Can John Walker Lindh Go Home Now?

After he was captured in 2001, fighting alongside Taliban forces in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh became the most hated man in America. He was beaten, vilified, and then—in a strange plea bargain orchestrated by the U.S. government—sentenced to twenty years in a federal prison. Now, in an exclusive interview, his parents break their long silence to reveal new details and to ask: When we punished John Walker Lindh, did we go too far?

By John Rico

April 2009

Frank Lindh's words break cautiously from his lips. Tall and thin in a smart dark suit, he sits thirty-three stories up, in the San Francisco office of his son's attorneys. He is finally opening up about his son John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, the traitor, the one who hates America, the one who had the audacity to reveal himself as one of Allah's chosen, to enter our living rooms uninvited when we were still traumatized and choking from the twin towers. That one. The one who's been sentenced, silenced, and incarcerated since he was pulled from a prison riot in Afghanistan, the first enemy combatant captured in our war on terror.

Frank and his ex-wife, Marilyn Walker, smile weakly at each other across the conference-room table. Marilyn wears a beige blouse and a wary expression. Her dark hair is trimmed with gray. They have been divorced for four years (and separated since 1997), but they're united today to tell their son's story, hoping that now, after a self-imposed ban on answering questions from the media, they'll be understood in a way they haven't been before.

Frank does most of the talking. "It gets me in trouble," he says. "Everyone's assuming John's guilty of the worst crime in our history. And now here's his father not apologizing. But I can't apologize for something that's not true. I can't feed into that myth. He's a really good person." He pauses and takes a halting breath. "I'm proud of my son."

Of the children produced by this couple whom a New York tabloid once called "California airheads unfit to raise lettuce," two out of three are growing up to be responsible adults. And their other child, their second, the one who was pulled from a bloodied basement in Afghanistan, a soldier of the Taliban who was instructed at a bin Laden training camp, the one who scandalized a nation? He turned out to be exceptional.

*****

Every other month, Frank Lindh travels from San Francisco to Terre Haute, Indiana, to spend four hours with his son. John Walker Lindh is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence for violating an executive order, signed by President Clinton in 1999, prohibiting aid to the Taliban. He is an inmate of the Communications Management Unit, a wing of the Federal Corrections Institute where the government congregates inmates whose communications they want to monitor. Frank and Marilyn alternate months, flying in late on a Sunday, then back again Tuesday evening. John, who is now 28, is allowed four hours of visits a month, limited to weekdays, which makes it hard for his brother and sister to visit. Except for them and his grandmother, who visited just once, his parents are the only outsiders he's seen in his seven years in custody.

Frank and I meet in the empty lobby lounge of a hotel just a few blocks from the prison, where he's just seen John. It's October of 2008, and the imminent changes in Washington have filled Frank Lindh with a rare optimism. A presidential executive order is the only legal avenue for an early release of his son, and pardon season is right around the corner. Frank is hoping the outgoing president will recognize a fellow man of God and be merciful. "You know," Frank reminds me, raising his voice over the din of a cleaning crew vacuuming nearby, "President Bush's first public reaction to John was to call him 'that poor fellow.' " It was a statement Bush repudiated two weeks later, when he began calling Lindh a member of Al Qaeda, but it's that first notion that fills Frank with hope.

He tells me that John is doing pretty well, but he won't say much more. "I can't speak to that," he says in response to questions about John's life in prison, and he does not waver. Until 2021, nothing John says, however mundane, can be communicated to the outside world. That's just one part of the "special administrative measures"—no mail, no nonfamily visitors, no Arabic—unilaterally imposed on John by then Attorney General John Ashcroft. It was designed to ensure that John Walker Lindh not speak, not share his story, not inspire potential followers, and not describe his treatment while in the custody of the U.S. government. It was an order of uncertain legal merit (not unlike George W. Bush's presidential signing statements), but because John was initially deemed an enemy combatant—a brave new legal status of undetermined meaning—it's an order to which Frank and his son's attorneys are careful to comply, lest they risk John being held after his prison sentence has ended. So until 2021, nothing John says can be communicated to the outside world.

Frank can only say that his son spends much of his time "studying the Koran," that together they spend their time "laughing," and that every time he visits, he reminds his son to exercise in order to keep his mind sharp for his studies and to alleviate the depression that perpetually looms. "I feel like I bring him oxygen when I visit," Frank tells me. All Frank can say for certain is that for one weekend every other month, in a small cinder-block room where death-row inmates once waited to die, he speaks to his son through a thick, scratched partition of glass over a telephone that records their conversation. "How many fathers spend a weekend doing nothing but talking to their 28-year-old son?"

