More than anything else, this may be the central question at the heart of American War. It is introduced early on with the vignette of Julia Templestowe, the suicide bomber who assassinated President Daniel Ki, igniting the Second American Civil War. When Templestowe is first mentioned in the Federal Syllabus excerpt, the reader would be forgiven for thinking of Templestowe as an ideological diehard, driven to murder by her slavish devotion to the Southern cause. Later, she is shown simply to be a damaged individual recruited straight out of the suicide ward: "They knew how to find the ones who were most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord. From these, they forged weapons" (32).

While existing conditions of desperation and depression can make it easier for recruiters to transform individuals into terrorists, such a strategy won't work for a girl like Sarat. With a loving family and a free-thinking mind, Sarat is unlikely to strap on a suicide bomb absent a long grooming period and, most importantly, the radicalizing circumstances of war.