American War

"Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you." 

This quote explores the vastly different dynamics facing armies that send their troops elsewhere to fight a war, versus those who fight on their home turf. For the South or other real-life warzones in the Middle East, the experiencing the war in your own backyard is a radicalizing force in and of itself.

"Sarat thought how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them." 

In considering the reasons the Free Southern State never fixed the asymmetrical stars on its hastily-drawn flag, Sarat examines the extent to which people hold their traditions close, even when those traditions are broken and no longer serve the people who embrace them. 

"It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester—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?" 

While there is a point to be made here about the merits of recognizing one's privilege when living in a state of safety and stability, the idea that craving safety is the same as condemning your enemies reveals how quickly Sarat has become radicalized. This perspective implies that it's not merely the Northern officials or soldiers who are to blame for her loss and hardships, but the civilians who enjoy safety while she and her kind suffer. This is an important cognitive leap that later allows Sarat to justify the mass murder of millions of innocents.

"He fed her the old mythology of her people—the South of Spanish moss and palmetto fronds; of magnolia trees dressed up in leaves of History and History's step-sister Apocrypha; of unmatched generosity and jubilant excess; of whole pigs smoked whole days and of peaches and pecans and key lime pie. She gorged on it all, delighted not only that such a world existed but that she held to it some ancestral claim. How much of it was real and how much pleasant fantasy didn't matter. She believed every word." 

Here, Gaines plays on Sarat's nostalgia for a past that she never experienced and that perhaps never existed at all. This, the author suggests, is a useful tactic for sowing resentment in the hearts of terrorist recruits by making them ache for a life they feel they are owed by ancestral birthright, and which they could easily achieve if not for the enemy.

"What is the first anesthetic? Wealth. And if I take your wealth? Necessities. And if demolish your home, burn your fields? Acknowledgement. And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight? Family. And if I kill your family? God. And God... hasn't said a word in two thousand years. Good girl." 

In this dialogue, Gaines seeks to engender in Sarat a sense that she has nothing left to lose, not even her own soul. God is not watching, and therefore there is no sin too terrible to commit in her fight against the enemy.

"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." 

While Gaines seeks to frame Southerners' unshakeable conviction as something noble compared to the mutable nature of Northern ideals–a dubious concept considering what those convictions entail—the events of the novel will prove that the Southern cause is equally subject to the whims of circumstances, particularly in Part 4 when the war is in its final days.

"There, for the last time in her life, she slept soundly." 

This quote comes from the night before the Camp Patience massacre. While Gaines' silver tongue goes a long way in persuading Sarat to engage in terrorism, it is the massacre itself that does more to radicalize her than anything else. Had the Northern army not sanctioned the militia-led massacre, it is likely Sarat would have supported the Southern cause through more official, less insurrectionary channels. Most importantly, Sarat likely would have never unleashed the virus that killed 110 million people.

"I don't wanna hear about them anymore. I don't wanna read about them or memorize their capitals or learn how they did us wrong […] I want to kill them." 

Again, the experience of losing her friends, countrymen, and much of her family in the horrific Camp Patience massacre is the key event that radicalizes Sarat. She now believes she knows everything she needs to know about the North, and the time for talking or reading about it is over.

"Karina knew. But unlike everyone else, she didn't admire Miss Sarat or hold her in some reverent esteem. The girl was still a child—at seventeen, less than half Karina's age. She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early. And she knew from the news and from townie gossip what the girls had been through. And because she knew, she understood. But that didn't mean she had to admire it." 

With so much of the novel seen through Sarat's eyes, it is rare to get such a candid outsider's perspective on her character. Here, the author seems to be speaking through Karina, acknowledging the tragic hardship she's faced and understanding why she is the way she is, while taking pains to withhold his admiration.

"Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflicting on others the very same carnage once inflicted upon them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again—she knew them only as the Widow This or the Widow That—but she'd never met a Widower Anything." 

The expectations of bereavement, and how they differ among men and women, are frequently on the minds of the characters. Sarat's violent crusade against her enemies to the North is at least in part fueled by her refusal to grieve passively, as is expected of her as a woman.

"And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon's forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world's only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she'd learned, was simple: If it had been you, you'd have done no different."

The idea Karina puts forth here is almost like the inverse to the famous Anna Karenina quote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Tolstoy, Leo, 1828-1910. Anna Karenina. Moscow: The Russian Messenger. 1877.) Karina's thoughts on the matter also emphasize the extent to which extremism and terrorism grow less out of a specific regional ideology and more out of a universal experience of suffering.

"She knew he had become a soldier not in service of God or Country, but Escape—a chance to become something other than his father, to dodge a life spent soldering the backs of solar panels or wading ankle-deep through shit in the vertical farms. Anything, anything else. And if that meant picking up a rifle and throwing on brown-speckled camouflage, so be it." 

Once again, the author de-emphasizes ideology as a driving force behind those who choose to take up arms against their fellow human. This quote also shows that one's hardship needn't be as dramatic as, say, what Sarat suffered in order to persuade a person to fight in a war. The ordinary yet often crushing hopelessness of an average working-class American can persuade someone to pick sides in a violent conflict, if for no other reason than to be a part of something.