These are relatively peaceful days for Frank. The storm is over. The world has mostly moved on. He lives on a quiet tree-lined street in San Rafael, in Marin County, and rides the bus every morning across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco, where he is the general counsel for the California Public Utilities Commission and oversees a sixty-five-lawyer legal division. He recently remarried, this time to a man, his partner of ten years. The ceremony was performed on election day, just ahead of the passage of Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage statewide. And although he's joined to a new family, a partner with children of his own, he says he's still close to Marilyn and his children. If anything, John's ordeal has made the family stronger.

But once I leave, Frank Lindh has a long day in Terre Haute: a lonely afternoon walking the mall across the street, a movie matinee, dinner for one at the Texas Roadhouse, with its signature baked sweet potatoes. Maybe later he'll return to his hotel room and log on to kill the time. And perhaps, against his better judgment and with John foremost on his mind, he'll find himself, as he sometimes does, scouring the Internet for phantom reminders of a nation's hate for his son, preserved in perpetuity in blogs and comment boards like permanent graffiti:

CandelarioGalvan (eleven months ago)
Hang this traitor I will personally pay for the rope
skeetereze (eleven months ago)
What happened [to] the days when a traitor could be hanged? This sick, twisted fuck-up is a traitor and should be treated as such. His parents are lolly-gagging liberals and ought to be sent to the gallows with their retarded offspring.
Thigpucker (one year ago)
They should all be butt fucked by the severed dick of a dead Muslim before being hanged and tossed into a sewer.

YouTube videos can be worse. Frank's especially bothered by the clips of Bill Maher and the mocking Frank himself took from Jon Stewart; these were people he admired, people he thought were funny. Even they piled on. "It bothered me to see how cruel [Stewart] was being to John," he says. He's less bothered by the attacks he and Marilyn endured, but his son can't speak for himself. "When it's your kid everyone's going after," he says, "you have to be strong." Frank concedes that strength comes and goes. "When you're in the moment, there's something with your adrenaline where you're not affected by it, but I go back and read some of it now and I get depressed." He pauses and stares across the empty hotel lobby. "They more than made fun of him; they called him a traitor. That's like calling someone a rapist. At the time, I wouldn't take that in, but some of that gets to me now on an emotional level."

That John Walker Lindh is likely innocent of the crimes with which he was initially charged—conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals and conspiracy to contribute services to Al Qaeda among them—has become an obscure asterisk from the opening skirmishes of America's war on terror. Despite the grand charges listed on the cover page of the indictment, the document suggests that Lindh actually did little more than join the Taliban as a soldier against the Northern Alliance. That Lindh's only understanding of Osama bin Laden, whom he briefly met at a Taliban training camp, was likely as a heroic freedom fighter in Afghanistan's war against the Russians; that after Lindh's capture, he was interrogated with a bullet still lodged in his thigh; that his repeated requests for an attorney were denied; that he was tortured; that he expressly refused an offer to participate in attacks against America and Israel; or even that his violation of sanctions occurred in the same calendar year the Bush administration gave the Taliban $43 million in aid—these are all moot points: John Lindh is in prison and will be for the next twelve years.

*****

"John was 16 years old when he converted to the religion of Islam," Frank says. "I myself am Catholic and was raised in the Catholic tradition, but at age 16 he converted to Islam. For John, it made good sense. It was a good match," Frank says, noting that he and Marilyn supported their son's religious transformation from the outset. "If John had converted to Judaism, I think we would have felt the same way—that this was a bona fide and legitimate thing. There was no negative association in our mind about John's conversion. It certainly is an unusual thing; there aren't many 16-year-old white kids in Marin County, California, that convert from being Catholic to Muslim, but nonetheless that was John's path."

The Lindhs are precise and practiced in their defense. There isn't a question they haven't been asked or haven't asked of themselves. There isn't a decision that hasn't been scrutinized. The explanations—of why John went to Yemen, for example, or why they let him—are easily accessed. "There wasn't anything here that was close to what he was looking for," Marilyn says of John's decision to go to school in Yemen. "At that point, he really just wanted to study the language. And it wasn't going to be for an extended period of time." Still, Frank and Marilyn are visibly annoyed when I ask about that first decision to let their unusually fervent 17-year-old go to Yemen to study Arabic. "That was one of the hardest things for me," Marilyn remembers, "letting him go. But we did a lot of research. How many people let their kids go abroad at 17?" she asks. "A lot of kids go to Europe or spend time in a kibbutz."

John would stay in Yemen for nine months, leaving only after his visa expired and he was forced to head home.

