WASHINGTON — US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz reflected on his chilling experience on the battlefield in Afghanistan, in which he had to make a split-second decision on whether to kill a child.
Waltz, a retired Green Beret and four-time Bronze Star winner, recalled a mission in Afghanistan, where his team had to “hold the flank” and stumbled upon a child spotter for the Taliban.
“Sure enough, we started taking mortar fire, and it started walking in closer and closer. And very quickly, one of my snipers spotted a little boy up on a hill, maybe 10, 12 years old, and every time he brought up binoculars and a cellphone, another round came in,” Waltz recalled to host Miranda Devine on the “Pod Force One” podcast.
“Very quickly, my sniper asked me for permission to take the kid out, because clearly he was the spotter,” he added. “I was thinking of my kids. … Long story short, I told him, ‘Take a warning shot. After my sniper called me everything under the sun, he took a warning shot. The kid ran away.”
“We chased him into his village. The rounds stopped, so clearly it was him.”
The US ambassador to the UN previously opened up about that chilling experience in his book, “Hard Truths,” which hit bookshelves in 2024.
In that book, he emphasized the importance of individuals with power and in leadership to show restraint at times.
The self-styled “warrior diplomat” explained that he later learned the Taliban rolled into that village earlier that morning and “told all the families, ‘Give us your oldest son to go attack the Americans, or else.’”
One family who refused had their 7-year-old boy hanged by the Taliban in retaliation.
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“It was brutal. Now look, those are the split-second decisions. Was it the right call? I think restraint was the right call in that moment,” Waltz reflected.
Though he caveated that he likely wouldn’t have felt that way if one of his fellow Green Berets was killed by the mortar rounds.
Waltz also praised other famous episodes of restraint, such as a Soviet officer holding fire during the Cuban Missile Crisis, former President Harry Truman refusing to bomb mainland China during the Korean War, and the Union declining to “humiliate the army of the South, which could have led to guerrilla warfare.”
“Especially in our politics, sometimes you take a step back, or take the higher road, or take a more strategic view,” he stressed.
