Previously
on Serial.
Kayla Harrison
Gentlemanly
is a good word. He was very much a gentleman.
Bowe Bergdahl
Coast
guard boot camp is, uh, still kind of the traditional boot camp.
Mark Boal
Do you
think he's lying?
Sarah Koenig
Um...
Kim Harrison
And then,
all of a sudden, he shows up in his uniform.
Sarah Koenig
Oh.
Kim Harrison
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
From This
American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one
story told week by week, or day by day, or whatever. I'm Sarah Koenig.
This is
episode eight. But if you haven't listened to episode seven yet, you should go
back and do that first, because this is really a part two. In these two
episodes, we're trying to answer the question of how walking off your outpost
into Afghanistan might make sense if you're Bowe Bergdahl.
I think
the following will likely be a question at Bowe's court-martial. Did the army
screw up by accepting Bowe, by deploying him to Afghanistan? Just to remind
you, Bowe was separated from the coast guard in 2006, after he became
overwhelmed and had a break down during basic training. The army, in order to
enlist him two years later, would have to waive its usual standards, which it
did. So the question actually is, did the army recruiting process work like it
was supposed to?
Bowe's
separation from the coast guard wasn't labeled a psych discharge on paper, but
that's essentially what it was. So, did the army miss something? We talked to a
retired army psychiatrist, Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie. She was deployed all
over. She was chief of forensic psychiatry and also of inpatient psychiatry at
Walter Reed. And she was psychiatry consultant to the army surgeon general, the
top mental health advocacy position in the army.
Dr.
Ritchie's assessment of how all this went down with Bowe? Eh, she thought the
whole thing sounded pretty normal, like standard practice. The fact that the
army didn't have all the details about Bowe's hospitalization in the coast
guard—not uncommon. She said getting access to more detailed medical
information, especially between branches of the military—in this case, coast
guard and army—was hard because the military's network system wasn't so hot.
Information sharing was incomplete.
But she
also didn't feel like anything we told her about Bowe's coast guard situation
would have been disqualifying, even if the army had known and had sent him for
a mental health evaluation as the coast guard doctor had recommended. Even if
Bowe had been assessed by, say, an army psychiatrist, Dr. Ritchie said it
probably would have been one session. And unless he showed obvious outward
signs of psychosis or something like that, you're really depending on the
potential recruit to self-report any psychological problems. So it's quite
possible Bowe would have been OK'd regardless.
At the
end of the day, Dr. Ritchie told us, the best assessment for whether someone's
going to make it in the army doesn't happen in the recruitment office anyway—it
happens during the sustained, high pressure test of basic training. And Bowe
did really well in army basic training. So that's one view. Now for a second
opinion.
Michael Valdovinos
Somewhere,
the ball was dropped.
Sarah Koenig
This is
Dr. Michael Valdovinos. He's a clinical psychologist. He was in the air force
for about seven and a half years. And he worked in the SERE program, which
teaches survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He knows Bowe. In fact,
Valdovinos led the SERE psych team that helped reintegrate Bowe right after his
rescue, those first few weeks when Bowe was at the hospital in Germany.
Two
things: Valdovinos has permission from Bowe to talk to me about their
conversations. And also, he was not officially Bowe's doctor. His job was to
reintegrate him, not diagnose him or anything. He never even saw Bowe's medical
record back then. So he's not breaking any doctor-patient confidentiality.
Well,
three things, I guess—the last being, Valdovinos cares about Bowe, so he's not
dispassionate on the question of what happens to him. Valdovinos's view is that
the army recruiter should have looked harder at Bowe's situation, should've
asked more questions before signing him up. Even if the recruiter didn't have
the particulars of Bowe's coast guard discharge in front of him or information
about Bowe's hospitalization, he says the mere fact that Bowe had been
separated at all from a branch of the military begged more scrutiny.
Michael Valdovinos
You know,
it's a pretty big deal to get separated from the military. Um, at the very
least, I would think that this recruiter would be a little bit more concerned
about that and would have taken it maybe a few steps further to say, hey, let's
make sure that this guy's a good fit for what he's about to get into.
