Remembering This report also asks what role trauma plays in detainees’ and their families’ memories of their experiences as they attempted to provide clarity, rationale, sequence, and coherence to events that fundamentally altered their lives. Separated from one another for years, they recounted collective and individual experiences of loss, uncertainty, confusion, and trauma. These collided when detainees returned home, changed by experiences of torment, torture, physical and mental abuse (including sexual), and humiliation. There are stories of how family members tried to take care of one another, stories of discord and abandonment, stories of hope and hopelessness. Reclamation was difficult: detainees were changed people. Their families found them unrecognizable, recalling who they used to be – boys with dreams of education and employment, sons and fathers who had once provided for their families – as they attempted to regain normality in their lives and move on. Upon return, detainees shared stories of hijacking, kidnapping, crossfire, and treachery through which they were handed over to American forces and transported to Bagram. Remembering abduction and imprisonment, they described the methods officials used to extract information, to discipline them, and to cruelly entertain the guards. To counter these memories, detainees regaled stories of resistance, bravado, and speaking back to power, as they fought to remain sane and hang on to their humanity and dignity in an environment that was meant to destroy them. When Hanif Ali’s family received the news that they would soon be required to present testimony to the DRB over the phone, all the family members began to gather stories of what a responsible son, husband, and father he was in order to support his case. Similarly, Shakil’s father Wakeel wanted to provide documentation of his son’s school enrolment to show he was a student. His motivation was demonstrating that Shakil was but a boy, impressionable and disillusioned — not a criminal. Examining such choices, this report asks how, in a post-9/11 world where laws and rights can be suspended with impunity, families made sense of what happened to their missing relatives. Delimited by DRB processes that coercively presumed guilt before innocence, and the pressure to obtain justice, families recollected the past narrativizing the ways in which it was not possible for their loved ones to be militants taking up arms. Who had their sons and brothers grown up to be? Average men looking for work to support their families? Devout, peaceful proselytizers? Or ideologically radicalized militants? These, however, were not questions families directly engaged with in their conversations with JPP. Instead, they talked around these fearful possibilities by encasing beloved family members, who they were separated from, in morally wholesome and masculine narratives of capability to care and provide for the family. As Das and Kleinman (2000) explain, such needs can be understood as a competing relationship between victims’ moral values and their emotional states, due to the dissonance that takes place in our social worlds where both victims and perpetrators of violence occupy the same space at once. These narratives are markedly different from those of detainees: Shakil’s outright admission that he attempted to join the jihad (see page 52); Usman Yusuf expressing vocal anti-American sentiment (see page 28). In noting such differences and variances, between families’ and detainees’ memories and explanations, this report asks readers to pay attention to what stories detainees and their families chose to tell and felt they were able to tell, and how their forms of narration spanned that continuum. 10