The American Fighter

A U.S. Convert's Path From Suburbia to a Gory Jail for Taliban

By EVELYN NIEVES

Published: December 4, 2001

SAN ANSELMO, Calif., Dec. 3 — John Walker Lindh's parents knew he was a different sort of boy. 

When others his age were filling their heads with football and fast cars, John was holed up in his room studying thick treatises on world religions.  Buddhism, Native American religions, Hinduism.  John, raised a Catholic but encouraged by his parents to choose his own spiritual path, studied them all. 

That is, until Islam captured his heart and soul, propelling him on a journey that ended over the weekend when he was captured as a fighter for the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. 

Calling himself Abdul Hamid, John Walker, who goes by his mother's last name, was identified today as one of the Taliban soldiers who had taken refuge in the tunnels of a Northern Alliance prison in Mazar-i-Sharif.  After days of fighting in which hundreds of soldiers were killed, he and the Taliban fighters he was with were finally flushed out when the tunnels were flooded. 

Until his parents saw the wretched-looking captured Taliban soldier they recognized as their 20-year-old son on CNN on Sunday night, they had no idea where he was, or even if he was alive. 

Their son became a Muslim at 16, known in this old, moneyed Marin County suburb as the quiet, religious kid who did not play with others.  He stood out at the Mill Valley Islamic Center, where most of the Muslims were Indian.  He was so serious about Islam that he changed his name to Suleyman Al- Lindh and convinced his corporate-lawyer father, Frank Lindh, and commercial-photographer mother, Marilyn Walker, to send him to an Islamic school in Yemen. 

Two years later, on a visit home in February 1999, he told his family he was going to return to the United States to go to medical school, and then move permanently to Pakistan, where he would continue his spiritual path while ministering to the poor. 

How he diverted from that path is not clear.  His parents lost contact with him in May, when he e-mailed them from northwest Pakistan, where he was studying at an Islamic religious school, to say he was moving somewhere cooler for the summer. 

Mr. Lindh, a lawyer for Pacific Gas and Electric , based in San Francisco, said it had not occurred to him that his son was in Afghanistan. 

"We thought he was in Pakistan the whole time," Mr. Lindh said in an interview outside his home this afternoon.  He added that he had been taking Mr. Walker's photograph to local mosques since Sept. 11, trying to get word.  No one knew anything. " We want to see John right away," he said. " He's been through a horrible ordeal." 

Both parents, who have been separated for three years and who have two other children, spent today working with elected officials and the F.B.I. to try to find a way to get to their son.  Friends said the parents were devastated at his condition and his affiliation, which they likened to the kidnapped Patty Hearst's joining her captors and becoming a bank robber. 

"I would gladly have him for my own son," said Bill Jones, a family friend whom Mr. Lindh lived with in San Rafael for two years after his separation from Ms. Walker. 

Mr. Jones met the young Islamic student two years ago and was impressed at how mature, smart and directed he was for an 18-year-old. 

"He wore the long robes and pillbox hat and had a beard," Mr. Jones said. " His parents weren't the kind who said you had to change into Levi's while you're here.  They were proud of him, as I would be if I were them." 

Stephanie Hendrix, a friend of Marilyn Walker, who was not talking to reporters camped outside her apartment complex in Fairfax, Calif., said Ms. Walker had been trying to find her son for months. 

"The metaphor that came to me about this is your son becomes a Presbyterian and ends up with the Ku Klux Klan," Ms. Hendrix said.  She said Ms. Walker had received death threats as news spread of her son's involvement with the Taliban. 

The soldier captured on video covered in soot and dirt grew up, as the family friend Mr. Jones put it, "intellectually privileged." 

Mr. Walker was the middle of three children — an older brother lives in San Francisco — who was born in Washington and spent his early years in the Maryland suburbs.  His father at the time was a lawyer for the Department of Justice, and his mother worked as a home health care aide.  They moved to Marin County in 1991, when John, named after the Beatle John Lennon, was 10. 

Mr. Walker attended Tamiscal High School in Larkspur, which the principal, Marcie K. Miller, described as an alternative school for "motivated, self-directed learners." 

Mr. Walker's father said that at 16 his son was changed by "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," deciding to become a Muslim after reading it.  His mother, who dabbled in Buddhism, and father, who remained a Catholic, supported his decision, Mr. Lindh said. 

As he became pious, Mr. Walker reminded his father of relatives who had become priests. " He's very pious and hard-working in his studies," Mr. Lindh said. " He's chaste, with no girls or alcohol." 

Although his parents worried a little about their son's conversion, "He was always intellectually coherent and he had a wonderful sense of humor, and none of that changed when he converted to Islam," his father said. " I never had any major misgivings." 

Those who knew Mr. Walker from his studies at the Islamic Center of Mill Valley said that he left Marin, known for its progressive politics and millionaires, because he found it too difficult to be a Muslim there. 

"He found it difficult to practice Islam here," said Abdullah Nana, 23, who used to drive his under-age friend John Walker to the mosque. " He wanted to leave this country and go to a Muslim country." 

Mr. Nana added that he was not surprised to learn that his friend supported the Taliban.  Mr. Walker told CNN over the weekend that he had joined the Taliban as a volunteer because his "heart became attached to them" after he studied their movement.  He also claimed to have gone to a training camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden appeared several times. 

Mr. Nana remembered that just before Ramadan began on Nov. 16, Ms. Walker went to the mosque asking about her son.  She said: "I haven't seen my son.  I've lost contact with him," Mr. Nana said. " We couldn't really tell her anything."