Sarah Koenig
Because
what a separation like Bowe's tells you, just on its face, is that, for
whatever reason, this person couldn't hack it in basic training. And the army
recruiter's job is to send that potential recruit straight back into basic
training—in Bowe's case, the same situation he washed out of two years earlier.
Finally,
Valdovinos says Bowe told him that the recruiter did know about his problems in
the Coast Guard, because Bowe says he told the recruiter. Bowe said he was
afraid not to tell him, since, you know, not a good idea to keep things from
the government.
Michael Valdovinos
You know,
and...and he said, "Yeah, I told them everything." And...and
specifically, I said, "You told them exactly what happened when, you know,
you broke down in training and, you know, went to the hospital and, you know,
the incident in the barracks?" And he said, "Yes. You know, I told
him all these things."
Sarah Koenig
As part
of his application, Bowe did attest that he had not consulted with the
behavioral health care provider in the last seven years. When General Dahl
asked him about that, Bowe said the coast guard treatment, quote,
"wouldn't have triggered the idea of consulting a psychologist,"
unquote. Dahl found that to be consistent with Bowe's other paperwork, since,
on his medical history form, Bowe checked yes to the question of whether he'd
ever received counseling of any type. He said he was thinking of counseling
he'd had when he was 10 years old.
General
Dahl concluded that the army recruiter, on paper, did everything he was
supposed to—read the codes, followed the regulations. But in a footnote, Dahl
seemed to agree that this system isn't good enough—that Bowe's situation
probably should've been looked at more carefully. He wrote that when you're
deciding whether to reenlist someone, few things are more relevant than a prior
separation. He added, quote, "It seems inadequate that we would rely on an
interview and an applicant statement to explain the details of prior service,
and not review the separation action," unquote.
And where
was Bowe's head at this time? It's funny: once you hear how Bowe thought about
the military, why he wanted to join, oddly, it does help explain why he decided
to walk off his post.
Mark Boal
Did
you...did you think that you were going to be a career soldier?
Bowe Bergdahl
Um, this
is where, you know, I'll admit that my mind did get lost in fantasy.
Mark Boal
OK.
Bowe Bergdahl
I wanted
to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then. I wanted
to be World War II soldier.
Mark Boal
Right.
Bowe Bergdahl
I wanted
to be, you know, 1800s soldier. You know, I wanted to be a samurai soldier, a
fighter, warrior.
Mark Boal
Right.
Bowe Bergdahl
Um, I
wanted to be...you know, more than anything, I wanted to be a kung-fu, you
know, fighter.
Mark Boal
[CHUCKLES]
Bowe Bergdahl
Honestly.
I love the idea of just, basically, your hands and that's it.
Mark Boal
Right.
Bowe Bergdahl
You know?
Sarah Koenig
Bowe
loved Bruce Lee when he was a kid, thought he was cool. He watched his movies,
later read his books. Bowe studied Asian warriors, especially samurai. He
learned about the Bushido code, which stresses honor and loyalty and
self-sacrifice.
In Bowe's
childhood bedroom, his dad kept a collector's set of old army manuals, way up
high on a bookshelf. He said his dad loved military history. Bowe climbed up
there and got the books down. Even when he couldn't read, he'd study the
pictures.
Bowe Bergdahl
So, you
know, I...as far as being a soldier, in my mind, you know, I was...I was very
much left in history. You know, but that's where I ended up getting
the...having problems was because I wanted to be a soldier, but the only option
I had was to be, you know, a modern soldier.
Sarah Koenig
Bowe's
ideal soldier, the one from history, fights for a cause he or she is
completely, personally committed to. That soldier rallies behind military
leaders that he or she trusts. The modern soldier turns out to have no choice
about those essential aspects of combat. Instead, he's a brainless private that
does whatever the government tells him to do, go here, go there, go fight these
people. He's just a tool. That's how Bowe saw it.
And the
thing is, Bowe knew this was going to be the case when he signed up. He sort of
knew it. He thought he could handle that gulf of meaning.
Bowe Bergdahl
I was
aware of that problem. And that was something that I had to deal with every
day.
