Somewhere in the concrete lungs of Russia, Oscar Jenkins is rotting. A wannabe warrior with a hard-on for chaos, he’s now chewing through a 13-year sentence in a prison that probably hasn’t seen sunlight since Stalin took his last breath. And our government, bless their clean suits and buzzword ethics, is trying to bring him home.
Let’s not get too romantic. Jenkins isn’t some misunderstood poet of the battlefield. He failed to get into the Australian Army, reasons unknown but not hard to guess — maybe too much bloodlust, maybe too little discipline. Maybe the shrinks saw the flicker in his eye and said, “Not this one.” So what did Oscar do? He joined the French Foreign Legion, the last refuge of lost men who want to kill with paperwork.
The Legion didn’t care about his past. They broke his will and his body, and gave him a rifle. Soon, he was marching into war zones where no one knew his name and he didn’t know theirs. He wasn’t there to understand. He was there to fight, to prove something to himself. To test the animal inside.
And now he’s in a Russian cell, probably for doing the one thing he was trained to do: kill people in places he had no business being. Russia called it a crime. He might call it Tuesday.
Here’s where it gets sticky. Our government, guardians of decency and due process, are making noise about getting him out. They say he’s an Australian citizen. They say he deserves consular support. They say a lot of things.
But let’s be real. This isn’t a backpacker caught with weed or a business exec locked up on a visa technicality. This is a man who made violence his vocation. Who took up arms not for country or cause, but because war gave him a reason to breathe.
There is precedent, of course. My great-grandfather, John Denis Pacholli, wasn’t just a newsman with ink-stained fingers. He too danced with danger as a soldier of fortune in South Africa, crossing paths with Breaker Morant in that bloodstained chapter of colonial war. We lionise those stories in hindsight, but they were soaked in the same moral contradictions.
So what should we do? Bring him back like a prodigal son? Parade him through airports while the cameras flash and headlines debate his soul?
No. If we have any sense left, we tread carefully. Provide the basics — legal help, make sure he’s not being tortured. But don’t storm the Kremlin gates demanding his freedom. He chose this life. He walked into the fire.
If anything, we talk quietly. Negotiate for a transfer. Let him serve his time on home soil, under supervision. Watch him. Study him. Learn why young men chase war like it’s a drug.
Because there’s an ethical reckoning here, and it isn’t just about Jenkins. It’s about who we rescue, and why. It’s about what we tolerate under the banner of patriotism, and what we quietly bury. He is a mirror we don’t want to look into. But he’s ours. And how we deal with him will say more about us than ever about him.
It can’t be overstated that such combatants enter these conflagrations for lots of money, knowing that they could probably die or become captives of the enemy force…they choose to gamble their lives taking lives…make absolutely no sense to me.
With digital assistance from
An eerily articulate AI — HAL’s chattier, less murderous cousin
