55 pages • 1 hour read
Omar El AkkadAmerican War
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5-Excerpt 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “July, 2081—Iuka, Mississippi”
Chapter 5 Summary
The year is 2081, six years after the Chestnuts' arrival at Camp Patience. Aside from looking after her children, Martina devotes most of her energy to writing letters on behalf of other refugees seeking assistance from camp administrators or Free Southern State officials in Atlanta. Dana, now 12, has become "the prettiest little refugee girl anyone's ever seen" (76) and regularly poses for photo-ops in return for cash whenever Northern journalists visit the camp. Sarat, already as tall as her mother, is a fearless girl who spends her days sneaking out of camp with her friend Marcus Exum, or hanging out at the North end of the camp—despite its dangerous proximity to the enemy—to watch soldiers hunt for landmines.
Meanwhile, 15-year-old Simon has fallen under the spell of the Rebel movement and wants to join the Virginia Cavaliers militia. This upsets Martina, who blames the Rebels for her husband's death. Over the course of the war, the fighters in the South begin to fall into two groups: trained soldiers under the employ of the Free Southern State—who, as Martina puts it, "fight by the rules" (93)—and unofficial Rebel insurrectionist militias like the Cavaliers. It is from the latter group that suicide bombers are frequently recruited.
Excerpt 5 Summary: “Neither Breathe nor Hope: The Untold Story of the South Carolina Wartime Quarantine”
By 2085, the tide of the war has turned decisively in the Union's favor. However, its "glaring embarrassment, the shame of a nation" (94) is the South Carolina quarantine, within which over a million people still suffer from the zombie-like disease that the North bioengineered, expecting its effects to wear off in a few months. Nicknamed "the Slow," the disease leaves its victims unable to do much more than "breathe, eat, and breed" (95). Hoping to find a cure, the federal government enlists the help of virologist Gerry Tusk. After nearly a decade of failed trials, five of his human subjects suddenly come alive, responding to Tusk's latest experimental vial. By the end of the week, all five are dead. Tusk has inadvertently created "the Quick," an even more contagious and universally deadly virus than the one he tried to cure.
Driven to despair, Tusk escapes the United States by trading his virus to the Bouazizi Union, a coalition of states in North Africa and the Middle East that emerged after a series of democratic revolutions toppled the dictatorships and monarchies that had long ruled the region. Already a global superpower, Bouazizi spends most of the war supporting the South through military and humanitarian aid to prolong the conflict and further destabilize the United States. The author of the excerpt suggests that Bouazizi—unhappy to see the war end—is the party responsible for unleashing the Quick on Reunification Day, killing 110 million Americans.
Chapter 6 Summary
One day, a boy pays Sarat $50 to step into Emerald Creek, a ditch where the excrement from the camp's bathrooms drain, so named because of the bright green disinfectant used to clean the toilets. She loses her footing and is for a moment completely submerged in the filth. Even after a thorough shower, Sarat's hair still feels dirty to her, so she shaves it off. Looking at her bare head in the reflection of a window, "she felt new and impossibly light" (111). Unable to face her mother after the Emerald Creek stunt, Sarat tries to sneak into the abandoned infirmity for the night. While struggling to open the window, a well-dressed middle-aged man approaches and introduces himself as Albert Gaines. Gaines says he needs someone to deliver an envelope to a man named Leonard in the South Carolina part of the camp, a fearsome sector that few outsiders—including Sarat—ever visit. Sarat agrees.
Outside Leonard's home, a boy her age pushes Sarat. She punches him in the nose and beats him badly until Leonard comes outside, pulls her off, and takes the envelope. When Sarat returns to Gaines, he notices the blood on her knuckles and says, "Good girl" (116). Gaines invites Sarat to his office in the basement of the administrative building where he shares his story: Born in New York, Gaines served in the U.S. military before returning home to work as a plastic surgeon treating burn victims. He came to sympathize with the Southern cause and now volunteers at field hospitals. He also tells Sarat he looks for "special people" (121) who are angry about what the Northerners have taken from them, and he believes that Sarat may be one of the “special ones.”
Excerpt 6 Summary: “A Northern Soldier's Education in War and Peace: The Memoirs of General Joseph Weiland Jr.”
