American Jihadist

By GL Dorion

The first section establishes the relationship between Luke - the narrator - and Gustav, his best friend, who quit college to find adventure by traveling to the Middle East and joining one of the so-called 'terror groups.' Their quest lands them in the middle of the Syrian Civil War in an intense conflict which they immediately are desperate to escape. Trouble seems to appear though at every turn.
The escape from the rebel group that is fighting the Syrian regime involves the young men's effort to help some of those who have been devastated by the immense destruction in Syria's "Stalingrad" and they zero in on two refugees who, it appears to them, might be heading to toward a life of modern slavery. Thus, the second part of the novel involves the boys' escape by ship through the Aegean Sea and their suspicions that a young Syrian woman and her small child who are aboard are about to be exploited for the modern slave market. Luke wants desperately to help the possible victims while Gustav is reluctant to get involved because he suspects that the slavers would do anything to protect their "property". He sees the slavers as potentially more lethal than ISIS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GL Dorion
• Release date: Feb 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463172742

GL Dorion

About me:I live in Thailand with my wife, Uraiwan, four dogs, and granddaughter, Smile, 2, in Issan Province where I am writing new books and maintaining our property which basically has a ranch-style two-bedroom home, numerous fruit trees (banana, mango, cherry and lime trees) and a tropical fish pond with about 2000 tiny fish, many lotus flowers and some very noisy frogs.I retired from teaching in 2013 after 13 years in NYC high schools. In 2004, I took a year off, and wrote at Starbucks in Astor Place every day, substantially writing three books, although two -"The Jack Trilogy" and "Desperate Days" - took years to finish.Back then, I taught English, Global History, and journalism.Historical fiction has been my favorite genre since my elementary school years. I still recall being fascinated with the 'World History’ textbooks as early as the 4th or 5th grade. In high school, I was independently reading the great Russian writers. I continued to independently pursue a classical education by reading dozens of the ancient works of Greece and Rome while reading classical philosophers up to the more modern ones.I studied English and journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I received BA degrees, received my Master of Science in Literacy at Touro College, Manhattan, and took night classes in European history and French Painting at Harvard.I spent ten years as a news reporter in Boston-area courts. Those years were a fantastic learning experience. I began in 1980 as the Lowell Sun's court reporter in Cambridge. There were nearly 100 prosecutors in the DA's office then. I later took over the Middlesex News Service, and it expanded it by adding a dozen or so client news organizations including the Associated Press. Few people see a murder trial gavel to gavel during their lifetime. I saw about 500. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Kafka's, The Trial, were the inspiration behind those years. It's amazing what books can do.

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Discover other Titles by GL Dorion

Title 1 The Jack Trilogy

Title 2 Jack: Book 1 The Rebel

Title 3 Jack: Book 2 Murder on the High Seas

Title 4 Jack: Book 3 Friends Forever

Title 5 The Desperate Days

Contents:

Chapter 1 Heading to Aleppo

Chapter 2 Bombs

Chapter 3 Decision at Dawn

Chapter 4 To Kill or Not to Kill

Chapter 5 Pie in the Sky

Chapter 6 Gustave’s Plan

Chapter 7 Sorry, Son

Chapter8 The Siege of Aleppo

Chapter 9 The Little Man, Abdullah

Chapter 10 The Russians are Coming

Chapter 11 Platoon Leader

Chapter 12 Chow Time

Chapter 13 ISIS in Syria

Chapter 14 The Orphanage

Chapter 15 The Bakery

Chapter 16 The Plan

Chapter 17 White Helmets

Chapter 18 Fighting for Life

Chapter 19 MiGs above the Rubble

Chapter 20 Onward to the Euphrates

Chapter 21 Free at Last

Chapter 22 Preparations

Chapter 23 Nayla Bahar

Chapter 24 Resistance

Chapter 25 Surprises

Chapter 26 I feel like a beggar

Chapter 27 Tales of Woe

Chapter 28 Now What?

Chapter 29 Thank You but No Thank You

Chapter 30 Another Old-World City

Chapter 31 The Long Road to Freedom

Chapter 32 Brothel in Beyoglu District, Istanbul

Chapter 33 Ishmael’s ‘Slut’

Chapter 34 Gone from This Earth

Chapter 35 Ishmael’s Plan

Chapter 36 Samos Island Refugee Camp

Chapter 37 Double Crossed

Chapter 38 Tunneling into the Camp

Chapter 39 ‘Get Us Out of Here! Please!’

Chapter 40 The Slavic Route

Chapter 41 Escape from Samos Island

Chapter 42 A Wrinkle in Our Plan

Chapter 43 I’m so Grateful too for America

Chapter 44 A Big Problem

Chapter 45 What Now?

