American War(87)







Excerpted from:

THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—SUGARLOAF DETAINEE LETTERS (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)


Dear **** *****, I received your letter in February. ****** from the ************* ******** humanitarian team delivered it to me. As usual, ******* ***** read it first, so I don’t know if I got the whole thing. But I am grateful to ******, who has tried *** best to help me, and of course to you for writing.

I’m still in Camp Saturday. There are ** of us here, I think, but it’s hard to tell. We are still in isolation, and the ******* ******** ***** ********* us every ***** *****.

Since ***. ***** took over, things have gotten worse. He ******* ** ****, I think, but I’ve never seen his face. I think it was him who ordered them to take our books, our sleeping shades, our toothpaste packets, and everything else that reminded us we’re still human beings. I know he had to give his permission for them to ********* us after we started our protest.

It happens at all hours. Day, night, there’s no difference here. First they’ll come in and tell you to quit being difficult, to just eat.

When you refuse, they take you to another room. There ************************ **. ***************************. *************** *******. **************************. ************.

*************. ********************. ******************. *********. ************. ************************. **********************************************.

******************. ******. ***************************. **************************** ***********************. *************************************. ****************.

*************************. **************************. ******************************. *******************. *****************. *********. *************************** **************************************. ************. ******************************.

I heard ***. ***** believes one of us killed his father. But I’ve been here for years, long before any of that. I never even saw ****** *****, never heard of him before one of the *** ****** told us what happened.

Everything else is the same. The days go by. *********************, except for ****** ********, when we get to see the sun.

I know they’ve stopped telling people how many of us are still being ********. ************* ****************************************. They’ve been trying everything they can think of to make us quit. There’s a nurse here, and *** does everything in *** power to make *** ************ ******** ** ******* as possible. I don’t know why. I told *** it’s a violation of *** oath, but *** doesn’t care. I begged the guard, but he cares even less.

I heard there’s talk of peace back home. I hope for your benefit that it’s true, but I don’t think it matters much for us. We’ve been here too long. Whatever we were before this is all gone. People here speak to themselves. They see ghosts. I dream about you and *****, and about ******, and about home. I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours with love,

*****





CHAPTER TWELVE


They were brought to Sugarloaf in roaring airborne beasts, chained to the floors and chained to each other. Eye-masks and earmuffs severed them from their surroundings. Through their pores the captives took in what little information there was to be had about the thing that carried them—a vast metal cavity, scorching hot as it sat for hours on the tarmac of some clandestine airfield and, soon after the plane ascended, bitterly cold. When the mouths opened to beg for water or relief from the chains, the skin felt other things—the hardness of a rifle butt, the steel-backed tip of a boot. The mouths closed. The bodies flew, dumb as idols, over the Florida Sea.

Only the very crest of the hill remained above water, the last vestige of the peninsular state. Upon it was built an artificial island of stone and concrete, rounded and circled with high razor-wire fencing. A jut of unused land, about fifty feet in length, extended beyond the fence to the shore. Here, but for a strip cleared to build a dock, the grass ran wild and the ground was thick with weeds.

The grass camouflaged the island. When the storm clouds cleared and the residents of the southern Georgia coast were able to look far into the Florida Sea, they sometimes mistook Sugarloaf for a trick of the eye—a tropical sea-dwelling mirage.

The women were kept in cages while the camps were reordered and their male captives segregated. The cages were small and the taller detainees could not stand without crouching.

Guards in black masks patrolled the cages. The masks hid their faces but their youth was evident in the skin around their eyes. The guards called the women in the cages by the last two digits of their detainee numbers, and called each other by their initials. As such, whenever the senior officers ordered the guards to move the women to other cages or to the Non-Compliance Area, the instructions sounded like moves in a game of chess.

But sometimes the guards accidentally used their real names. This was how the women, who had little to do but sit and listen, learned the identities of the soldiers who walked hourly among them. The tall one with the blue eyes was Lillyman; the kind one with the accent, who used to smuggle water bottles through the fencing and was soon removed from duty, was named Izzy. The one with the thick neck—the cruel one—was Bud Baker.

In time the women learned other things too: the names of the guards’ hometowns, of their children and their pets. They learned a feeble geography of the camps, and of the officers’ suburb, which lay on the other end of the island. And although none of these things were useful to them in their squat, vacant pens, the women committed all the information to memory, held the things they learned close like yet-unsharpened shanks.

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