"But most cheered because of an innate desire to back the underdog. That he stood no chance against his youth-armored opponent only endeared him further to the roaring crowd. Instinctively, they expected of him the same chivalrous defiance they believe they themselves, placed in the same position, would show." 

In the Yuffsy fight Sarat attends, the older and overmatched challenger Taylor is a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Rebel army fighting the much larger, more well-funded Northern troops. As a result, the audience members project their own lofty ideas about chivalry and a refusal to surrender onto the fighter. The usefulness of these ideals, however, is called into question in dramatic fashion when Taylor's refusal to give up results in him getting beaten to death.

"The people who're sending you those letters, I bet you most of them aren't yet damaged that way. Maybe they've been touched by it, lost a friend or heard about some massacre, but it's not the same. The truth is, they're on the other side of the river from where you are, they haven't been through what you've been through. And they don't want to. They're not young like you; most of them are old enough to remember when it wasn't like this, when there was peace. And if you'd known that, you'd want it back too." 

This quote emphasizes how difficult it is for people who have known nothing but war to even consider peace. Sarat has no memories of Northerners being anything but her enemies, and therefore it is virtually impossible for her to make the cognitive leap necessary to think of them as her friends.

"It's that goddamn Gaines. He does this to all his little kids, makes them think it's all about them—that the whole damn war turns on how they feel, what they lost, how they're hurting. But it doesn't. There's a whole great world out there, little girl." 

While many youths join terrorist organizations because they want to feel like they're part of something bigger, this quote reveals the utter narcissism at the heart of many young insurgents like Sarat, and the extent to which recruiters fuel and prey on that narcissism. These tactics are particularly effective given that for many youths like Sarat, Gaines was probably the first person to ever call them "special."

"I wanted to be something. I just wanted to be something." 

Like the Northern soldier that, as Sarat assumes, joined the war effort to avoid working class hopelessness, Attic too has no ideological or personal axe to grind with the enemy. While Sarat is unsurprised by such dispassion among Northerners, she seems genuinely mystified that a Southerner—to whom she habitually ascribes noble motives rooted in conviction like hers—feels the same way. 

"She discovered she was angry at him. She was angry at him for not dying in Patience. Had he simply done what all the other men on the execution line had done, she would have forever known him as a martyr, not a marionette—a dumbstruck plaything for doting housekeepers and idiot widows." 

Here, Sarat seems to do two things: For one, she may be projecting some of her own survivor's guilt from the Camp Patience massacre onto her brother. Two, she expresses an unspoken death-wish for martyrdom that foreshadows her own decision later in the book to kill herself for the glory of vanquishing her enemies.

"In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers' hands and placed them in her own. In starvation she found agency, control." 

Such is Sarat's drive to retain a part of herself amid her dehumanizing treatment that she starves herself, just to assert a modicum of control over her circumstances. It is only later, during the waterboarding, that Sarat loses her last measure of control—and, thus, the last part of herself and her ability to resist.

"There was no lie too big that her fear of drowning couldn't make it true." 

After resisting the interrogators through years of treatment that would break most individuals, the sense of utter helplessness and desperation Sarat feels almost immediately at being waterboarding underscores its severity as a torture implement. At the same time, the torture is so severe that the "intelligence" gathered from it is useless. In this way, the book implicitly condemns waterboarding as being at once deeply inhumane and deeply pointless.

"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." 

This is the strongest repudiation of Gaines' insistence that when Southerners fight wars they are unshakeable in their convictions. The fossil fuels, it appears, were nothing more symbols, as easily cast off as the ones used by the North to justify war. Moreover, the sight of Southerners so quickly embracing that which they supposedly fought against, deprives of meaning the immense loss and suffering Sarat experienced throughout the war.

"I told the President's people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over. But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all those years later, we live with the consequences. They didn't understand, they just didn't understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories." 

During the Reunification talks, the North wins major strategic victories because the South seems to care only about casting the war in a light that shines favorably on their side. Only one member of the Northern delegation sees the danger in this. He is no doubt reminded of the years following the First Civil War, in which Southerners successfully recast the cause of the Confederacy as a just and noble one, minimizing or even denying the role slavery played as a central factor in the war's outbreak. In doing so, Southern whites refused to acknowledge of suffering of former slaves, paving the way for white supremacist Jim Crow laws.

"Fuck the South. Fuck the South and everything it stands for." 

This is a dramatic turnaround for Sarat, who in her younger days had little patience for anyone not fully committed to the Southern cause. However, she still proceeds with her plan to release the virus during the Reunification Day ceremony. This exposes the extent to which Sarat's insurrectionist identity has become completely divorced from ideology. Her goal in wreaking havoc on the people of the North now stems entirely from her personal resentment over what they did to her, a need to punish those who punished her.

"There's this passage in one of the books Albert Gaines once gave me. It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past—the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting. What they've got up there in the Blue—what your wife wants, what our parents wanted—is a future." 

Here, Sarat offers an exceptionally grim take on the Southern experience. It suggests that the South's heedless worship of tradition and its reactionary desire to return to a mythical past prevent it from moving forward in any meaningful way. However, Sarat refuses to accompany Simon to the North where a real future is possible. By ensuring a future for herself, Sarat would be forced to bury her past—a past full of trauma that perhaps would be better off in the ground. However, it is still a past that shaped her life and identity in such profound ways that she cannot let it go.