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.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Much of the rest of the novel is told from Benjamin’s perspective. It is January of 2095, seven months before the Reunification Plague will be released. The Free Southern State has negotiated a reunification agreement with the federal government despite fierce opposition from the few remaining United Rebels still committed to the cause.
In the years since Sarat's capture, Simon has become far more lucid, though his mind still gets "clouded" sometimes. He and Karina marry, and Karina gives birth to Benjamin—named for Simon's father—who is now six-years-old. The Chestnut homestead is now a vast plantation of greenhouses where Simon and Karina grow food for local markets. The expansion of the estate was financed by Karina's founding of a bank. After Sarat's capture, most people who hid their money with Karina assumed the Feds found it and stole it. When they learned their money was safe, they came to believe that God protected the money. Soon, everyone wanted to have Karina watch over their savings.
Karina makes up a room for Sarat, but the window faces the river, and Sarat is now afraid of water due to her waterboarding experience. She insists on sleeping in the woodshed. For the first few weeks, Sarat almost never leaves the woodshed. While leaving her dinner outside her door, Benjamin peers inside the shed and sees Sarat furiously scribbling in a notepad.
One day, Adam Bragg, Jr. arrives with a small convoy—essentially all that's left of the United Rebels. He hands Sarat a photo of Bud Baker, blindfolded and beaten. While on a family vacation in Utah, the Bakers wandered into Mexican Protectorate territory where they were captured and later sold to the United Rebels. Bragg drives Sarat to a cabin where Bud, his wife, and his two children are blindfolded and tied to chairs: “She wanted the blood inside him” (276). After brutally murdering Bud with her knife, she turns to kill the children but stops when she realizes they are twins. She tells Bragg to let the rest of the family go.
Excerpt 13 Summary: “Reasonably Satisfactory and Encouraging to All: An Oral History of the Reunification Talks”
According to Senior Peace Office Negotiator David Castro, Northern officials painstakingly prepare for Reunification Talks, briefing themselves on virtually every topic that could possibly arise. However, when the Southern delegates arrive, all they want to discuss is the wording of the Reunification Day agreements and speeches. They insist that the South’s war effort insurrectionist efforts be framed as “courage in the face of aggression […] and the protection of long-cherished ways of living" (279). While most of the Northern diplomats are happy to give the South what they want, Castro warns the President against recasting the war “s "a noble disagreement between equals" (280). He adds, "You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories (280).
Chapter 14 Summary
Benjamin frequently sees Sarat enter one of the Chestnut estate's abandoned greenhouses. Eager to see what she's been up to, Benjamin climbs a ladder to look in from above but falls and breaks his arm. With Simon and Karina out to dinner, Sarat rushes to his aid, setting his arm and putting him to bed. Benjamin makes up a story about how he broke it to protect Sarat's secret doings in the greenhouse.
Little by little, Sarat begins to spend more time with Simon, Karina, and especially Benjamin. At a farmer's market, Sarat lunges at a man in a Northern uniform before Benjamin stops her. Fortunately, the man is Marcus, who feels indirectly responsible for Sarat's hardships: "I did this […] You can't wear this uniform and not know what they did in Sugarloaf, Sarat" (294). Sarat assures him, "You never wronged me" (294).
While Benjamin loves to swim in pools, the overprotective Karina has instilled in her son a deep fear of the Mississippi River. One day, Sarat faces her fear by entering the river, and Benjamin follows her example by doing the same.
Excerpt 14 Summary: “The Civil War Archive Project—Reunification Day Ceremony Invitation Letter (Cleared/Unclassified)”
A letter from the Peace Office to Georgia Governor Timothy Combs emphasizes the extraordinary amount of security along the Tennessee border in the days leading up to the National Reunification Day ceremony on July 3, 2095.
Chapter 15 Summary
One day, Joe arrives at the Chestnut homestead. From him, Sarat learns that Gaines gave federal authorities her name and those of many other Rebels in order to protect his family in the Bouazizi Empire. The only reason Joe or some other Rebel hasn't killed Gaines is that he recently had a stroke and probably suffers more alive, stewing in his guilt, than he would in death. Joe also tells Sarat he has a way for her to get revenge on everyone who ever wronged her: the Quick virus Gerry Tusk inadvertently concocted during his search for a cure to the Slow. Sarat agrees to release the virus. She also asks Joe for his real name: Yousef Bin Rashid. His initials are the same ones inscribed on the knife Gaines gave to Sarat in Camp Patience.
Sarat seeks Bragg's help in bypassing the extreme security measures along the Tennessee border. She will pose as a patient on a medical transport headed for a Northern hospital. When Bragg tells Sarat she will forever be a hero to the Southern cause, she responds, "Fuck the South" (313). Sarat also learns from Bragg that Attic, one of his father's old henchman who drove her to Atlanta all those years ago, turned himself in for the assassination of General Weiland shortly after Sarat's capture. He is still detained at Sugarloaf indefinitely.
Sarat drives to Gaines' old cabin intent of killing him, but when he sees him in such sorry physical and mental condition, she realizes killing him would be a kindness. Sarat gives Gaines the knife back and leaves. Her final act before traveling North to unleash the virus is to relocate Benjamin far away from the coming plague. She gives Benjamin a letter and leaves him in the care of two United Rebels who drive Benjamin to the West Coast. From there, they sail up the coast to New Anchorage, Alaska, a neutral state.