As Frank will try to convince me, this isn't about his son or even the Middle East. It's about a deep, socially entrenched religious prejudice. "If John had gone to France to study, or to Israel," he reasons again and again, "no one would have had a problem." If only John had had the sense to stay Christian, Frank seems to imply, the nation would not have come to hate him. But unlike the thousands of American students who did go to France or to Israel, John's travels didn't end in a homecoming, a spell of culture shock, and a transition to college. They ended in service to a foreign army of oppressive fundamentalists and a twenty-year prison sentence. Still, Frank is quicker to blame John's predicament on our tainted perception of Islam than on his son's decision to attend school in a country where girls marry at age 11 or to explore a part of the world where Islamic extremism was surely and steadily on the rise.

Then, as if anticipating my next question, Frank reminds me that John's conversion and his spiritual quest into the Islamic heartland all happened before the world changed, before Muslim became synonymous with jihadist, before watercooler parlance included words like Sunni and Shia.

Frank and Marilyn exchange glances over the conference-room table and sigh the same frustrated sigh. They'll try explaining it one more time: John's Islam wasn't just a phase; he was sincere, devout. And they weren't indulgent Marin County parents who didn't discipline their child, because there was nothing to discipline: John was a good kid who was close to his family and kind to his siblings, a seeker who'd seemed to find what he'd been looking for in the depths of the Koran.

When John returned to California, he was filled with enthusiasm from his studies in Yemen, but, says Frank, he was the same John he always was. "There was never any suggestion of a personality change, or any indication he was becoming militant or adopting any point of view that was becoming worrisome."

It was in Yemen that John's thirst for Islamic truth began to intensify, but he found the school there to be too secular to slake it. His classmates were mostly Western Muslims trying to satisfy their parents' desire for some kind of religious indoctrination. In his book, "My Heart Became Attached": The Strange Odyssey of John Walker Lindh,author Mark Kukis contends that Lindh's piety was as grating to his classmates as their secularism was to him: "The students," Kukis writes, "…grew to see him as something of an annoying joke. After classes, most of the students relaxed on campus or explored the city.… Unlike Lindh, few were concerned with the calls to prayer sounding five times a day. Lindh would urge the other Muslims at the center to join him for prayers, but he found few takers and went out on his own."

After his visa expired, John returned home and spent six months working at a warehouse in Sausalito and attending lectures at the mosques in and around San Francisco. But home felt different now. He felt uncomfortable amid the excesses he'd grown up with, and he felt compelled to return to Yemen. In February of 2000, Frank and Marilyn, together with John's brother, Connell, and sister, Naomi, drove to the airport to see him off. Naomi, who was extremely close to John, broke down crying and was comforted by a Yemeni family who were on their way back home to Yemen; they promised they'd look after him.

But John wouldn't stay in Yemen very long. The following November, a month after the bombing of the USS Cole—in which Al Qaeda suicide bombers blew a hole in the side of the ship, killing seventeen American sailors—John e-mailed his father to ask permission to go to Pakistan. He wanted to study at a madrassa there. He didn't contact his mother; like children the world over, John knew which parent to play. Frank told his son to go and have a great adventure.

Then Marilyn interrupts. "If he had contacted me," she says slowly, "I would've told him no."

*****

In pakistan, john found his way to a madrassa run by a mufti named Iltimas who was proud to have an American studying at his school. John was treated as a visiting scholar and excelled at his studies, even embarking on a verbatim memorization of the Koran. It was in the poverty of Pakistan that John began to feel most at home, and he soon fled the twenty-first century for the tenth, shedding his belongings like a trail of breadcrumbs until his only possessions were a Koran and a cloth sack. John started listening to the radio broadcasts of Radio Shariat from Kabul, Afghanistan, where the Taliban, a group that was held in considerable local esteem, was portrayed as heroic in its attempt to form the first true Islamic nation. John began to take an interest in the plight of Muslims across the world—in places like Chechnya and Kashmir. On his notebook, he started recording the statistics of the murdered children and the raped women in these places. It was a Muslim's duty to engage in jihad, to help the suffering of those who could not help themselves. And just as hundreds of American Muslims before him had left to fight in places like Afghanistan and Kashmir, John too began to feel the stirring of jihad.

I asked Frank once about what attracted his son to Islam, and after thinking about it for a moment, he replied, "For John it was a more authentic experience of God."

It was more authentic because it demanded participation. You didn't just say your Hail Marys and go on your way; with Islam you prayed five times a day, you fasted during Ramadan, you made pilgrimage to Mecca.

You want to see the face of God?

Earn it.

John was used to earning it. As a foreigner and a convert, he'd been earning it for a long time. And soon he would earn it some more, going off the map of the civilized world to Afghanistan, a country whose infrastructure had barely evolved past the biblical era, so that he could see God, free from distraction and the enticements of the modern world.

