’t always the opening. Over eight drafts, I probably had four or five different beginnings. Writing a novel is such a blur; sometimes Zone Rouge feels dreamt up. I got my hands on the galleys recently and the first thing I thought was when did I write all of these words? But I vividly remember writing this specific scene. It was around five in the morning when I usually write alone at my desk, and I stumbled on a documentary showing the exact procedure described in the opening. I immediately sat down and wrote the scene in about fifteen minutes. Marie-Helene Bertino once said a novel’s entire essence is contained in its opening paragraph, and I think that applies here. Initially, this scene appeared much deeper in the manuscript, but several readers urged me to move it up front. Surprisingly, there was no pushback—quite the opposite.
BA: Let’s keep talking movies for a second. War movies are some of the box office’s top blockbusters, and I think it’s safe to say this is because it’s a world most of us will never come to know in person. But we want to engage with that human experience of extreme circumstances—battlefields, moral dilemmas, survival, loyalty, loss. Some films focus on action and spectacle while others delve into the emotional toll or psychological conflicts of war. These films can span historical periods or fictional timelines, but all of them grapple with the consequences of violence and the endurance of the human spirit.
Saving Private Ryan, 1917, Dunkirk, American Sniper, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Jarhead—just to name a few.
I’m wondering if you can chat about your own feelings on war cinema, and if there were any films that influenced the lens of your storytelling for Zone Rouge?
MJP: War films consistently top the charts. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson by now, but I doubt we ever will. What’s strange is that even films meant to show war’s ugliness somehow end up glorifying it. Look at Saving Private Ryan: veterans reportedly walked out of the opening scene because it was painfully realistic. I spoke with one Normandy veteran who said the opening of the film was actually worse than he remembered his lived experience. Go figure. Yet that same movie inspired countless young people to enlist. Tim O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried as an anti-war novel, yet people still joined the military after reading it, myself included. It’s a strange phenomenon. There’s something mysterious about that pull toward military service.
I’m not a combat veteran, but I was trained as an infantryman. So certain films resonate with me. Movies like Jarhead, Generation Kill, Full Metal Jacket, and even the HBO series Barry capture specific aspects of military culture well. Full Metal Jacket, for instance, I think really nails the atmosphere of Parris Island, but at the same time, it wasn’t at all like my personal Parris Island experience. There was way more screaming and chaos but also a lot of rehearsing drill movements (marching in formation) and tons of mundane drudgery and time in the classroom than what they have in the film. I remember one day where they had us seated in formation for close to six hours. It’s hard to make all of that into a story. A film of sitting cross-legged for six hours, staring at the back of the head of the guy in front of you? It’s just not a good story. And that’s one of the more innocent ones. I’ve got tons of moments like that, real life experiences from the Marine Corps that would instantly be cut by even the most generous editor because they don’t fit a narrative arc of any kind. So whenever I watch one of these films or read a war story, I look for the red flags, so to speak. I am very much in the Tim O’Brien camp of “How to Tell a True War Story” when he says “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” Which is not to say I had a bad time or that I regret my time in the military. But rather, I often have to look a little closer to find the truth in the films.
BA: Shifting the conversation to war literature, we’ve seen many firsthand accounts (memoirs, diaries) and fictionalized war narratives.
It’s astonishing to me that someone who lived through war could write about their experiences, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I wonder for you, what did that choice look like, to write a novel instead of a collection of essays or a memoir, or perhaps some kind of journalistic approach? Why drew you to fiction and the form and structure of a novel?
MJP: This is a great question. I thought about a nonfiction approach because this issue is still ongoing, but frankly, I’m no journalist. I didn’t have the resources, patience, or language skills to embed myself deeply in France or authentically capture French culture. Even my military experience didn’t match. I was a machine gunner, not an explosives expert. I had handled 40 mm grenades and the like but beyond that, I knew nothing. Fiction allows us the space to explore such a wide spectrum of human emotions. The relatable, the disturbing, truths of all shapes and sizes. I will always defend fiction as a meaningful and worthy endeavor. But it is not without its risks and challenges. How could I tell this story without a lived frame of reference?
So, I leaned into my experience as an EMT. I know firsthand those long, uneventful shifts suddenly punctured by chaos. Although being an EMT in South Carolina and a démineur in France seem worlds apart, the emotional core felt surprisingly similar.
The story began in 2012 after briefly visiting Verdun, where I discovered they’re still clearing unexploded ordnance and recovering remains. For years, I struggled to find a way in. Then, around the time I was transferring units in the Marine Corps, I spent a lot of time in the administrative office handling paperwork. I was amused by how these Marines, who spent their days joking and bantering, would produce these stiff, bureaucratic orders. The tension between their authentic voices and the formal language fascinated me. Initially, I wrote scenes as reports from démineurs at the end of their shifts—formal but with slips of personality sneaking through. Over the next four years, those reports evolved into fully realized scenes and a larger narrative emerged. But it started with the voices. It always starts with the voices.
BA: Your book has been called “a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our modern anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.” I agree! The multi-voiced narrative of the démineurs totally read Greek mythology to me, a sort of chorus, if you will, serving as a medium to formulate, express, and comment on the moral issues being raised by the dramatic action of the story.
