“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head, ‘” Bergdahl said in a “Serial” podcast released on Thursday. It explored a murder case in which a teenager named Adnan Syed was convicted of killing his girlfriend.
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How Bergdahl ended up in Taliban hands for five years is nearly as controversial as the prisoner swap the USA made to release him.
Instead, he was picked up by a group of men on motorcycles affiliated with the Taliban who would hold him captive for the next five years.
MANY Australians may not yet have heard of soldier Bowe Bergdahl, but get ready – his weird story is set to become a national obsession.
Bergdahl was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska.
“Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world”. In choosing Bergdahl, Serial departed from the poignant discussion on the American criminal justice system it found in season one. We’re anxious to see where the producers of Serial carve out a story there. And the consequences of that decision, they spin out, wider and wider.
“I was fully confident that when somebody actually took a look at the situation and when people started investigating the situation that people would understand that I was right”, he said.
Bergdahl was the last American prisoner of war in Afghanistan when the Obama administration brokered a trade for his freedom, releasing five Taliban fighters detained at Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba to Qatar in May 2014.
The second series kicks off with an overview of the events that took place on June 30, and Bergdahl’s reasoning for walking off base, in his own words.
Among Bergdahl’s claims is that he left his unit “to create Dustwun – a radio signal that stands for ‘Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown.'” The move was to demonstrate his unit’s alleged poor leadership with the deserter stating he understood his flight would result in a manhunt and a “hurricane of wrath”. “So what are you going to do?'” said Bergdahl.
“I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying to prove to the world, to anybody who used to know me, that I was capable of being that person”, the army sergeant said. Koenig calls this the biggest point of conflict in his story.
It also features interviews directly with Bergdahl, who has avoided commenting publicly and in the press amid the furor about his return. Koenig said in Thursday’s episode.
Bergdahl could now face a court martial and charges that could lead to a sentence of life in prison. In certain voice clips, Bergdahl sounds irrational. He also likens himself to the fictional character Jason Bourne at one point. “Was this top cover for stuff that they wanted to be doing, but they already knew Bowe was in Pakistan anyway?” said Snyder. Who was a true soldier?
Bergdahl said it wasn’t long after he walked away that he realized how stupid.
He wanted to warn them about what he believed were serious problems with leadership in his unit. Koenig is awed by this fact, but it’s only her disconnect from the experience of war that inspires this emotion. In Afghanistan, he spent more time with locals than his platoon.
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“I couldn’t do anything against six or seven guys with AK-47s, and they pulled up and that was it”, Bergdahl said. He commits a cardinal sin in walking off and leaving his post. “Our view is that the more information everyone has the better”.