Just why and how his son made the transition from religious student to armed warrior is a leg of his son's journey that Frank has the hardest time explaining. "This is the case of the kid who kept the family car out after curfew times a million," Frank says. "It's like the worst teenager in American history. That puts it all in perspective." But does it? It's something Frank repeats several times, invoking John's harmless naïveté—accidental Afghan as funny adolescent anecdote—but it ignores the more serious questions about his son's eventual alignment with the Taliban.

To what extent did John share its fundamental worldview? Did he know he was aiding an oppressive, terroristic regime that supported sworn enemies of the United States?

To these questions, Frank is defiant. His words are polite, but his tone is aggressive. His son, he reminds me, never attacked or conspired to attack American forces. He was in Afghanistan for reasons having nothing to do with America—to liberate Muslims being victimized by the Northern Alliance. "He never had extremist views," Frank continues. "I find it very frustrating. I can't apologize for him being a radical or an extremist when he's not. It's kind of distressing to have to defend a person that doesn't exist," he explains as his voice breaks. "No one can get to know John.… That's not who he is. That's not what he embraces."

And when I ask about the reports that he was insufferably pious even by the standards of the other students in Yemen, that he seemed already destined for Islamic evangelicalism, Frank simply dismisses the charges as journalistic fiction. And where it's easy to see religious fanaticism in his son's eventual allegiance to the Taliban, Frank sees only a well-meaning kid who, like many young Muslims of fighting age, including Americans, went to Afghanistan to fight for justice: "He was naive and idealistic. He thought the world was divided into good guys and bad guys, and since the Northern Alliance were bad guys, the Taliban must be the good guys." He later adds: "The Taliban were atrocious. They have this atrocious record of violating human rights. But the Northern Alliance warlords were equally bad or even worse. At least the Taliban didn't rape women. It's not like saying the Taliban bad, the Northern Alliance good; there were no good guys there."

I ask him if he ever allowed himself to be angry with his son. "I was," he admits, "but it's so hard to give too much attention to that when the whole country is coming after him for false stuff. So on one hand, I'm upset. Damn, John, why did you do that? You had no business going into Afghanistan," Frank says, pausing. "But that's between father and son or between mother and son."

Frank would love to show me all the ways that his son has since changed, how he's grown, the ways in which he's reflected on his past self, the sense he's made of all this. But he can't and he won't. John Ashcroft's gag order guarantees that John's identity will remain locked into the mistakes he made eight years ago. But the John Walker Lindh currently serving time in prison is not the John Walker Lindh who joined the Taliban. That kid grew up, but his maturity is appreciated by no one, witnessed by only a mother and a father.

To fully understand Frank's unequivocal support, you have to understand the scrutiny his family faced. That in a world dominated by thirty-second sound bites, it becomes impossible to explain the complicated psychology of an adolescent son—perhaps fanatical, yes, but also noble and devout, naive and intelligent, arrogant and modest. The nation wasn't interested in hearing Frank's thoughtful reply, so Frank offers only his full-bore, absolute support. To acquiesce now, after everything his son has endured, after an entire country grew to hate him, would be treasonous. Loyalty is the one thing Frank can offer. To Frank, John's suffering is also his redemption.

He pauses, glances at John's mother, then back at me. "He was 20 years old!"

*****

"Have you heard from John?" It was a question Frank and Marilyn asked each other a hundred times during the summer of 2001. They hadn't heard from him since an e-mail he'd sent in April, and their agitation grew with each passing day. They shared custody of their youngest, 12-year-old Naomi, and whenever she was shuttled from one parent to another, John's whereabouts were part of the conversation. Frank and Marilyn would stop at the National Geographic map of Pakistan that hung in the hallway of Marilyn's town house. A single red pushpin was stuck in the city of Bannu, Pakistan, the origin of John's last e-mail. He'd written that he was leaving the madrassa and heading to the mountains to avoid the summer heat.

That summer, Frank scoured the local mosques in hopes that someone had heard from John or knew his whereabouts. Marilyn wrote to the various schools and mosques John had visited overseas. She was even preparing to travel to Pakistan to see for herself but was talked out of each departure by Frank, who worried about the further fracturing of his family into the wilds of the world.

"I was pretty anxious," Marilyn recalls. "I was checking e-mail every day. By July, I was in a panic state. I was ready to go and look for him." But then she got a response from a madrassa John had attended in Pakistan. It was from the mufti Iltimas, writing admiringly of John and his scholarly devotion. Iltimas wrote that John had left his school but was traveling in the hills with Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary team John had first met at a mosque in San Francisco. The news of her son, the glowing report from his teacher, and the knowledge that John was traveling with Pakistanis he'd met in San Francisco offered some relief from the summer's anxiety. It was just enough, she tells me, to keep her from traveling to find her missing son.