In my understanding, the myth of Sisyphus is about persistence and finding meaning and purpose in our actions, despite their repetitive or sometimes futile-seeming nature. We push the boulder up the hill; we persist.
How did this choral voice of the bomb disposal team come about? And what does it mean to you, the Sisyphus-esque nod you’ve been given in your work?
MJP: Sisyphus and his boulder came to me early. I’m drawn to novels that grapple with big ideas, and when I learned démineurs had centuries of work ahead—work they’d never see completed—it immediately evoked Sisyphus. I was deeply influenced by Albert Camus, whose interpretation gave Sisyphus agency: at the hilltop, watching the boulder roll down, he consciously chooses to walk back and begin again. That resonated powerfully, and I wanted some of my characters to embody that hopeful acceptance. Despite their seemingly futile task, the real démineurs I found in my research weren’t morose; they seemed fulfilled. For me, the book fails if readers leave thinking only “war is bad.” Of course war is bad; but we still control our individual actions. That’s why Martin persists. Not heroically, but simply step by step. Someone you can trust to keep going.
I’ve always admired the Greek chorus, especially in contemporary adaptations and books like The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka and We The Animals by Justin Torres. Even Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried which, while not in a collective “we” voice, still embodies a unified feel in the narrative voice. Initially, the novel was entirely in that collective voice. But it didn’t work beyond the démineurs. Academics, with their strong egos and differing motives, needed separate voices. At first, I resisted the change, but then saw the new structure mirrored an artillery shell detonating perfectly: the unified voice in the first section explodes outward into individual voices in the second section much like shrapnel. In the final section, the voice simmers down, fragments scattered on the ground, just as they are in Verdun. That might sound overthought or too heady, but for me, style and structure are everything. They are all integral to the overall vision of the piece. To quote from an essay I read in this very publication by the maestra of craft, Suzanne Grove, “Everything, everything, everything (every damn thing) should be in service of your vision.” I completely agree. Writing can be strange and confusing but when I have moments such as the one I just described, I know I’m doing it right.
BA: Without spoiling too much, there’s an aspect of the book that deals with what I’ll call a “medical hell.” This subplot unfolds alongside, or in contrast to, the hell of war, creating a continuum of suffering. Hospitals and clinics often serve as stand-ins for trenches: sterile yet chaotic, clinical yet dehumanizing. Medical records, diagnoses, and treatments become a kind of battlefield of their own, reflecting the ongoing, sometimes invisible damage done long after the weapons fall silent.
How has your work as an EMT and your time in the medical field influenced your writing, and why was this important to include in the book, as it feels like such a necessary element here?
MJP: Being an EMT was simultaneously the most rewarding and stressful job I’ve ever had. Life-changing from the start. In just six months, working suburban and rural shifts, I saw everything from overdoses and suicides to heart attacks and accidents. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning hoping to see EMS later in the day. So, without romanticizing it, EMS work lets you witness people unexpectedly, often at their lowest or loneliest moments, showing who they truly are.
The funny thing about the medical stuff in the book was it was never supposed to be in there. In fact, Ferrand Martin, the character experiencing medical issues, barely existed in early drafts. But as I kept writing, his story took over, pulling my interest completely. Writing authentically about medical issues felt crucial. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking advantage of what is often the worst part of someone’s life for the sake of a plot point. I did my best to approach those moments with sincerity and care. The parallel between Martin’s illness and the poisoned landscape emerged naturally, raising questions about what really constitutes "cancer": is it the leftover ordnance from war, or are humans the disease, and the ordnance just a toxic remedy? Maybe that’s cynical or too direct, but it felt necessary to explore.
BA: Parent to parent, we gotta talk! I am so inspired by your commitment to your craft, even in the throes of newbornland! I think we mostly hear from women about how becoming a new mom has shaken up their writing process, informed identity, and even revealed new depths of subject matter, etc. So, I’d love to hear from a new dad what this has all been like!
How has bringing a new life into the world shaped your writing? How might it shape the future of your work?
MJP: So far, parenthood has been the most transformative experience in my entire life. But it comes with its fair share of challenges. It is a continuous exercise in decentering myself from my own manufactured universe where I am the star which everything else revolves around. It’s not about me anymore and that can be tough to accept.
But these challenges present unique opportunities I would not have otherwise had. Every night I look forward to story time with my son. He sits on my lap and although he cannot understand most of the words, he remains attentive through (almost) the entire picture book. These books are so much fun! They are a crash course in style. They are all so playful and easy to engage with. It has given me much to think about in the way I approach my own writing in terms of voice and story.
It is also so amazing to watch a child, especially a very young one (my son just turned one last month), experience basically everything about the world for the first time. That childlike wonder is a real thing. For instance, I never thought as a thirty-four-year-old man, I would have so much fun playing peek-a-boo for forty-five minutes straight. Yet here we are! Even the most mundane, everyday things (a car driving by, a bouncing ball, a piece of fabric) capture his attention in a way that makes me pause and consider how I might look at my familiar world a little differently. So much of writing is taking the familiar and making it appear new for a reader. Children are the best role models if you are interested in this approach.
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Michael Jerome Plunkett is a writer from Long Island, a Marine Corps veteran, and former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. His writing has appeared in The War Horse, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, Leatherneck Magazine, and other publications. Zone Rouge is his debut novel.
