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55 pages 1 hour read

Omar El Akkad

American War

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Chapter 11-Excerpt 12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “October, 2086—Lincolnton, Georgia”

Chapter 11 Summary

Sarat travels to the ruins of Lake Sinclair, the site of a random assault by dozens of Un-Oriented Drones. In a bombed-out house, Sarat meets with Joe and tells him that Gaines has disappeared. She worries that federal authorities have snatched him up, but Joe tries to assure her that Gaines is probably okay, adding that he used to disappear all the time when they served in the military together. Back in Lincolnton, one of Adam Bragg, Sr.'s henchmen, Attic, tells Sarat that his boss would like to meet her. They drive to the United Rebels headquarters in Atlanta where Bragg, Sr. tells Sarat that she needs to lay low for a while. Sarat's response is defiant: "Don't call me little girl" (234).

On the way out of Atlanta, Sarat and Attic stop in a bar. They discuss the Southern cause, about which Attic doesn't care. She asks him, "Why'd you pick up a gun and risk being torn to shreds by the Blues if you don't care for the cause?" (237). To which he responds, "I just wanted to be something" (238). Back at home, Sarat is angry that Simon favors Karina, an outsider who cares little for the Southern cause. Further, Sarat realizes that she resents Simon for surviving the Camp Patience massacre. Had he died, he would have been "a martyr, not a marionette" (239).

A man comes to the house and informs Sarat that Dana is the victim of a drone strike outside Augusta, where she planned to meet her boyfriend. Sarat rushes to the hospital just in time for Dana to die in her arms. Her last words are, "Beautiful girl, I miss you already" (242). For a week after Dana's death, Sarat cannot bear to be inside the house, preferring instead to sleep in a woodshed on the property. One night, Sarat notices a red dot on the wall of the woodshed. Moments later, federal authorities bust down the door and arrest Sarat.

Excerpt 11 Summary: “The Civil War Archive Project—Sugarloaf Detainee Letters (Cleared/Unclassified)”

In a heavily-redacted letter, a detainee at the Sugarloaf Detention Center writes to family. The detention center sits on an island off the coast of Georgia that used to be Sugarloaf Mountain, one of the highest points in Florida. While much of the letter is blacked-out, some relevant details remain, like the fact that a new guard has taken away the detainees' books, toothpaste, "and everything else that reminded us we're still human beings" (244).

Chapter 12 Summary

Blindfolded and ear-muffed, Sarat is flown to the Sugarloaf Detention Center. For three months, Sarat and the other new arrivals are kept in cages. Sarat is too tall to stand in hers and suffers crippling back and leg pain from crouching. Of all the guards, the meanest by far is Bud Baker. Finally, Sarat is brought to Camp Thursday, where prisoners have the privileges of communal living. Three days later, Sarat is chained to a chair and interrogated by an unnamed woman in a suit. When the woman calls her "Sara," Sarat is certain the authorities know nothing of her crimes, concluding that they picked her up either for associating with the United Rebels or simply as part of a random dragnet. To every question, Sarat answers, "I didn't do nothing" (248).

Bud takes Sarat to the Light Room, where she is chained to the floor with her wrists tied to her ankles and subjected to searing hot flood lights. After 20 days in the Light Room, the woman again interrogates Sarat. Her answer is the same: "I didn't do nothing" (251). The guards then bring Sarat to the Sound Room, the exact details of which are not described. Between visitations by the interrogator and subsequent stays in the Light and Sound Rooms, Sarat is kept in solitary confinement in Camp Saturday. Sometimes months pass between visitations, while other times the visitations occur almost daily.

Three years pass, and Sarat participates in a center-wide hunger strike: "In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers' hands and placed them in her own" (253). When Sarat begins to convulse a week later, the guards begin to force-feed her daily. One day, Bud brings Sarat to a new interrogation room where she is waterboarded: "The water moved, endless. She entered and exited death, her body no longer hers. Spasms of light and heat encased her; the mind seized with fear and panic. She drowned yet death would not come. It was in this way her captors finally broke her" (256). Sarat proceeds to confess to all the crimes with which she is charged, despite not having committed any of them. From that point forward, Sarat obeys her captors unerringly. She eats everything they put in front of her and gains a significant amount of weight. Four years later, a new well-dressed woman arrives and tells Sarat that the Second Civil War is effectively over. Furthermore, the government determines that the intelligence leading to Sarat's capture is not credible and so she will be freed.