But then September 11 came, and her anxiety all but exploded. "I knew there was talk about sending military and possibly bombing in the Pakistan area, and…I didn't know where John was," Marilyn says, her hands fidgeting in front of her. "I was frantic.… I had nothing. Everybody in our family was concerned. 'Have you heard from John?' 'Have you heard from John?' "

*****

John Lindh is afraid that he will die.

It's late November 2001, and he sits with his arms tied behind his back, one in a row of 400 Taliban in a muddy horse pasture in northern Afghanistan. Just the week before, John had been on guard duty, eating macaroni as he kept watch over an unimportant valley position in the northern province of Takhar. From the lookout, he could just barely see the battle between his Taliban colleagues and Northern Alliance forces raging in the distance. And then came a call to retreat and the frantic fifty-mile scramble through the dusty hills that followed. All so that he and what was left of his scattered unit could later be tricked into surrendering to the enemy, General Rashid Dostum's Northern Alliance forces. And now he sits in a field outside a prison fortress, awaiting his fate. He's lucky to be alive, but he's ready for his great adventure to come to a close, to conclude with a tearful reunion at San Francisco International Airport.

Everything has just changed in this part of the world, and whether he knows it or not, John is on the wrong side of history. The Taliban, who existed as the remnants of the U.S.-backed mujahideen in the 1980s proxy war with the Soviet Union, have just become America's primary foe, while the Northern Alliance, led by General Dostum, who had once been allied with the Soviets, has just been anointed the new U.S.-backed freedom fighters.

John and the others have been brought to the Qala-i Janghi fortress by General Dostum. But here Dostum's soldiers are not in charge; two white men in civilian clothes move across the rows as they bark orders at Dostum's guards and interrogate the prisoners. And just as the men single John out and begin questioning him in English, there's an explosion at the entrance to the fortress basement—an undiscovered grenade on an unsearched prisoner. In the chaos that follows, several prisoners grab the weapons from their guards, and Dostum's men open fire on their captives.

Many, including CIA agent Mike Spann, America's first combat casualty in Afghanistan, are killed in the firefight. John Lindh is shot in the thigh.

Some prisoners fight. Others flee, ducking into the fortress basement. John lies on the ground pretending to be dead as the thunder of American air strikes rattles the earth beneath his head. For twelve hours, he remains immobile, offering silent prayers to Allah amidst the moans and the screams. When night finally comes, the Taliban hiding in the basement rush into the yard and drag John into the frigid gloom of the fortress basement, crowded with the distress of 300 prisoners surrounded by Northern Alliance troops outside and American air power overhead. Dostum's men start dropping grenades down air ducts and blasting RPGs into the entrance, splashing blood and severing limbs. John huddles in a corner that doubles as a toilet, as his shoulder, back, ankle, and calf are pelted with sizzling shrapnel.

Gasoline starts dripping from the air ducts, and when it's ignited by the Northern Alliance soldiers above, the eyes of the prisoners squint at the sudden flash of the dancing blaze—the first light they've seen in days. Men burn, dancing in pain, screaming as they flail flame-covered limbs, and then, after a few days, comes the water—freezing-cold gushes in an already frigid basement. John stands with the help of another as the water rises to their chests, mixing with the gasoline and feces and blood. Body parts float as he struggles in the current, stepping on submerged soldiers in an attempt to keep his head above water. In all, John will be here for a week.

When John and the other eighty-five or so survivors eventually give up, they emerge from the basement and into the custody of General Dostum. They're then loaded onto trucks with other captured Taliban. When John finally lands in a stretcher after a week with a bullet in his thigh, CNN is there. They interview him while a Special Forces medic cuts off his clothes and administers antibiotics and a morphine drip.

"Right now you are a prisoner," the reporter tells him.

Of who? John wonders.

And it's at this moment that John offers the videotaped confession that will form the majority of the government's case against him. He says his heart became attached to the Taliban while in Pakistan and that he attended one of bin Laden's training camps. These are words that get the full attention of the nearby Special Forces. John is immediately blindfolded and carried into a separate room of the compound, where he is interrogated further.

For the following two weeks, he is kept blindfolded as he is transported by helicopter from camp to camp. Everywhere he goes, angry voices utter menacing epithets. He repeatedly asks to have the bullet removed from his thigh, but his requests are denied. He repeatedly asks for a lawyer, but this too is ignored. There are more voices, telling him that he will hang for his crimes. Laughing, snarling young men pose for pictures with him, telling him that these photos will be sold to benefit Christian charities after his death. His handcuffs are so tight that he can't feel his hands. On December 14, he's taken to a navy vessel in the Arabian Sea. A doctor there observes that Lindh is suffering from dehydration, hypothermia, and frostbite. He's unable to walk. The next day, almost two weeks after the prison riot and more than a week since he was taken into U.S. custody, John Lindh gets his wish—the bullet in his leg is finally removed.

