The American Taliban Prequel

Tonight I’m thinking about John Philip Walker Lindh, who was caught and imprisoned by the U.S. during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.  I’m  also thinking about my childhood experience at Maywood Christian Camp.  I think it must have been in 1968, although I can’t prove it.  Mothers were not nearly as obsessed with documenting childhood then, and my memories are vague.  I was perhaps eight years old and had never been to any kind of camp, or much of any place else,  before. I think it was in Tennessee, although I can’t prove that, either. I do think these events actually happened, however, because I can prove it with dental records.

We boarded a bus at Northwood Hills Church of Christ in Florence, Alabama, and off we went to the hardship of the wilderness, much like the Isrealites, who were also God’s people.  When we arrived,  they divided us into cabins which were named, I think, for the cities in Canaan.  I was in Shechem A.  There was a Shechem B as well.  There was a cabin named Gilgal, and one called Bethel, and Shiloh.  I don’t recall the others. 

I remember they served us cold chocolate milk in glistening aluminum pitchers at breakfast, and that I ate eggs for breakfast with great relish, which was odd because my mother’s eggs on the breakfast table at home nauseated me.  I remember that I won third place in the archery contest.  I remember that I made some kind of wooden box with tiny square tiles on top, and a lanyard, although I didn’t quite know what one was supposed to do with a lanyard.

I dived into the swimming pool one day and somehow chipped my front permanent tooth on the concrete, leaving half of it at the bottom of the pool.  No one called my parents or a dentist, or tried to retrieve the lost part.  I don’t really know if I called it to the attention of anyone in authority.  Today insurance and physician information along with signed liability waivers would be required before participating in an activity during which I could potentially have disfigured myself, but back then parents just put us on the bus and happily shipped us off, no questions asked, and the camp shipped us back on schedule, scratches and dents notwithstanding.

One thing I recall clearly, and that is that the showers were communal ones.  By that I mean they were not merely in a central location, but they were –- well—communal.  No stalls, no walls, no curtains.   I recall my complete mortification at the idea that I was expected to disrobe right there in front of God and the older girls with body parts I did not have yet – and tend to my personal hygiene.  So I refused.  I swam every day, but  during shower time I made myself scarce, and not once during the week did I join the other girls who were less modest and more conscientious about their personal toilette.

I also recall saving my one clean sweatshirt, a white one, to wear back home.  The last morning of camp I donned the sweatshirt, brushed my chlorine frizzed hair -- which was, by this time, a bush -- put on my glasses and headed down toward the bus, tripping over a root and tumbling head-over-heels down a clay embankment to land in an untidy heap at the bottom where the bus was parked.  

When I arrived back at the church, after riding the entire way with the bus windows open and the wind blowing through my ever-expanding hair,  singing "Kum Ba Yah" and "Michael Row the Boat Shore" all the way back, I bounded to the door of the bus to greet my mother with a gap-toothed smile, the red clay of Canaan's land covering both my clothes and my face. She hugged me and took me home as if nothing were out of the ordinary, for dental intervention the following day.

Flash forward to the American invasion of Afghanistan, when the U.S. army captures an American citizen named John Philip Walker Lindh. He is wearing the garb of the enemy and aiding the Taliban. There was a great outcry about his treason, and a photo of "The American Taliban” was on the cover of Time magazine. 43 years later, my saintly mother’s only comment when she saw his photo on CNN?  "He looks exactly like you when you got off the bus from Maywood Christian Camp, dear."  Ouch.