In the week since the last episode of Serial, US army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s real-life legal case has picked up steam. Bergdahl, whose 2009 disappearance in Afghanistan and subsequent capture by the Taliban, is the subject of Serial’s second season, appeared before a military judge at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, on Tuesday on charges of desertion and misbehaviour before the enemy. He deferred, entering a plea, and did not decide whether he wants to face a court-martial with a jury or one with just a judge. A pre-trial hearing will be heard before judge Colonel Christopher Fredrikson on 12 January.
If convicted at a general court-martial, Bergdahl could get five years for desertion and faces life in prison on the misbehaviour offence, a now rarely used charge.
But before he could be court-martialed by the military, Bergdahl had to escape from his imprisonment by the Taliban, a manouevre he attempted in this week’s episode of Serial.
‘Locked in a room and forgotten’
As they continued their hunt for their missing soldier, the US military decided that they needed a member of Bergdahl’s platoon to record a message for Bergdahl that could be played over Afghan airwaves. They recruited Josh Korder for the job, despite the fact that he felt disloyal to his platoon for recording the message, which stated that he hoped Bergdahl was safe and that they wanted him to come back. “I kept thinking later on if for the entire five years they kept playing the same thing,” Korder said. “I wonder how long my voice has been going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan telling Bowe to come home.”
Bowe never heard the message, but he was trying to come home. The previous episode of Serial documented Bergdahl’s first attempted escape, which was simply making a run for it when his captors weren’t paying attention. He was quickly recaptured and beaten for his efforts.
Over the next few months, he learned some hard lessons about surviving as a prisoner of war. “If you ask for something, like water, you’re likely to get less of it, or less of something else, like food,” said narrator Sarah Koenig, who also noted that “filth and stink” are a prisoner’s best weapons, because (as any toddler can tell you) the more disgusting you are the less likely anyone wants to come near you.
Bergdahl also learned that the best thing that can happen to a prisoner is to be almost forgotten by his captors. “Picture someone taking a bag, throwing it in a closet, and just forgetting about it. That was basically how they treated me,” said Bergdahl. You know you are pretty low in the world when you aspire to be treated like a totebag.
As Bergdahl’s captivity continued, the US military’s rescue operations dwindled. “They’d keep his eyes and ears out of course, but at some point the military had to call it,” said Koenig.
‘Stray voltage’
“It seemed like a very strong possibility that he was a Taliban sympathizer,” said film-maker Mark Boal, whose interviews with Bergdahl make up much of the material, after hearing early reports that the sergeant had walked off his post. “The unrated version is: what a fucking asshole.” Koenig says that was many people’s interpretation of Bergdahl’s situation: “It was understandable based on the information dripping out at the time.” She and Boal then listed several of the rumors they had heard about Bergdahl: he rode a horse, he went rabbit hunting with the Taliban, he played soccer. Not the behaviour of an angry prisoner.
Koenig explained that intelligence officers call this sort of information “stray voltage”, which is almost certainly untrue but gives a bad impression of the captive. Boal said it made him feel like he shouldn’t care about Bergdahl’s fate. When Bergdahl was released, Boal was shocked to learn that he was briefing the military on all the intelligence he had gathered during his time with the Taliban. “That doesn’t sound like a traitor,” said Boal.
Bergdahl’s first real attempt to escape came a few months into his captivity. He spotted an opportunity to make a break for it when his captors went to drink tea. He managed to loosen his chains, stuck his hand out the door to unlock the wires that held it shut, and ran. He found that he was in a valley with three houses in it. He ran towards the houses and encountered a group of children. “They see me and start screaming and run to the house,” said Bergdahl. He ended up cornered on the roof of a house, covered in mud, and back in captivity.
‘Phase one, torture; phase two: abuse; phase three: neglect’
According to Bergdahl, the escape lasted 10 minutes, but the aftermath was severe. His captors blindfolded him and beat him with a rubber hose, eventually moving him to a new location where he was chained, spreadeagled, to a bed. “That’s how I spent the majority of the next three months,” said Bergdahl. They beat him with a copper cable and he developed infections, including diarrhea that lasted three years.
Bergdahl was persecuted for months, held in the dark, held in the light, tormented constantly. His military debriefers and psychologists were shocked that he wasn’t more numb or more damaged by his torture. As Boal put it: “I think that would have been enough to basically turn 95% of people into potatoes.”
‘Cooperating with them to the point so they don’t shoot me’
Bergdahl was being held by the Haqqani family in Pakistan on behalf of the Taliban. Koenig describes their interrogation as a hodgepodge of reasonable questions like how do drones work and “crazy talk”, such as “Is President Obama gay?” or “Are all American women prostitutes?”
“They never really asked me anything I could answer,” said Bergdahl, who never gave the Taliban anything useful. According to Koenig, Bergdahl’s value was not in information, but in the videos he could make for them.
Bergdahl made many videos – reading scripts, occasionally with guns to his head – that his captors released online. Some in the military view these videos as traitorous and a violation of the military’s code of conduct. Koenig noted however that the military does not expect its soldiers to die refusing to make propaganda videos for their captors. “I was desperately trying to figure out how to stay on the edge of not cooperating with them and yet cooperating with them to the point so they don’t shoot me,” said Bergdahl.
‘Out the window’
Bergdahl passed the months trying to gather as much information as he could, whether he was blindfolded and strapped to a bed or later walking around the room or filming a video at gunpoint. One thing that he noted was part of a school uniform with the words North Waziristan on it, but he had no idea where that was.
The whole time he was plotting his next escape. He tried to dig through the mud walls of the hut, made friends with the guard dog, and gathered supplies like a length of PVC tube, a nail, and a key that had fallen off a string. He tried many escapes but never made it very far. He seemed so pathetic that his guards had stopped watching him very closely. So one night he made a break for it, lowering himself out a window and running.
For Koenig, Bergdahl’s escape clears one thing up: Bergdahl is not a Taliban sympathizer, in fact he “loathes” the Taliban.
“Even when he’s sick, doesn’t have any food, and has already been punished for escaping the first time and knows what that’s like, still, he goes out the window,” she says.
Apart from being rescued, Bergdahl considers that moment of escape the best moment of his five years. He wants to get as far as possible from the fortress, aiming for Pakistan, having no idea that he is already in Pakistan. He wandered and wandered and then fell off a cliff. He injured himself, badly, but kept going. He ended up digging a hole in the ground and burying himself in it to spend his first night of freedom.
Bergdahl’s escape lasted around nine days. During that time he drank fetid water, ate grass and, frustratingly, watched the American drones as they moved across the sky, unable to make contact.
Near the end of his escape, he was so weak that he kept passing out. One day he woke up with the Taliban searchers close by. He was re-captured. They didn’t beat him very much, because he was so weak they didn’t think he could withstand it. Instead they took him to the Mullah who told him that if he tried to escape again they would kill him. “That escape was the last time I saw stars until Special Forces picked me up,” said Bergdahl. It was about four years.
Next time on Serial, the United States realizes they need to get out of the war. There’s no new episode next week, but will start up again in the New Year.
Observations
- Bergdahl was a hot commodity and other groups tried to capture him for their own nefarious purposes.
- Watching Bergdahl was a tedious affair for the young Taliban fighter punctuated only by pranks.
- The Taliban think there is nothing funnier than a man with a beard but no moustache.
- One captor was called “Crazy Talib”, known for decapitating men.