*****

On Saturday, December 1, 2001, Marilyn Walker was home alone, hunched over her computer. She was still checking her e-mail compulsively, afraid that if she wasn't online at the exact moment John sent the e-mail she prayed daily to receive, she'd miss the chance to respond. That after eight months she'd still not heard from her son was unfathomable. People don't just disappear off the face of the earth. Her brief confidence of the summer—that John would make contact and apologize for his absence and come home again—was slowly evaporating into the realization that perhaps people do just disappear off the face of the earth; at least in Pakistan they do.

Then Marilyn got an e-mail from a cousin of Frank's, linking to a breaking story on MSNBC about a prisoner riot in northern Afghanistan. Accompanying the story was a picture of an unnamed American who looked a lot like John. Marilyn called Frank and left a message. He was in his car, waiting to pick up Naomi from her theater rehearsal, when he first heard the message. It was a moment of relief as well as dread: Finally, there was news about his son. But he knew messages like this never ended well. Frank already knew that this wasn't going to be a rescue operation but a judgment, a damnation. "There's this nervous anxiety, not knowing how John was. Not knowing how he had gotten there. Not knowing whether he had done anything wrong.… But it's also this foreboding," Frank recalls, catching himself before he has a chance to cry. "Even talking to you now brings it up."

Minutes later, he and Marilyn are standing over the computer in her living room, looking at a picture of their son—filthy, unkempt, traumatized—a single side profile they instantly recognize as his. Still, there's little more to go on. The article doesn't tell them much more than that their son was serving in the Taliban forces and that he had been shot.

"We were both in this state of shock," Frank says. "Just this realization that he had been in Afghanistan all this time—that he was really badly injured and had survived this really horrible massacre. I'm confused and anxious, and at the same time it's a sense of relief. This mystery had been solved, and we knew he was alive."

"I started to panic," Marilyn explains. "I didn't know what to do. I called the FBI, and they didn't know what I was talking about. I called the State Department, and they wanted to blow me off, and I said, 'No, I need to talk to somebody!' It was a weekend at night...and they connected me to someone...but she was at a cocktail party. I was explaining the situation, and she just didn't get it. She didn't want to be bothered."

Marilyn's phone rang at five the next morning. It was a reporter who'd met John in Afghanistan. Marilyn immediately pumped him for information. She wanted to know how her son was, how he'd gotten to Afghanistan, what was going to happen to him. For a moment, the reporter acquiesced—he's been shot but he's stable, he said; he'll live—and then immediately interrupted her questions with his own: What was her address? What were her religious beliefs? Was she a Muslim? Was Frank?

Frank woke up early. His first concern was telling Naomi about her big brother before she heard it from someone else. "She was coming down the stairs," Frank explains, "and as she was on the third step from the bottom, I said, 'They found John.' She started to cry right away. And I had to tell her that he was shot…and we didn't know what type of condition he was in. I tried to reassure her…but I really didn't know. She just kind of collapsed into my arms, there at the bottom of the stairs."

It took only a few hours for the news media to show up at their houses, incessantly ringing the doorbells, peering in windows, microphones in hand.

"It was like leaving a burning house," Marilyn says. "What do you take? I dashed out of the house with one bag of sleeping stuff and pillows and ran to the carport and peeled out."

And Monday morning, while Marilyn and Naomi were in hiding, Frank traveled to San Francisco. "I remember it was sort of rush hour," he says, "a busy Monday morning. I'm standing at the back of one of these trains, looking at the next car, and all the people are reading this morning paper and the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the story is about John, and I remember thinking, This time tomorrow, I won't be able to be like this."

Frank went to work to sort his affairs—he'd need to take some vacation days—and then immediately afterward went to the office of James Brosnahan, a prominent San Francisco attorney. He couldn't afford him, but that didn't matter. "I was really anxious," he says. "I kind of knew that he was going to be in trouble legally just by the way the story read. There was already a narrative being written. Oh boy, this is going to be treated as if John was fighting against America; it's going to be really ugly. I could feel it."

That same day, Brosnahan sent a letter addressed to President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, informing them that Frank Lindh had secured an attorney on his son's behalf. None of them responded. Except for the FBI agents who interviewed Frank the following day and the ones who came to Frank's and Marilyn's homes to read their e-mail, the government made no contact with Frank and Marilyn for forty more days—when a navy chaplain caring for John allowed them to send their son a single letter.

And with Monday came the beginning of another news cycle, and just like that, Frank and Marilyn's obscurity was gone.

Larry King: Sad stories of war. You just ask what, Frank?
Frank Lindh: Ask that people have a little mercy.…

Frank turns to me, his voice quivering in the law-office conference room.

He pauses and then says meekly, "That's still what we ask for."