Mark Boal
It's
like, in order to play the game, you had to play by the rules as they were
being—
Bowe Bergdahl
Exactly.
Mark Boal
As they were—
Bowe Bergdahl
But it
doesn't mean you're not going to struggle every step of the way, you know? And
that...that ended up happening.
Sarah Koenig
This is
one of the things about Bowe. He at once recognizes that his expectations were
unrealistic, that he sees things differently from other people. But at the same
time, he will fiercely defend his vision of how things should be. He does not
let go, especially when it comes to what he saw in Afghanistan.
Mark Boal
Do you
think what you witnessed and what you were reacting to was the army in an
especially bad way? Or was it just the army being itself and kind of messed up
as it...you know, in a kind of average way? Does that make any sense?
Bowe Bergdahl
Yeah. Um,
maybe it was normal. Maybe what I was looking at was simple everyday army.
However, the way I was looking at it was, this is messed up. This
shouldn't be like this. So irregardless of whether it was, you know, off the
chart from regular stupidity, or if it was everyday stupidity, what I was
looking at was problems. What I was looking at was things that needed to be
fixed.
So to
simply say, oh, well, that's just the normal everyday army life, and shrug it
off and say who cares—that is a huge problem. That shouldn't be acceptable to
anybody.
Sarah Koenig
Mark's
conclusion about Bowe, after all those months of talking to him: He's not a
conscientious objector. But he's also not your casual deserter who throws up
his hands and just says, I don't care about any of this—I'm outta here. Mark
thinks he's the opposite of that—that he's a rare person who will act—rightly
or wrongly, it turns out—but still, he will act according to his principles.
And his principles are wrapped up with the very institution that so many people
now feel he betrayed.
Mark Boal
It's the
disillusionment of somebody that really believes in the army. He's somebody
that thinks that military leadership is a...a sacred position. He wants the
army to be better.
Sarah Koenig
Right.
Mark Boal
The
military is huge for him, right?
Sarah Koenig
Yeah.
Mark Boal
It
represented something...there's got to be a better word than huge, but it
represented something very powerful to him, even before he joined, and to his
sense of himself as a man, to his relationship to his country, to all sorts of
kind of big identity questions that were floating around for him.
And it's
still really important to him. He still kind of wants his day of reckoning with
those values. That's, in a way, why he hasn't taken the more pragmatic route
through all of this, which would just be to sort of stick your hands out and
say, "Whatever you guys say." Like, "Guilty. Just—"
Sarah Koenig
"Get
me out of here."
Mark Boal
"Let's
get this over with." Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
Yup.
Mark Boal
I think
he doesn't want to cross the line of saying "I had no point."
Sarah Koenig
Which is
not to say that Bowe wants all this attention on him now. He wasn't seeking
this big an audience.
Mark Boal
And, by
the way, he's not asking to be some kind of like Paul Revere. He just
wanted...he didn't...Bowe never wanted the discussion that's happening now,
right? His whole goal was to talk to...it was like an inter-family dispute. He
wanted to talk to people in the military.
Sarah Koenig
Yeah.
Mark Boal
There was
actually a reporter that was sent to...that was like embedded or something with
his unit, that was hanging around there. And it's not like he pulled the
reporter aside and said, "Hey, get a load of this. This will make a great
story." He didn't do that. He wanted to be heard within the military.
So, obviously,
that didn't happen. And obviously, he behaved in a way which runs counter to
every single military precept ever known since the dawn of time, which is, you
know, you don't...you don't walk away from your brother. So he's not a great
messenger for his message, but, um, but that's also what makes it kind of
interesting.
Sarah Koenig
In Bowe's
case, no one saw it coming, him walking off like he did, because it's so
unthinkable. But a few people say they did start to see signs that Bowe wasn't
totally OK. At the September hearing in Bowe's case, Greg Leatherman, Bowe's
weapons squad leader, testified that, at some point, he noticed something was
up with Bowe.
Quote,
"It started to kind of feel he wasn't adjusting to the deployment like the
rest the guys were," unquote. Leatherman said he wasn't incredibly
alarmed, but he figured he ought to say something to one of the higher-ups
about it, just in case. One day, he's on a patrol, somewhere southeast of
Sharana, and he finds himself sitting next to his first sergeant, Pablo
Jimenez.
