“Gutsy but still stupid”, is how US Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl explained his decision to leave his military base in the middle of the night and walk into the Taliban-infested desert in Afghanistan in 2009.
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“What I was seeing from my first unit all the way up into Afghanistan (was) leadership failure to the point that the lives of the guys standing next to me were literally in danger of something seriously going wrong and somebody being killed”, Bowe said. “(And Bergdahl, by the way, is such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve encountered before.) But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made”, Koenig wrote in the email update.
Bergdahl said his motivations for walking off of his base were twofold.
“Like, doing what I did was me saying, ‘I am, like, I don’t know, Jason Bourne, ‘ ” Bergdahl said.
“Suddenly, it really starts to sink in that I really did something bad”, he added.
The confounding case will make for captivating listening for Serial fans, but it’s also still very much a focus for American politicians, who just this week released a report about the prisoner exchange program. He returned home in 2014, when the Obama administration swapped him for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
He is now an active-duty soldier with a desk job in Texas while the military decides whether to put him on trial for desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy” that could see him jailed for life. Democrats noted that the “question of legality” on the 30-day notice “remains unsettled”. But the requests have been denied, so Fidell said he was hopeful “Serial” would quiet some of Bergdahl’s critics and detractors – including 2016 Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
On the first season of Sarah Koenig’s massively popular podcast Serial, audiences were told about the mysterious case of Adnan Syed.
Bergdahl was interviewed by filmmaker Mark Boal. And, I mean, I hate doors now. The soldier said that by slipping away from his platoons base and reappearing at the larger base, he hoped to not only draw attention to problems he saw in his unit, but prove his own worth as a soldier.
The series prompted think pieces, conspiracy theories, and backlash, making listeners wonder how on earth Koenig could top the triumph of her first season.
For those unfamiliar with the podcast, season one of Serial was released by public radio station WBEZ in October 2014 and examined a murder case that took place in Maryland in 1999.
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is speaking publicly for the first time about his experience in the second season of the podcast “Serial”.
“There’s times when I’d wake up and it’s just so dark, like I would wake up and not even remembering like what I was”, he said.
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Welcome back, long break room conversations, arguments with co-workers and grating week-long waits for the next episode (during which you end up listening to podcasts about Serial than you dare admit).