Excerpt 15 Summary: “Hearing Before the Committee for Truth and Reunification, One Hundred and Sixty-Third Congress (December 1, 2123)”
In a Congressional hearing, it is revealed that the two men at the Tennessee checkpoint who let Sarat's medical transport through the border are Bud's sons, Martin and Bud, Jr. They enlisted in the federal army after the death of their father, eager to exact revenge against Southerners. Although the committee still doesn't know exactly who released the virus, they suspect it was a passenger on that medical transport. Video surveillance reveals Bud, Jr. threatening to shoot a very large African-American woman—whose face is never seen—before Martin intervenes, letting the woman and the rest of the medical transport through the checkpoint. Though the committee chairpeople are mystified by the surveillance footage, Colonel Singer says, "I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness" (326).
Chapter 16 Summary
Benjamin grows up in an orphanage in New Anchorage. As a teenager, he joins the protests against refugees from the Lower 48 states seeking safety in Alaska from the plague, despite being a refugee himself: "Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees' presence in a city already overburdened" (327).
In Sarat's letter to Benjamin, she thanks him for teaching her to feel joy again. At the end of the letter is a set of numbers. It is only well into adulthood when Benjamin realizes the numbers are coordinates. They lead him to Southern Georgia and the home of a now-elderly Layla, Jr., Sarat's one-time partner who managed to escape the plague because Sarat told her it was coming. Layla hands Benjamin pages and pages of diary entries Sarat scribbled while staying in the woodshed, revealing her whole story. Furious that Sarat murdered 110 million people including his parents, Benjamin burns the diary: "It was the only way I had left to hurt her" (332).
The only page he doesn't burn is the first one, which reads, "When I was a young, I lived with my parents and my brother and my sister in a small house by the Mississippi Sea. I was happy then" (333).
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
As the war draws to a close, one of the major themes El Akkad explores is the power of narratives to erase or distort military history. In Excerpt 13, Senior Peace Officer David Castro describes the attitude of his Southern counterparts during Reunification talks: "Every day they'd come up with something new they wanted included in the public record—one time it'd be some nonsense about courage in the face of aggression, the next time it'd be about the necessity of self-defense and the protection of the long-cherished ways of living" (279). While his colleagues are happy to oblige the Southerners' attempt to shape peacetime narratives if it means the North fulfills its own strategic goals, Castro better understands the power of those narratives: "You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories" (279).
It is here that El Akkad's Second Civil War most closely resembles the first. In the years following the American Civil War, Southerners worked hard to put forth a revisionist and negationist theory about the roots of the conflict that minimized or outright denied the role slavery played. Instead, they framed the war as a fight to protect their Southern traditions in the face of tyrannical Northern aggression. This came to be known as the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, and it's persisted to varying degrees ever since the war ended. Confederate monuments were erected celebrating the heroism of its combatants, and textbooks were rewritten to emphasize "state's rights" as the guiding principle behind the dispute, rather than slavery.
While many historians agree that these narratives aided in the peaceful reunification between Northern and Southern whites, they also minimized or ignored the suffering of former slaves, helping to pave the way for Jim Crow laws and other formal and informal acts of white supremacy in the South. According to historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Neither the trauma of slavery for African Americans nor their heroic, heartbreaking struggle for freedom found a place in that story." (Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. "'You must remember this': Autobiography as social critique." Journal of American History. 1998.)
For Sarat's part, she has a very different—though equally troubled—response to the Free Southern State's negation of the reasons it fought the war. On the way back from killing Bud Baker, she notices that theirs is the only "fossil car" (277) on the highway: “She remembered the old wartime footage of hollering Southerners on the back of huge fossil trucks, revving their engines in defiance. All that was gone now, and looking at the roads you’d think there never lived a single Southerner who’d ever wanted anything to do with the old fuel that started the war” (278). For Sarat, fossil fuel was never more than a symbol of defiance against the Northern enemies who took so much from her. However, the fact that the South is so quick to abandon something so central to its cause makes Sarat realize all the suffering—inflicted on her and that which she inflicted on others—was for nothing. It also undercuts one of Gaines’ favorite recruitment lines: that “when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for, you can agree or disagree, but you can’t ever call it a lie” (142). Meanwhile, the reveal that Joe’s real name is “Yousef Bin Rashid” (306)—the same as the initials on the knife Gaines gave Sarat—suggests that perhaps Gaines was just as deluded as Sarat, having fallen under the spell of his recruiter, Joe. All of this is enough for Sarat to conclude, “Fuck the South” (313).
If Sarat no longer believes in the Southern cause, why does she carry out the virus attack on Columbus, causing the deaths of 110 million people? One answer is that it reflects the final split between Sarat’s insurrectionist identity and ideological pretense. She does it not to support the Southern cause or any other cause, but simply as a raw expression of her rage at those who caused her and her family so much suffering. Moreover, Sarat seems to know that the plague will spread not only through the North but the South as well; after all, she warns Layla, Jr. about it ahead of time, even though she lives in the Southern tip of Georgia. The attack stems therefore from a searing desire to inflict as much damage as possible in an act of pure spite and resentment that spares Benjamin alone from its carnage.
When Benjamin learns that Sarat is the one responsible for the Reunification Plague, he burns her diary, depriving her of the chance to take credit for it and to shove her thumb in the eye of America one last time. He does however leave one page untouched: The first, which reads, “When I was young, I lived with my parents and my brother and my sister in a small house by the Mississippi Sea. I was happy then” (333). Despite all Sarat’s sins, in this short passage there rings a note of pity for the woman. Sarat had but six years of happiness before the war took her father and then took nearly everything else. The passage is also a final expression of the theme that terrorists like Sarat are more than anything else the product of their violent circumstances, not ideology.