Frank followed Larry King with Today and Good Morning America, but he and Marilyn soon realized that their attempts to humanize John weren't going to work. Leniency was not part of the national conversation at that point.

"It was hopeless," Marilyn explains. "It was a tsunami. The more we would say, the more they would ridicule us."

Frank says that the country was divided about his son: Half wanted to kill him; the other half wanted him to serve life in prison. But Marin County understood, or withheld judgment at least. Neighbors offered encouraging words and gave Frank and Marilyn places to live while they rode out the storm. Naomi's classmates shielded her from the media waiting in the school parking lot. Frank hid out at the home of his daughter's friend and stayed there most of December, but he couldn't hide from the evening news. "It's dinner hour," Frank remembers, "and on television there would be Donald Rumsfeld talking about John. Or they'd be talking about whether he would get the death penalty."

Frank is still angry about the way the media complied with what he calls "an inherently flawed narrative." Each article was based on news wires that themselves were based on inaccurate government information—a giant incestuous feedback loop communicating the same inaccuracies: that John had been working with Al Qaeda, that he had conspired against America and taken up arms against his home. Frank watched helplessly as a false reality hardened into history.

"The reaction was primal," Frank charges. "It was their tribe and our tribe." He recounts the litany of accusations leveled against his son by those in positions of power: the president calling John "an Al Qaeda fighter" at a press conference, Senator Hillary Clinton labeling him "a traitor" on Meet the Press, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reporting, inaccurately, that John had been captured fighting with an AK-47 in hand.

Marilyn says, "Everyone of prominence was tripping over themselves to score patriot points in any way possible, and John was an easy target."

"It was poisonous," recalls David Fechheimer, who was hired by John's lawyers to investigate the gaps in the time line between John's arrival in Pakistan and his capture. "I've had a lot of unpopular clients, but this was the only project where I lost friends, where people quit speaking to me."

No allies were forthcoming, not even the normally promiscuous ACLU. "It was toxic," Frank says. "Absolutely toxic. No one wanted to touch it. We felt completely alone. Just totally alone."

And when I ask if there wasn't a brave politician, a controversial director perhaps, or a left-wing lawyer… Marilyn responds for both of them: "There wasn't anybody."

Then Frank, as if somehow transported back to relive those dark days again, asks: "How can we withstand this?"

*****

Frank and Marilyn spent most of January 2002 flying back and forth to D.C. in anticipation of their son's return to American soil. "They weren't telling us basic information," says Frank. "Everything we learned, we had to rely on TV and reporters." They knew only that at some point John would be flown to Northern Virginia, a tactical trick to get jurisdiction to attach in Alexandria, Virginia, where jurors would have a high probability of being employed at, or having some connection to, the Pentagon.

Finally, on January 23, John Walker Lindh arrived at Dulles International Airport on a C-17 military transport and was then flown by helicopter to the Alexandria city jail. When his parents finally saw him, he was clean-shaven and shorn of all his hair. He looked bruised, but his spirits were high, and he was in better shape than his parents expected. "This is now fifty-some days into it," Frank says. "So by now he'd been taken to the ship, and he got good medical care on the ship. The navy treated him decently. But when they took him back to Camp Rhino, the U.S. base in Afghanistan, and flew him back to the United States, they roughed him up. You could see it in his face. He'd been punched."

"Hi, Mama. Hi, Papa," John told them, and they reached to touch his hand through the mesh cage.

John's trial was set for the federal district court in Alexandria, and for a time that would coincide with the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In their lawyer's view, it was a venue and a date that made acquittal all but impossible, despite the dearth of corroborative evidence that he'd ever committed any crime greater than joining the Taliban. "The judge set the trial on the first anniversary of 9/11," Brosnahan explains. "We did a jury survey in Virginia, and 38 percent wanted to give John the death penalty. It would have been extremely difficult [to win at trial]."

"If we didn't win," Frank reminds me, "John was looking at life in prison."

It would be hard to find a defendant less likely to garner public sympathy in the summer of 2002 than John Walker Lindh. But both Frank and Brosnahan reserve a special contempt for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who did as much as anyone to shape the public narrative of John as a terrorist. Ashcroft, they say, gave press conferences where, in direct contradiction of information now known to have been in the possession of the government at the time, he stated: "John Walker Lindh chose to train with Al Qaeda, chose to fight with the Taliban, chose to be led by Osama bin Laden."

