Bagram Air Base

Bagram Air Base appears in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account both as a transfer point in a concealed chain of custody and as the setting for a sharply observed memory of American soldiers. The narrative gives few details about the base itself, but its position between Jordan and Guantánamo makes it part of the route through which the United States controlled his movement, while Slahi’s recollection there turns an ordinary sight—soldiers eating—into a critique of consumption and waste.

A Waypoint in the Transfer Route

After Slahi returned to Mauritanian police headquarters for questioning, his family believed for almost a year that he remained in local custody. In reality, a CIA rendition flight had taken him to Jordan about a week after he went in voluntarily. Months later, the United States retrieved him from Amman and delivered him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan; a few weeks after that, he was transferred to Guantánamo. While his family continued paying for his upkeep at a Nouakchott prison, officials there concealed that he was no longer in their custody. Bagram thus occupies a middle position in a transfer sequence whose true course was hidden from his relatives.

That movement belongs to the larger geography of the memoir. The editor describes Slahi’s detention and interrogation over the next eighteen months as an approximately twenty-thousand-mile journey through four countries, beginning with what was supposed to be a homecoming and ending thousands of miles from home on a Caribbean island. Americans participated in the detentions along the way, and the United States remained the force directing the course of events. Bagram is named as one stage of that route, between Jordan and Guantánamo, rather than as a fully narrated setting in its own right.

A Memory of Abundance and Waste

Slahi recalls that, when he was delivered to Bagram Air Base, he noticed soldiers constantly chewing or eating. The observation becomes the starting point for a broader contrast: he regarded Americans as having access to an immense amount of healthy food, yet wasting more food than any other group he had known. He extended that criticism beyond the base, reflecting that the planet could not sustain the level of waste if every country lived as Americans did.

The recollection makes Bagram more than a name on a transfer itinerary, but it does not supply a detailed account of the base’s layout or daily operations. Instead, the place is registered through Slahi’s attention to the people around him and the habits he associated with American life. His remark about food waste gives a specific, everyday detail a wider environmental significance.

Place in the Narrative

Bagram’s importance rests on the tension between what the memoir makes visible and what the transfer process concealed. The family was led to believe Slahi remained in Mauritania while he had already been moved through Jordan and Bagram toward Guantánamo. In the personal recollection, by contrast, the base is remembered through a direct encounter with its soldiers and a judgment about their consumption. Together, these appearances establish Bagram as both a link in a hidden system of transfers and a brief point of human observation within Slahi’s account.