Everyone Fights an American War

The range of emotions that came with the ending of American War by Omar El Akkad were like no other. Sarat's mother, father, and sister were dead, her only relative left had a serious head injury and could barely remember anything, and when she came back from interrogation at Sugarloaf, she felt like she had nothing left.

When she returned to the new Chestnut family home, Sarat was met with her old maid, Karina, who married her brother, Simon, and had a child named Benjamin. Sarat probably convinced herself that she hated all three of them, but she clearly took a liking to Benjamin. She helped to fix his broken arm and helped him face his fear of the river while also facing her own fear.

There was a single time when the book ever mentioned rehabilitation services for Sarat, when it was brought up by Karina in an argument with Simon. I did a little bit of research, and as of today, March 18th of 2021, there are laws for reintegration of torture victims into society (read about them here). The victims need to be reestablished in their situation before the abuse happened (which wasn't really possible for Sarat), they need to be compensated, and a public apology is to be made, with punishment for the wrongdoing. Now, the government of 2095 didn't really think what they did to Sarat at Sugarloaf was a wrongdoing, so there was no apologizing, no rehabilitative care, and probably not much compensation. They just threw Sarat back into normal life with all of the mental trauma and physical damage they caused her. This is what brings me to the topic of revenge.

Of course you would want revenge on a government that killed your family and tortured you for information, just as the government did this for revenge on Sarat for killing their highest generals. Though the government didn't really know that Sarat did the very last killing of the general because someone else took the blame, they still made her a pet. Sarat got her revenge on Bud Baker, her primary torturer, but that wasn't enough - she wanted to take the entire country down with her.

I will stop right here and ask you this: would you think that a person who was tortured and imprisoned for 7 years and thrown so mercilessly back into everyday life would ever be capable of feeling love or care for anything or anyone ever again, or even just for a long time? My answer would be a resounding no.

However, Sarat came to form some sort of a relationship with Benjamin. Was it love? Was it a familial bond? Was it the similarity between this child and her small, immature self before the torture? I don't think we know exactly, but whatever it was, it was a strong enough bond for her to pick him from his family and cart him all the way west to a neutral state before she spread a deadly pandemic that would kill over half of the country, including her only living relative, Simon. It couldn't have been a familial relationship that led her to spare Benjamin, because she left Simon to die. Granted, she wished that Simon would have just died in Camp Patience, but you wouldn't think she would be okay with being the cause of his death.

This brings the circle right back around to revenge. Benjamin grew up and grew a mind of his own, and decided that he hated Sarat. Sarat left him an apology letter, a loving last message of sorts, and he took this and all of the books she wrote about her history and her legacy and burnt them down so that nobody would ever know what she did to the country, for the country. This final act of revenge against Sarat made me realize that in this book, there were to be no happy endings. There are no happy endings to things like this American War and plague and sorrow. The biggest theme to be taken away from this book is that sometimes revenge both accompanies and outweighs the love.

If you haven't read this book, I'd highly recommend you check it out here.