Chapter 46 Gratitude

Chapter 47 Change of Plans

Chapter 48 Republic of North Macedonia

Chapter 49 Roses

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Chapter 1 Aleppo

The dust settled, and the storm ended. The sun baked us even though it was just mid-morning. We had gone to Syria to be jihadists although we were not Muslim. Istanbul first and we left that city two days ago. Now we crossed the Turkish border and were at our destination. We wanted to fight against the regime that was murdering its own people. The Americans were supporting us secretly, but it was on open secret among the jihadists. They wanted Bashar al-Assad brought down at all costs - even if they had to deal with the devil.

My name is Luke Gebhardt. My friend, Gustave Schmidt, and I had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota - German ancestors, football, baseball and ice hockey during Minnesota's long winters - we were the best of friends. No, we had not been radicalized by anyone, nor were we radicalized at all - at least we didn't think so. We didn’t care about the ISIL ideology or the recently-declared caliphate but really only that Assad was running a vast network of torture prisons across the nation with nobody to help those who entered its dark passageways.

We were only 21. We had gone to high school together. We went through two years of college afterwards. We were in the same political science class. Professor Schmidt - another American of German extraction and Gustave's father - railed against Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and her basically open-door policy for Syrian and other migrants escaping the Middle East and North African wars. The Middle American cities also had become a magnet for jihadists and for Muslim immigrants. The Midwest’s "American pie’ culture had long given way to a new alien culture - Islam. With one person out of every four on the globe being Muslim, the inevitability of systemic permanent change wasn’t lost on Midwest Americans - many who were as stupefied and as lost as Professor Schmidt but who lived with the new reality every day.

She is destroying Germany, the nation of Goethe, Beethoven, of Bismarck, and Wagner, he said on the day we told him we were going to the Syrian war. We knew his thoughts about Chancellor Merkel and Syria. The professor longed for the old days and had a hard time adjusting to the rapidly-changing modern life that the big cities of the Midwest had become. He liked the world of his books. He wrote articles constantly, criticized Western European governments for their 'stupidity' in how they dealt with Islamic immigration. His students thought him to be old school. But they liked him. He was in his 29th year of teaching at a major institution. The university wanted to retire him, but he was too popular, and they dared not make a move. They didn't like his conservative politics, his focus on Islamic immigration issues, and his sharp criticisms even of the university itself. The administration considered him a malcontent.

Be careful, boys. Come back in one piece. Take care of one another, and fight for the cause. Assad has caused these migration problems and has flooded the west with his refugees and the poor and with a smattering of terrorists in the process who will only cause pain for many in our old country. Germany will never be the same. My grandfather's Germany no longer exists. Pretty soon we won't be able to recognize it and, after that, the same will happen here. Sharia law will destroy America as we know it. Europe has succumbed to Islam except in the east. And the liberals will just keep feeding the gullible more bullshit.

We didn't come to Syria because of the professor - well, maybe partly - although Gustave - a straight A student unlike me - and I, were upset with what was happening in Germany. Of course, we also wanted to see the world and find adventure. And so that first day after crossing the border into Syria, we met our contacts after making our way to Aleppo, an ISIS stronghold - two young idealistic and naive - we were to find out - American boys.

On that first night after meeting Abdullah, a Sunni Arab who was recruiting for Jabhat al-Nusra, the official arm of Al Qaeda Central, in Syria, we were grilled by three tough-looking fighters who said they suspected we were working as spies for the Israelis. They demanded to know who sent us, why we were there, and who were our contacts. When we told them no-one sent us, that we had vowed to not reveal our contacts and wanted to fight for 'the cause', they laughed at us and said that either we were 'dumb, stupid Americans' who think they can just show up and magically fix Syria's problems or we were Mossad agents and thus Israeli spies.

When I insisted, we had come mainly to fight Assad to help stem the flow of migrants into Germany, the shortest fighter - a man who looked to be about 28 - backhanded me in the face. When I started to go at him, he pulled a knife, grabbed me around my neck in a choke hold and threatened to slash my throat. Why are you here, Yankee? he said. Do not lie to me again!

I told you. We don't like Merkel. We don't like Assad. We want to help you, I said.

We were taken to a back room that was about 10 feet by 10 feet. They padlocked the door. There were no windows. We were dead tired, having traveled all day, only to be interrogated as spies. We were hungry. Nothing was offered. Not even water.

Gustave had not said a word during the entire questioning. He seemed stunned.

What are we going to do? he asked me now as we lay on the concrete floor, dead tired.

We'll see what happens tomorrow, I said. Maybe they believed us. Maybe they'll kill us. I don't know. I think we might have stepped in shit this time. We may have to bide our time and, at the right moment, get the hell away from here.

Yeah. Let's get the fuck away, Gustave said. "This isn't the adventure I was looking for! They’re not even ISIL - they’re al Qaeda and those two