Ashcroft's behavior was enough to inspire U.S. District Court judge Avern Cohn to write a letter to The New York Timesdecrying Ashcroft's prejudicial comments in announcing the case against Lindh. The comments, Judge Cohn wrote, "appear to have violated Justice Department guidelines…on release of information relating to criminal proceedings that are intended to ensure that a defendant is not prejudiced when such an announcement is made." Scott Horton, who teaches at Columbia Law School, calls Ashcroft's conduct "highly unprofessional and highly unethical." He says, "The whole thing was driven to advance the fear-mongering agenda of the Bush administration, and John Walker Lindh was vilified for those purposes. You could go through the handbook of prosecutorial ethics and tell me what rule of prosecutorial ethics wasn't broken? When prosecutors make hysterical claims in alarmist tones suggesting that this person is an enemy of the entire nation and is out to kill us all and broadcasts this to the media, what does that do to the person's ability to get a fair trial?"

As the trial inched closer and the hopes that the 21-year-old Lindh would get an impartial hearing in front of an impartial jury dwindled, Brosnahan won a key victory: In June they were granted the right to hold a pretrial hearing on John's treatment during captivity. "There were people who were taunting him," Brosnahan says, "putting bandannas on his head that said shithead. He was kept naked for the interviews, kept in a metal box where the temperatures went down to the 30s. His treatment was terrible—they left a bullet in his leg for fifteen days when there was a hospital 500 yards from where he was." The lawyer hoped that if the jury heard testimony about the abuse John had suffered at the hands of the U.S. military, it would help humanize him. But he also knew that it could be embarrassing to the government. "So they were facing that type of a week," he says of the hearing. "But if one ounce of what Ashcroft said was true, they'd have had a great trial and a great time prosecuting it."

Lindh's lawyers braced for the worst.

And then suddenly, on July 15, the government offered a plea bargain. Prosecutors offered to drop their charges in exchange for a guilty plea to violation of a 1999 sanction against providing aid to the Taliban. Ashcroft declined to comment on this case or his motivation for reaching a bargain agreement rather than going to trial, but U.S. attorney David Kelly, who was among the prosecutors on the case, contends that the plea bargain was in no way symptomatic of a weak case. "We had a very compelling case," he says, "and a lot of witnesses, people with whom he [Lindh] had interacted in Pakistan, and people with whom he had interacted in California and said things to." To Kelly, the plea was a satisfying outcome. "The goal in any case," he says, "is to reach a just result. The plea was one that was worked on diligently by lawyers on both sides. To call it an economic sanction is to really understate the severity of this charge. It's not just sending a blanket to Afghanistan."

"It was surreal," says Brosnahan. "They accuse this young man of all sorts of terrible things, and then they drop it."

Frank was on the freeway when Brosnahan called.

"I knew it was something important, so I got down to the end of the ramp and pulled over to the side," Frank explains. "And that's when he told me they were offering this plea bargain that they wanted him to serve twenty years. I wanted to cry."

*****

It's early monday morning in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Frank Lindh is keeping a date with his son. "I'm like Mr. Smith goes to Washington," Frank says quietly, his hands folded on his lap in the front seat of my rental car, which is parked outside the prison gate. His demeanor is reserved and oddly formal, a distance born of too many years playing defense, of too many assaults on his family and himself. "I still kind of have this naive belief in the government," he tells me with some resignation in his voice. "It's very hard for me to accept that the government would be so malicious in the prosecution of a young person and make these incredibly false allegations about somebody. I still find it hard to believe that the government did this."

Almost seven years have passed since John's fate was sealed and he was officially punished for fighting for the wrong kind of justice on the wrong side of the world. Since then, the founding fathers of America's war on terror have mostly moved on—even Bush and Cheney have been relegated to their legacies—and the war itself has gotten muddled and has morphed into some compromised new reality. America, too, is a starkly different country than the one that pulled John from that prison basement in Mazar-e Sharif and brought him home to face the consequences. But John remains in prison.

His parents are as devoted as ever, though it has been an ordeal. "It really shook us all up," Frank recalls. "At the time, the media was saying we were really bad parents and all that, and you begin to…Ibegan to doubt myself. Maybe something is wrong with us. Maybe we did do something wrong. Maybe John did do something wrong. But with the passage of time," he continues, a confident smile curling his lip, "I can realize we were always right: John was always a good kid. He never did anything wrong. This was just a big orchestrated deal by the media and the government after 9/11. Now it's like I'm back, and I'm more grounded now."

Frank checks his watch and stares out the front windshield. It's almost time. And before he steps out of the car, I ask him if he has any regrets—about endorsing John's quest, about accepting a plea deal without going to trial, about anything that might have gone differently in regard to his son. Frank is quiet for a minute, gazing at some undefined point on the prison looming outside, and for a moment I don't think he'll respond. But then he turns, one hand gripping the dashboard, and forces a smile. "You can't second-guess yourself." And then, quieter and to himself this time: "No, you can't second-guess yourself."

John Rico served in the army's 25th Infantry in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005. He is the author of the memoir Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green. His next book, Border Crosser, comes out in June.

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