This week on Serial, Sarah Koenig digs into Bowe Bergdahl’s mental state. As the season wraps, she wants to help answer the question: What should we blame Bergdahl for?
As listeners learned a few weeks ago, Bergdahl has been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, and a military “sanity board” found that he was suffering from a “severe mental disease or defect” – and that was before he was held captive by the Taliban for five years.
Koenig starts this episode by returning to Bergdahl’s time in the US Coast Guard. He only made it as far as boot camp before he was “separated” from the Coast Guard due to what Bergdahl described as a panic attack. However, Koenig spoke with a fellow Coast Guard recruit who described what happened to Bergdahl as far, far more serious than just a panic attack. What he saw was a brutal bloody scene much more akin to a suicide attempt. When Bergdahl’s Coast Guard cohorts later found out he was being held by the Taliban, they were more surprised that he had been allowed into the army at all. After what they had seen, they didn’t think he was fit for duty. Still, the army found Bergdahl met all their recruitment requirements, although an investigation admitted that perhaps the army should have looked more closely at Bergdahl’s separation from the Coast Guard. Koenig suggests Bergdahl screwed up by walking off base, but the army screwed up by letting him back into the military in the first place.
But in the shadow of Bergdahl’s looming court martial, Koenig knows the military wants Bergdahl to pay the consequences for his decision to walk off duty, especially if any American soldiers died looking for him. The problem is that no one seems to know whether that actually happened.
Former Lt General Michael Flynn, ex-head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was in Afghanistan when Bergdahl went missing acting as Gen Stanley McChrystal’s second in command. He is adamant that soldiers died while searching for Bergdahl, on the grounds that any soldier who was killed or injured by an IED while hunting for Bergdahl, those deaths were basically Bergdahl’s fault. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said. Koenig however has been unable to find a single reported death or injury in those circumstances.
The six soldiers
Bergdahl walked off OP Mest on 30 June 2009 and for the entire month of July people were searching for him. But no one died on those missions. According to Koenig, the six soldiers who died from Bergdahl’s battalion – and who are frequently cited as casualties in the hunt for Bergdahl – died on later missions and none of those was a search and rescue mission. Despite the lack of evidence, people remain convinced that soldiers died due to Bergdahl’s actions.
During one of those later missions, Lt Darryn Andrews was killed in an RPG attack in Paktika Province in Afghanistan. It wasn’t until that infamous Rose Garden ceremony when it was revealed that Bergdahl was coming home, that Andrews’s parents learned their son may have died while hunting for Bergdahl. His parents were irate and took their case to the media and testified in front of Congress to that fact, blaming Bergdahl, at least incidentally, for their son’s death.
But was that really the case? To answer, Koenig dug into the mission in Paktika Province. No one seems to know what the military was doing there that day, which isn’t unusual due to the army’s operational structure, but according to other soldiers on the mission, the scene quickly turned dangerous. They were surrounded by the Taliban and attacked, and held under fire for hours. It was a brutal scene that resulted in at least two deaths, but it’s not clear that the mission had anything to do with Bergdahl, other than the fact that soldiers were always supposed to be looking for him. Koenig points out that searching for Bergdahl was sort of an “umbrella” over all of the military’s operations, meaning whatever mission they were on, they were also supposed to be keeping an eye out for Bergdahl. That’s why it’s easy for the army to hold Bergdahl accountable for the deaths of those six soldiers. Even if he wasn’t the real mission that day, the hunt for him was still ongoing and omnipresent.
‘You could get killed any day’
But even Sergeant Major Ken Wolf, who spoke so bluntly about Bergdahl in episode six and clearly has no love lost for him, doesn’t hold Bergdahl responsible for those deaths. In no uncertain terms, Wolfe told Koenig that he wanted the families who lost sons during that deployment to know one thing: “Their sons did not die looking for Bergdahl.” According to Wolf, at the time of the mission in Paktika Province, the army already knew that Bergdahl was in Pakistan so they wouldn’t have had units on the ground hunting for him in Afghanistan. Despite that assurance, many people still hold Bergdahl accountable because the search for him stretched resources thin. Wolf gets it, but doesn’t buy it. “You’re in a very bad neighborhood regardless,” he said. “You could get killed any day.” Wolf doesn’t begrudge the soldiers their belief that Bergdahl is to blame, though, but he doesn’t think they are correct and does wish they had been more private about their thoughts. According to Koenig this is because Wolf doesn’t want the memories of the fallen soldiers to be “dragged into the Bergdahl morass”.
