American War

As Sarat's meetings with Gaines grow in frequency, El Akkad explores the radicalization process in more specific detail. Two key quotes in particular shed light on the mindset of a nascent radical like Sarat. The first comes in Chapter 7 when Sarat and Marcus debate the merits and ethics of escaping to the North, where it is much safer. Marcus asks in earnest, "If you had a chance to go where it's safe, wouldn't you?" (134). Sarat considers the question: "It seemed sensible to crave safety, […] [but] perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?" (134).

On one hand, this quote raises an interesting point about whether those who enjoy safety for themselves and their families do enough to acknowledge their own privilege and the cost of that privilege on others. More darkly, it reflects the extent to which Sarat's meetings with Gaines have contributed to her increasingly Manichean worldview framing every decision or issue in terms of Us vs. Them. From this perspective, an individual's safety always comes at the expense of another's suffering. At best, this is a simplistic reading of the world that resigns itself to Social Darwinism as the only possible guiding principle. At worst, it suggests that the Northern civilians who enjoy the safety afforded to them because of their geography are just as guilty as the soldiers, militiamen, and policymakers who in many cases cause direct suffering to their Southern countrymen. While Sarat isn't there yet, it's easy to see how this idea will later undergird her willingness to murder civilians along with combatants. It also reveals one small way that terrorists come to think of innocent civilians as expendable and even worthy of destruction in their crusades against their enemies.

The second important quote from these chapters arrives when Sarat asks Gaines directly why he fights for the Southern cause. He replies:

I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they're fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can't call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they're fighting for, they'll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I'd had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind (142).

For Gaines, the specifics of the cause for which he fights matter far less than the level of conviction held by those who fight alongside him. This sheds some light on El Akkad’s decision to center the Southern cause around fossil fuels, rather than a more emotionally and historically fraught issue like race. Had El Akkad chosen race as the dominant issue dividing North and South, it would be all too easy for readers to dismiss the Southerners' crusade as a consequence of their ugly and demonstrably flawed racist ideology. However, one of El Akkad’s most persistent themes is that ideology is a purely symbolic gesture when it comes to terrorists, and that the resentment they feel toward their enemies is bigger than any one ideological concern can capture. Rather, the guiding principle behind Sarat's and other insurgents' actions is as simple as the epigram El Akkad uses to introduce his novel: "The one you must punish is the one who punishes you" (vii). For Gaines, he finds it refreshing that the South recognizes this as the reality of war.

For all of Gaines' persuasiveness, it is the Camp Patience massacre that goes the farthest in transforming Sarat into a radical terrorist. Consider Sarat's behavior the day before the attack. She dreams of joining the Free Southern State in Atlanta as a government official. She organizes what the author refers to as "her own version of a scout troop" (146) to recover items lost in the previous night's storm. This does not sound like the behavior of a mass murdering terrorist, but simply a person who wants to do what she can to help her community. By the time the massacre is over, her mother is dead and her brother presumed dead, along with most of the rest of her community, all slaughtered by Northern militiamen. Gaines may have groomed Sarat for several potential roles related to the Southern cause, including but not limited to becoming a terrorist. However, it is the enemy to the North whose murderous behavior collapsed those possibilities into a single horrific outcome for Sarat.