Bergdahls interview is another coup for makers of Serial, which established podcasts as a viable outlet when the first season was downloaded more than 100 million times.
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“Suddenly, it really starts to sink in that I did something bad”.
“Serial” season 2 premiered on Thursday with the spotlight focused on U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s side of the desertion issue he is involved in.
The American soldier whose story is being explored in the new Serial podcast has said he left his post in Afghanistan because he wanted to be like movie character Jason Bourne.
“All I was seeing was basically, leadership failure to the point that the lives of the guys standing next to me, were, literally, from what I could see, in danger of something seriously going wrong and somebody being killed”, Bergdahl said in the podcast.
He says he was captured and for the next five years, his only contact with the world was in disturbing propaganda videos that showed him looking emaciated and hollow-eyed, begging for release. Just like with season one, an outside party brought a story to them – but instead of Rabia Chaudry with her box of clippings about Adnan, Mark Boal, the screenwriter for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, approached the team with extensive interview footage with Bergdahl, who previously hadn’t told his story to the press. He was their prisoner for five years, until President Barack Obama made the controversial decision to trade five Taliban members being held in Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl’s freedom.
If a trial goes ahead, military prosecutors will seek to prove that Bergdahl had a duty to defend a unit or place, and endangered his fellow soldiers by failing to uphold his duty.
In September, a defense department officer testified during a preliminary court martial hearing about Bergdahl’s motive for leaving his post. Many conservatives and others within the Republican Party criticized the deal as liberating five unsafe jihadists in exchange for a soldier who may have committed treason.
Bergdahl also described his time in captivity.
The podcast came out at the same time that the House Armed Services Committee released a year-long investigation of the Bergdahl case, concluding that the Obama administration broke the law on notifying Congress of the prisoner exchange.
Bergdahl’s attorney Eugene Fidell said Bergdahl has been judged unfairly in the public eye. The subject of that 12-episode season was an otherwise obscure murder case in the suburbs of Baltimore. The interview was widely discussed on cable news this morning – wresting some airtime from Donald Trump, who’ll probably end up suing someone over being treated this unfairly – and featured a left-field reference to one of Hollywood’s biggest action film franchises. “I’m not stupid enough to try knife off a bunch of guys with AK-47s”, he said. A large part of that conflict centers around how many lives Bergdahl himself risked in deserting the base.
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Serial has been hugely popular, ranking at number one on iTunes even before it debuted.