Quote,
"And so I told First Sergeant that, you know, I thought that Sergeant
Bergdahl should chat with somebody, you know, whether it be combat stress, or a
chaplain, or even if it were just, you know, the company commander. Just sit
down and, 'Hey man, how's everything going?'"
Bowe's
lawyer asked Leatherman how Jimenez responded to his suggestion. I'm just going
to read you that part of the transcript:
First
Sergeant said that he didn't want to...he didn't want one of his guys to tell
him what was wrong in his company. So it was not my place to tell him if he had
problems inside of his company.
I think
when we interviewed you, you had even more colorful language of what he said.
Yes, sir.
Could you
tell us that?
Sure. He
said, 'Flip off.' He said, 'Shut
the flip up. No one needs to
hear what a flipping
E5 has to
say about a guy in my company.' Then I said, 'Roger, First Sergeant.'"
In his
report, General Dahl includes a statement from Jimenez, who says he doesn't
recall this conversation with Leatherman, or any conversation like that, and
that Bowe, quote, "showed no red flags or emotional problems, as far as I
could tell," unquote.
Bowe's
friends said, from his messages and letters home, they could tell he wasn't
very happy with how things were going in Afghanistan. And in retrospect, you
can sort of see his thoughts churning, plans forming.
On June
27th, just three days before Bowe left Mest, he wrote a letter to his parents,
venting, in which he sounded pretty disgusted with how the army was operating
in Afghanistan. He wrote a more loving letter to a girl he was romantically
involved with. He wrote group emails. One was titled "Who is John
Galt?" His friend Chad was on that email.
Chad
I saw it,
and I was like, Ugh. Ayn Rand. OK, here
we go. You know?
Sarah Koenig
John Galt
is a character from Atlas Shrugged. The very first line of the
book is "Who is John Galt?" And after about 1,000 pages, you finally
learn that John Galt is this genius industrialist who sort of single-handedly
has shut down the world's economy in order to fix it. He stops the machine.
In the
book, he finally reveals himself, delivering, I kid you not, a 60-page speech
laying out his philosophy—or, rather, Ayn Rand's philosophy. And, honestly, just
as an exercise, you can grab almost any sentence from that John Galt speech and
apply it to what Bowe ended up doing. For instance, quote, "A code of
values accepted by choice is a code of morality," unquote.
And now,
just for kicks, stir in, say, the Bushido code—the part that teaches that it's
your duty to try to right a moral wrong, regardless of whether you'll succeed.
That's maybe a potent cocktail, if you're Bowe. Here's the text of Bowe's June
27th email.
"It
is not the being of value who fails the system, it is the system that has
failed the man. For man should not stoop to fit the system, but the system
should be made and remade to fit the man who holds value as worth. I will serve
no bandit nor liar, for I know John Galt and understand. This life is too short
to serve those who compromise value and its ethics. I am done
compromising." His friend Nick read that email, along with anyone else.
Sarah Koenig
Were you
just, like, uh-oh. Or did you think like, oh, this is just Bowe sorting
through—
Nick
This is
Bowe being Bowe.
Sarah Koenig
Oh,
really?
Nick
Yeah.
These are the kinds of things he would say.
Sarah Koenig
Kim
Harrison was on those emails too, and had gotten other messages from Bowe, and
she was starting to worry. She says she could tell he was frustrated, that he
thought his situation was dangerous, that he was trying to hold himself
together.
Kim Harrison
Here's
this...you know, he's writing these things, these notes, sending emails, he's
sending all these cryptic things. He's, um, in a state of mind that was obvious
to me, mentally, where he was at. It was stretched. He was on that precipice.
You know what I mean?
Sarah Koenig
Mm-hm.
Yup.
Kim Harrison
Where a
person can make bad choices. Like really bad choices.
Sarah Koenig
Right.
Kim Harrison
I don't
think...you know, it's not suicidal or that kind of thing at all. It was just,
he's frustrated, he's on edge, and not really completely logical, in his right
mind.