Excerpt 12 Summary: “Found Cause: Diary of a Former Southern Recruiter”

A former Southern recruiter details his recruitment strategy. which involves slipping lies in with the truth. A talent for deceit, the recruiter adds, also comes in handy to those under interrogation, most of whom identify innocent men and women as terrorists in order to protect themselves.

Chapter 11-Excerpt 12 Analysis

Much of American War is devoted to minimizing the role ideology plays in the development of a terrorist. The most powerful force of radicalization, El Akkad suggests, is not a persuasive ideology but rather an experience of suffering at the hands of an enemy, and the resentment this breeds. With the character of Attic, the book explores the idea that the despair which drives one to join a terrorist organization needn't be the direct result of loss or suffering at the hands of an enemy. Rather, it can frequently stem from a feeling of spiritual emptiness caused by a general lack of fulfillment—a scary thought, considering how many people from all walks of life and socioeconomic statuses suffer from this condition. When Sarat asks Attic why he fights on her side, even though he doesn't care about the Southern cause, he responds, "I wanted to be something. I just wanted to be something" (238).

This goes a long way in explaining why people from all over the world—from the Westernized and comparatively prosperous cities of Tunisia to affluent London suburbs—feel the pull of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State, despite having little in common with the group ideologically. It is also consistent with the apparent motives of several real-life terrorists like Andreas Lubitz, who intentionally crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 in 2015, killing all 144 passengers and crew members onboard. Rather than adhere to any specific ideology, Lubitz merely wanted to "do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it." (Manne, Anne. "Narcissism and terrorism: how the personality disorder leads to deadly violence." The Guardian. 8 Jun. 2015.) While insurgents like Sarat require dire circumstances and focused recruitment to commit acts of terror, others need only of promise of fame and the opportunity to "be something." Consider Cherif Kouachi, one of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo killings, who "originally sought to escape his life of petty crime and poverty by becoming a famous rapper. He sought a very western form of fame, and failed, before gaining it by launching an attack on the west." (Manne, Anne. "Narcissism and terrorism: how the personality disorder leads to deadly violence." The Guardian. 8 Jun. 2015).

Later, Sarat's capture gives El Akkad an opportunity to put forth a persuasive argument about the inhumanity and inefficacy of torture that relates to ongoing debates in American culture over interrogation techniques, particularly waterboarding. It only takes a short paragraph for El Akkad to convey even a fraction of how unbearable waterboarding is for Sarat: "The water moved, endless. She entered and exited death, her body no longer hers. Spasms of light and heat encased her; the mind seized with fear and panic. She drowned yet death would not come. It was in this way her captors finally broke her" (256). Compare this to the lengthy descriptions of the excruciating tortures of the Light Room to which Sarat is subjected, but which do not break her. Because it is likely impossible to describe in words the sensation of waterboarding, the author conveys its severity through contrast: Sarat prevails for years through all manner of beatings and stress positions, rendered here in brutal detail. In the seconds to take it reads that paragraph about waterboarding, Sarat is ready to do anything to make the pain stop.

By "do anything," that predominantly means confessing to things she didn't do, calling into question whether such extreme forms of torture in fact do more harm than good for intelligence gathering operations. There is a significant amount of evidence that waterboarding and other forms of torture rarely elicit credible intelligence. For example, false information linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda was given to Egyptian authorities by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi while under torture. This information was later used by the Bush administration to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta stated that brutality produced no valuable information in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and that the only valuable intelligence related to his capture was elicited through non-coercive means. (Sargent, Greg. "Exclusive: Private letter from CIA chief undercuts claim torture was key to killing Bin Laden." The Washington Post. 16 May 2011). While several military officials still claim that enhanced interrogation techniques can elicit valuable information, the body of evidence that undercuts those claims raises serious questions about their use.

In fact, El Akkad goes even further in suggesting that torture, aside from serving little purpose in obtaining credible intelligence, creates more terrorists than it stops. This idea is expressed in Excerpt 12 by the anonymous Southern recruiter who writes, "By the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they'd already turned most of the people there into exactly what they'd needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the South ever had" (260).

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By Omar El Akkad