Author of the week: ‘Johnny Walker’

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s hard to imagine any Iraqi who’s more pro-American than “Johnny Walker,” said Belinda Luscombe in Time. When U.S. Army tanks rolled into his hometown in 2003, the lanky Mosul native was elated. A part-time truck driver who loved Hollywood movies and country music, he soon was shuttling from base to base trying to land a job with the Americans. As he relates in his new memoir, Code Name: Johnny Walker, he soon enough was working as an interpreter for Navy SEALs and joining them on raids. Once, he carried a wounded U.S. serviceman to safety. Another time, he lost his front teeth in a Humvee crash. Even today, he usually goes without his replacement set. “And you know what? I love it,” he says. “It remind me always what I did.”

Walker is well aware that some of his countrymen will dismiss his book as American propaganda. “I don’t care. I saved a lot of innocent Iraqi people’s lives,” he says. “If we just surrender to the mujahedeen, who’s going to fight them?” For Walker, staying to fight became impossible, said Arun Rath in NPR.org. His brother was killed by extremists, other family members received death threats, and Walker himself narrowly survived an attack by two men who riddled his car with bullets. Eventually, Walker, his wife, and their three children secured visas to resettle in the U.S. “It’s not about me. It’s about my family,” he says. “They should have their life with a dream and a future. This is America. Done. No more nightmare, you know? It’s a huge feeling.”