Posted on 12/12/2001 3:56:39 AM PST by IronJack
The parents of John Walker, the American-turned-Taliban POW who is being held by Marines near Kandahar, have predictably risen to his defense as have a handful of other hand-wringers on the Left. He's just a good boy who made some mistakes, they claim, a nice, happy boy-next-door type who has always been free to chase his dreams, wherever they led him.
This time, they led him to a jumbled cellar in northern Afghanistan, huddled in cold, creaking darkness while American bombers circled overhead and opposition forces dropped hand grenades all around him. He and his compatriots were the last of the Taliban fighters who had briefly recaptured their prison fortress outside Mazar-e-Sharif. They gained the upper hand for a brief spell, then US warplanes and Alliance tanks smashed the compound and the rebels retreated into the ruined cellar of one of the larger buildings. When Northern Alliance soldiers began to fill the hole with water, Walker joined 80-odd walking dead in a mass surrender. After a 3-day seige, their end had finally come. With guns in their backs, they crossed a courtyard strewn with bodies and parts, and were locked into a metal shipping container, there to await their final destiny in a land known for its barbarity to prisoners.
The future hadn't always looked so bleak. John Walker is the son of Marilyn Walker of San Francisco, who is currently married to Frank Lindh, wealthy, "open-minded" parents who encouraged him to select from a wide palette of personal experience. They report that he has always been a strong-willed child, introverted, and given to experiment. He converted to Islam at 16, then traveled to Yemen to study Arabic. He wound up in Pakistan, in one of the madrassas, the religious indoctrination centers the Taliban sponsors to bolster the ranks of its fanatics. When the Trade Center was attacked and America retaliated, he was given a rifle and sent to Kunduz to pursue the jihad against Allah's wicked enemies.
Those "enemies" happened to be wearing American uniforms. John Walker, boy next door, was shooting his own countrymen.
Now, behind the razor wire at Camp Rhino, he has time to contemplate his folly. It's hard to know what thoughts go through his head as the minutes drag into hours, the hours into days, and the future remains a distant haze of dread uncertainty. But back in the land he hated so much, his mother and father are telling anyone who will listen that this is just another caprice, that their son is a happy youngster who stumbled onto the wrong path.
This path leads to a firing squad. John Walker is a traitor.
Aritcle III, Section 3 of the Constitution explicitly defines one crime: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." John Walker took up arms against the United States, aligned his sympathies with those of the Taliban, and lent his talents to the destruction of American fighting forces. There is no clearer case of treason. No spy who ever sold nuclear secrets to the Reds, no mercenary who switched allegiances because the pay was better, no Benedict Arnold or Ephialtes or Judas Iscariot betrayed their respective causes any more than John Walker betrayed his homeland.
But, in the manner of modern America, John Walker is to be considered merely an errant youth, a misguided youngster who might be teepeeing the principal's house or egging cars from an overpass. Nobody in post-modern America - from a certain President on down - is to be held accountable for his decisions any more. That is an expired construct, a moral relic no longer relevant in the age of situation ethics.
Nowadays, even a "mistake" as egregious as out-and-out treason is simply a youthful indiscretion, a prank that went awry, of no more consequence than flinging burning dog squat on a neighbor's front stoop. No sense of honor prevails, no onerous recognition of social responsibility. If young Mr. Walker didn't give a Muslim's damn about his country, maybe he could at least have considered the agony his decision would cause his parents. But the only important thing was that he indulge his latest whim, his wandering penchant for strange causes and childish idiocy. He shouldn't be blamed for that.
At least, that's the way Mr. and Mrs. Walker-Lindh want it. They don't want their son to suffer the righteous outrage of other mothers and fathers whose sons were the targets of Johnny Taliban's rainbow chase. They want compassion, forgiveness, understanding for their boy, not a body bag.