Koenig then dives into the idea that army leaders were using the search for Bergdahl as an excuse to get extra assets and go “kick in doors”, but were actually doing something else all together. According to an anonymous source, the search for Bergdahl became a sort of trump card that could be played whenever anyone wanted to go on a mission. Simply say you had good intel on Bergdahl’s whereabouts and your mission would be approved. The army has checks to make sure the system wasn’t abused, but as Koenig puts it there may have been “a little cheating, a little massaging, but no scandal”.
But if, as Wolf suggested, the army believed that Bergdahl was being held in Pakistan, why were they still doing searches in Afghanistan? Two reasons: The US had no authority to conduct searches in Pakistan, so they couldn’t search for Bergdahl there, and, it turns out that the army still had credible intelligence that Bergdahl might have been being held in Afghanistan. According to Koenig’s sources, the army was following every lead to find Bergdahl, because they never got to 100% bulletproof evidence where Bergdahl was being held and the army doesn’t willingly leave people behind. As a source told Koenig, “even if they’re a dickhead, you will do everything you can” to get a POW home.
‘The baggage of war’
So many resources were diverted to search for Bergdahl that some soldiers will always hold him accountable for deaths that occurred in the wake of his DUSTWUN. They firmly believe Bergdahl’s actions had a real world ripple effect that caused death or injury to other soldiers. Koenig thinks it’s going too far to blame Bergdahl for the deaths of those six soldiers, but she does admit people suffered psychologically and physically during the search for him. In his upcoming court martial, Bergdahl could be convicted of endangering his unit by deserting them in a war zone. But, according to Koenig, there’s guilt and there’s blame, which is a more delicate and nuanced thing. In wartime, blame becomes cloudy. Many people in the military blame themselves for deaths that are not their fault, which Koenig demonstrates with a series of heart-wrenching interviews with some of the voices we’ve heard over the course of the season of Serial. “You just want to blame something or somebody,” said one fallen soldier’s mother. “I blame the Taliban.”
In the blame game of wartime, it’s understandable that some of that blame falls to Bergdahl. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Paul Edgar told Koenig that Bergdahl’s behavior in wartime was actually pretty run of the mill. “His case is simply a very normal part of war,” he said. “When you sign up for war as a society, you sign up for this. You sign up for disillusioned youth.” He sums up Bergdahl and his behavior as simply “the baggage of war” and he doesn’t think it’s fair to pin all the responsibility for what happens in wartime on a 20-year old. Some of Bergdahl’s former platoon-mates agree Bergdahl shouldn’t hold all the blame. They initially held him accountable, but now realize they were mad at the entire situation. “It was going to suck no matter what,” said one.
Bergdahl isn’t the first soldier to go AWOL. In fact, between 2001 and 2014 more than 3,500 people were convicted of going AWOL and 980 of those were convicted of desertion. Most of those were in the US, but some have happened in war zones, including two cases that were remarkably similar to Bergdahl’s. Those cases didn’t make the news, though, and the soldiers were simply sent home to get some help, because as Koenig notes, walking off a base into Afghanistan is so dangerous you have to be “a head case”.
But because Bergdahl was captured by the Taliban, because a DUSTWUN was issued, because there was a search for him and because five Taliban were traded for him, Bergdahl’s case is different. But is that Bergdahl’s fault? Should he be held accountable for that? Possibly not, but the court martial is moving forward regardless.
Observations
- Lt Col Paul Edgar’s thoughts on society’s responsibility for the baggage of war are well worth a listen.
- Nice to hear that at least two of Bergdahl’s platoon-mates have been swayed by the podcast and no longer blame him for the mess.
- Film-maker Mark Boal still talks to Bergdahl occasionally, although he no longer seems to be working on a movie on these events.
Notes
(1) Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder discuss Serial season 2 in exclusive interview
(2) Sgt Bergdahl may not be quite so blameless
(3) The Case of Bowe Bergdahl: Military Justice in a Highly Charged Political Season
