Bowe Bergdahl opens up about abandoning Army post in ‘Serial’ podcast
“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head.’”
The second season of the critically acclaimed podcast “Serial” debuted early Thursday morning with the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who was captured by the Taliban in 2009 after mysteriously abandoning his post in Afghanistan and held captive in Pakistan before his release in a controversial 2014 prisoner swap authorized by President Obama and condemned by Republicans — who called him a deserter.
The first episode's title, “DUSTWUN,” refers to the Army radio signal for “Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown.”
In it, Bergdahl discusses his experience publicly for the first time, saying he realized he made a grave decision about 20 minutes after walking away from his remote outpost.
“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head,’” Bergdahl recalled in an interview conducted by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Mark Boal. “Suddenly, it really starts to sink in that I really did something bad. Or, not bad, but I really did something serious.”
Bergdahl says he left his post because he wanted to create a crisis to alert high-level commanders to leadership problems within his unit, and had planned to trek 18 miles to Forward Operating Base Sharana, a larger military base, to voice his concerns. But when he realized he might not be welcomed there, he decided to try to gather intelligence on Taliban insurgents so his commanders wouldn’t treat him as a deserter.
“When I got back to the FOB, you know, they could say, ‘You left your position,’” Bergdahl said. “But I could say, ‘Well, I also got this information. So what are you going to do?’”
In the interview, Bergdahl compares himself to the fictional rogue CIA agent in the Bourne book and movie franchise.
“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,” he said. “Like me doing what I did was me saying that I am, I don’t know, Jason Bourne.”
Bergdahl also describes in detail the pain and isolation he felt during his nearly five years in captivity:
How do I explain to a person that just standing in an empty dark room hurts? ... I would wake up not even remembering what I was. You know how you get that feeling when that word is on the tip of your tongue? That happened to me, only it was like, “What am I?” I couldn’t see my hands, I couldn’t do anything. The only thing I could do was touch my face, but even that wasn’t registering right. To the point where you just want to scream. But I can’t scream, I can’t risk that, so it’s like you’re standing there screaming in your mind. In this room, in this blackened dirt room, it’s tiny. And just on the side of this flimsy wooden door that you could probably easily rip off the hinges is the entire world out there. It is everything that you’re missing, it is everybody, everyone is out there. That breath that you’re trying to breathe, that release that you’re trying to get — everything is beyond that door. And, I mean ... I hate doors now.
The launch of the podcast comes the same day the House Armed Services Committee released a report blasting the Obama administration’s decision to release five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for Bergdahl.
“The administration clearly broke the law in not notifying Congress of the transfer,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the committee chairman, said in a statement. “Pentagon officials best positioned to assess the national security risks were left out of the process, which increases the chances of dangerous consequences from the transfer. It is irresponsible to put these terrorists that much closer to the battlefield to settle a campaign promise and unconscionable to mislead Congress in the process.”
Meanwhile, a military court is currently weighing whether to charge him with desertion, which carries a maximum sentence of five years, or endangering the troops who searched for him, a charge that carries the possibility of life imprisonment.
Former members of Bergdahl’s unit have alleged that at least six soldiers were killed while searching for him — though U.S. officials have said there is no evidence to back up that claim.
In September, Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, who led the Army’s investigation into Bergdahl’s disappearance, testified that while the soldier may have been delusional, he was truthful during his debriefing and should not face imprisonment.
“I do not believe there is a jail sentence at the end of this procedure,” Dahl said. “I think it would be inappropriate.”
Boal, who wrote and produced The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, conducted more than 25 hours of interviews with Bergdahl for a movie about the case — and agreed this spring, along with Bergdahl, to allow their use in the podcast.
The first season of “Serial” focused on Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 2000 of murdering his high school ex-girlfriend in a Baltimore suburb. The podcast, which was downloaded more than 100 million times, shined a light on the obscure case, and its popularity was seen as one of the reasons a Maryland court recently agreed to a hearing to introduce new evidence. (Syed’s lawyer is seeking a new trial for his client, who is currently serving a life sentence for the crime.)
“Serial” creator Sarah Koenig explained the decision to unpack a saga that "a gazillion people have heard about."
"This story — it spins out in so many unexpected directions," Koenig wrote in a blog post. "Because, yes, it’s about Bowe Bergdahl and about one strange decision he made, to leave his post. [...] But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made. Unlike our story in Season 1, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantánamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn't: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished.
