This young man has landed himself in Big Trouble, for sure, but I'm not inclined to line up with the "shoot him now, talk about it later" crowd just yet.

Joining in with a foreign fight is a tradition of long standing in the U.S.--Yanks fought against the Fascists in Spain, flew with the RAF early in WWII, and flew with the Chinese against Japan. John Paul Jones himself helped establish the Czarist navy. We've provided idealists and mercenaries galore to causes good and bad for two centuries.

Young Mr. Walker started out the same as all the others--he joined the Taliban well before September 11. Keep in mind that we were not at war with the Taliban at the time, nor were the Taliban responsible for knocking down any American buildings--the Taliban's fight was with the Northern forces. In any case, at the time he joined up, our own government was on good terms with the Taliban--at least we were willing to give them a pile of drug-war money.

So, as of September 10, no problem and no treason, as long as he took no oaths that would negate his citizenship. And even at that, the US gov't has found it possible to forgive such oaths when it suited them (speaking of our boys in the RAF again).

His position turned terrible indeed after September 11, though--or more aptly, somewhat later, when the US decided to begin pummeling the Taliban. Seems to me he was well screwed whatever he did at that point--stay and fight, or try to get out of there--either way was most likeliest to buy him a bullet in the head.

If he wanted to be a Loyal American, he should've taken the bullet trying to get out of there, but I can't really blame him for not going that route. After all, when you've been part of a fighting unit, you build up an intense loyalty to your buddies. The result: he made himself an enemy of his home country.

Any of the aforementioned participants in foreign wars could have ended up just the same if the US had fallen in on the opposite side. That they are regarded as heroes now is due mainly to luck that their ideals and US politics agreed in the end.

So what do we do with him? What did we do with the 'brainwashees' from the Korean war? With 'collaborators' like William Garvey after Vietnam? With German- and Japanese-americans who ended up in the wrong uniform?

We mostly didn't shoot 'em. And this kid doesn't need to be shot now. That's just asinine.

JtT