Summary of Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear The Water

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 I had known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West. His aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings.

#2 I had been sleeping little since I returned from Sanaa, but my tiredness left me as the scene came into focus: the Hindu Kush snowcaps, the slums on the hillside, the Humvee with its turret pointed at the gate.

#3 Half the city was escaping that summer. Afghans were losing hope in their country’s future, and were preparing to emigrate to America through the Special Immigrant Visa program.

#4 I wanted to go with Omar and document the refugee underground, so I proposed the idea to him. He needed to get asylum in Europe first, then come back for Laila. But while he was gone, her father might try to marry her off to someone else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669354192

IRB Media

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Insights on Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear the Water

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I had known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West. His aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings.

#2

I had been sleeping little since I returned from Sanaa, but my tiredness left me as the scene came into focus: the Hindu Kush snowcaps, the slums on the hillside, the Humvee with its turret pointed at the gate.

#3

Half the city was escaping that summer. Afghans were losing hope in their country’s future, and were preparing to emigrate to America through the Special Immigrant Visa program.

#4

I wanted to go with Omar and document the refugee underground, so I proposed the idea to him. He needed to get asylum in Europe first, then come back for Laila. But while he was gone, her father might try to marry her off to someone else.

#5

I was starting to feel the effects of the jet lag. I sat down at a desk in the living room, and as I walked the dog, Omar told me he was going to leave and become a refugee. He was going to ask his father for Laila’s hand in marriage, on the assumption that Omar could get asylum.

#6

I walked with Omar up to the top of the hill, where there was an empty lot ringed by trees. Kabul was beautiful at night, but Omar was ready to leave. He had no future there.

#7

I had been working with Omar since my first magazine story in Afghanistan, more than six and a half years earlier. In 2009, I had gotten an assignment from Harper’s to write a profile of Colonel Abdul Raziq, a border police commander who was a key ally of the US military. I wanted to go to Raziq's frontline province of Kandahar, but the magazine couldn't afford any of Kabul's established fixers.

#8

Omar, like me, had grown up during the war on terror. He’d heard the foreign troops were paying good salaries to do dangerous work down in Kandahar, and in 2006 he took