It should not be. John Walker, crushed into a cage in the wastes of Afghanistan, should be treated by the conquering forces the same as any other prisoner of war. If the Alliance decides to execute the troublesome guerillas, then John Walker should face the same fate. If the foreign prisoners are allowed to return to their homelands, John Walker should be tried in the United States as a traitor and at the very least spend the rest of his days making road ballast at Leavenworth. If justice prevails, he should stare down a firing squad.
Every day presents its decisions. Sept. 11, 2001 offered a lot of options for billions of people. But the folks in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon, and on those four fateful flights didn't have much in the way of options. Someone else wrote the final chapter to 5,000 lives that day. Some preening, pretentious, blinded zealots usurped the ultimate prerogative and decided that that day would be a good one for these strangers to die.
And John Walker made a decision somewhere in his life that led him to Pakistan, to Kunduz, and now to his feculent cell. It was a bad decision if the final goal was some kind of spiritual enlightenment or an ideological home. At the very least, the cost is awfully high. But it was a cost that any reasoning man would have seen beforehand. One doesn't go to war with one's country for cavalier reasons, or without expecting some retribution if the cause is lost.
The day of reckoning is nigh for John Walker. It is an offense to America to treat him lightly, or to regard his betrayal as inconsequential. The war is against terrorism, and if nations who harbor terrorists are our enemies, people who fight beside the terrorists must earn our enmity as well. Just as prosecution of this war is vital to project American outrage, so is a vigorous pursuit of the enemy's foot soldiers.
The distant star of "revolution" has always twinkled seductively to the young and disenfranchised. Over the years, countless youths have been drawn to experiment with alternate ideologies, mostly as a way of antagonizing their parents and asserting a pretentious independence. Soft-hearted parents tolerate such cultural defections because they are afraid to demand obedience from their children. They've bought the "self-esteem" nonsense purveyed by the liberal establishment, and fear that forcing any standards on their offspring will crush their nascent spirits and lead them to a life of bland uniformity.
So, in their search for a meaningful ethic, the brats run off and join the Black Panthers, the Peoples' Temple, the Trenchcoat Mafia. It's usually just a passing fancy, the mock rebellion of self-absorbed children, a tempest in a B-cup. But more and more frequently, the dalliance becomes an obsession and consumes the dabbler. A lark becomes an albatross, the scarecrow a tar baby. And a machine grinds slowly, inexorably toward disaster.
That seems to be the case with John Walker. He may have thought this was just another game, a way of thumbing his nose at Ward and June. But like the dead in Oakland and Guyana and Columbine, the bodies in Mazar are not pawns that can be replaced on the chessboard to await another contest. Their journey was one way, no takebacks, no rewind, no "do-overs." Their mistakes were fatal. John Walker's should be too.
If he gets a .30-caliber ticket to Paradise, he can ask Allah all those questions that have been burning in his soul these 20 years. Of course, if he's WRONG …. it could be that the last words John Walker will ever hear will be "Ready. Aim. Fi …"
I would not want to see him return to American soil for any trial, however. This is the Land of the Free and the Brave!
John Walker is a traitor.
He should be shot and buried in an unmarked grave in Afghanistan.
BINGO !
There is no question that he does not deserve the dignity of a firing squad or the comfort of lethal injection. As a traitor he should be hanged.
[This form of punishment is so obselescent in the United States that people dont' even remember that criminals are hanged while game is hung].
Would someone please explain to this poor non-thinking soul how it is that a 20 year old is considered by the liberal establishment mind set a "poor boy"?
These same degenerate thinkers (?) state that a 14 year old girl is old enough to have sex and abort the fetus should she choose and without parental notification.
Oh....so sorrrrry! Have I offended ?
You write an excellent, convincing essay, but the reason there is discussion is that many of us simply don't care about John Walker-- UNLESS, he was instrumental in the death of the American CIA agent Spann. Other than that, I simply don't care. He does, however, make a splendid bad example-- he took his parents' beliefs belief in unending tolerance to the logical, ultimate conclusion. And, I think the discussion that has been sparked will ultimately be good for us as a country, and force a whole lot of fuzzy liberals to re-think their intellectual positions and beliefs.
Leni
Personally, I don't either.
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