During the early years of the war, Joseph Weiland, Jr. works in the War Office approving or rejecting compensation claims for Southern non-combatants. Most of the claims involve Un-Oriented Drone strikes or UODs. Ever since Southern troops destroyed the server farm the Union uses to pilot their drones—or "Birds" as the characters call them—the aircraft fly over the country according to no set flight pattern, striking at random. After approving one such claim, General Joseph Weiland, Sr. countermands his son's decision, stating, "When you compensate a UOD strike claim, you take responsibility for a crime committed by your enemy" (125). Weiland Jr. counters that they might want to shift the perception that the federal government is unsympathetic toward Southerners' plight. To which his father replies, "Do you have an opinion about whose cause is right in this war? And how much would I have to pay you to get you to change your mind?" (125). His point, Weiland, Jr. understands, is that no amount of sympathy will change the Southerners' perception of the North.
Chapter 5-Excerpt 6 Analysis
In these chapters, Sarat takes her first tentative steps into becoming a terrorist insurgent. Although little about Sarat's sweet tomboy demeanor suggests she will grow into a mass murderer, she does possess a defiant streak, exhibited most dramatically when she accepts the dare to enter Emerald Creek, the swirl of excrement that sits in a ditch alongside Camp Patience's bathrooms. Referring to the boy who dares her, Sarat thinks to herself, "He had pasted on his face a smirk […] of knowing he'd left her with an impossible choice—step into the river of filth or be labeled a coward" (103). Throughout the novel, the refusal to be "labeled a coward" (103) will drive Sarat through much of her most difficult and destructive decisions.
The Emerald Creek incident also holds enormous symbolic weight to Sarat's character arc. Falling into the creek and becoming submerged in excrement is something of a baptism of filth for Sarat, as she takes on all the ugliness produced by the oppressed refugees at Camp Patience. Though she doesn't realize it at the time, the incident is a major turning point for the character on her way to being born again as a crusader for the Southern cause. For example, it causes her to shave her head, an act which is framed as a moment of rebirth: "Sarat observed her new face a long time. In the back of her mind swirled all manner of looming irritations—her mother's wrath, the ceaseless teasing of the children who'd seen or by now heard what she'd done. But in this moment, alone with her reflection, she felt new and impossibly light" (111).
This transition—from humiliation to rebirth—is eerily echoed in much of the scholarship on radicalization. In her book Terror in the Name of God; Why Religious Militants Kill, the scholar Jessica Stern identifies a common theme among terrorists: "They start out feeling humiliated, enraged that they are viewed by some 'Other' as second class. They take on a new identity on behalf of a purported spiritual cause. The weak become strong, rage turns into conviction." (Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God; Why Religious Militants Kill. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. 2004.)
Perhaps most importantly, the Emerald Creek incident indirectly puts Sarat in contact with Gaines, the man who will put on her on the path toward radicalization. It is when she tries to sneak into the infirmary, unable to face her mother after falling into a pit of excrement, that Gaines identifies Sarat as a girl willing to operate outside societal expectations. In their earliest interactions, Gaines never makes his nefarious intentions clear, employing a light touch that plays on Sarat's universal need to feel special and in control. Gaines says, "I suspect right now you're thinking, What can I do? I'm stuck here in this camp that may as well be a prison. What can I do against a whole army full of grown men with guns? Maybe there's nothing I can do, nothing at all" (121). To this, Sarat responds, "I didn't say that" (121). Here, Gaines deftly transitions from an acknowledgement of her powerlessness to an appeal to her narcissism and need to feel special: "Of course you didn't, of course you didn't! And that's my first inkling, Sarat, that maybe you're one of the special ones" (121).
In addition to setting Sarat on a path toward terrorism, these chapters begin to place the Second American Civil War in a global context. Just as El Akkad subjects the West to the challenges of the contemporary Middle East, the author also envisions a future for the Muslim world that more closely resembles the United States and the European Union at the turn of the 21st century. The emergence of the Bouazizi Union—a coalition of democratic states across North Africa and the Middle East that wrested control from long-standing monarchies and dictatorships—presents a mirror image of El Akkad's arguments about the West becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. In short, if the United States can fall victim to a scourge of domestic terrorist organizations and suicide bombers, then the Middle East can become a bastion of democracy and a global superpower.
That said, El Akkad has no illusions about what it entails for a superpower to retain its status. In Excerpt 5, he reveals the lengths the Bouazizi Union will go to further destabilize its competitors on the world stage: "It is all but known now that the Bouazizi Empire, eager to prolong the American civil war as much as possible, arranged the deal that granted the virologist his escape. On the morning of December 3, 2094, Gerry Tusk boarded the merchant vessel El Fattah at the Richmond harbor, bound eastward. His lethal creation paid his fare. The following year, the monster he bred would come alive on the steps of Reunification Square in Columbus, Ohio, and the first of more than one hundred million people would die" (96). In other words, in achieving democracy and success on the global stage, the Bouazizi Empire morphed into something arguably even worse and more destructive than the Western empires it supplanted.