Sarah Koenig
But is
this what you understood at the time that—
Kim Harrison
Yes.
Sarah Koenig
—or are
you saying this in hindsight, now that you've talked to him more.
Kim Harrison
No, no,
no, no, no. No, I had—
Sarah Koenig
This was
clear to you at the time.
Kim Harrison
It was
really clear. Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
A few
days later, some army people show up at her door to tell her Bowe is missing.
And just a day or two after that, a box arrives at her house from Bowe. He'd
sent it from Afghanistan. It's got his computer, his iPod, his Kindle, a
journal, and a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
It's been
pretty widely reported that, at Bowe's military hearing, his lawyers said this
carefully phrased but also somewhat vague thing regarding Bowe's mental health.
He said a, quote, "neutral army psychiatry board has now concluded that,
back in June 2009, that Sergeant Bergdahl possessed a severe mental disease or
defect," unquote.
And this
past week, I finally found out what he meant by that. In May of last year,
Bowe's defense team asked for what's called a 706 sanity board—a mental health
assessment—in connection with the charges against Bowe. An army forensic
psychiatrist, a well-regarded doctor named, Christopher Lang, met with Bowe and
gave a diagnosis—schizotypal personality disorder—that he said Bowe would have
had as of the time of the alleged misconduct. And I'm guessing this too will be
part of Bowe's defense at the court-martial proceeding.
Dr.
Valdovinos, the SERE psychologist who knows Bowe, said that when he heard this
diagnosis, he thought, Yeah, I think they hit the nail on the head.
Michael Valdovinos
Because
it very much fits, you know, some of the things that he struggles with. It,
um...it sort of permeates a lot of what's going on. You see this a lot play out
through his life, you know, from development, through his teenage years, to his
young adulthood. It really does tell the story of Bowe, unfortunately, you
know?
Sarah Koenig
Again,
Bowe gave Valdovinos permission to talk about this with me. He described the
basic characteristics.
Michael Valdovinos
Folks who
are diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, they're generally folks
who would rather be loners. You know, they sort of lack close friends. Um, they
incorrectly interpret events, including feeling like external events have
personal meaning to them; um, they dress in peculiar ways, sort of eccentric;
you know, belief in sort of special powers; perceptual alterations, persistent
and excessive sort of social anxiety—you know, which Bowe really struggles
with.
Sarah Koenig
Bowe's
grand ideas about his future, about his capabilities, the romantic adventures
he wanted to make happen—Valdovinos says those all fit the profile. He said,
for anyone with a psychiatric illness like this, symptoms tend to get worse
when you're under stress. One of the major symptoms is paranoia and the
potential to misinterpret situations.
And
Valdovinos says it's not a stretch to say that's probably what happened when
Bowe was deployed to Afghanistan, where it's actually dangerous, it's obviously
stressful. Bowe's not super tight with the guys in his unit. He starts to think
his battalion commander is against them—might even send them on a suicide
mission, which is very paranoid thinking. And that all leads to a decision that
isn't, well, entirely sane.
Michael Valdovinos
By that
point, I think the paranoia of it all kind of pushed him over the edge, and he
said, I'm doing it. When you start thinking about the idea of him being Jason
Bourne, and, you know, him doing special operations, it sort of fed into that
whole narrative—that, you know, I'm going to be able to do this, I'm going to
go and bring the help—and not really thinking through the ramifications of
walking off a base into...basically into the Taliban. For most of us, it would
be an absolute...sort of an absolute boundary for us, you know, to say, hey,
even if I'm frustrated with my command, even if I'm frustrated with this
mission, frustrated with the army, there's still something, I think
biologically, that's going to keep us from literally walking off a base.
Sarah Koenig
Right.
Like just self-preservation at that point would kick in.
Michael Valdovinos
Exactly.
And so for him to actually do that, you have to think through, like, wow, how
could he have done this? You know? And when you look at the whole total
picture, it starts to make sense.
Sarah Koenig
Valdovinos
thinks that what happened with Bowe at the coast guard, what happened in
Afghanistan—it's all of a piece.
The army
knows about this diagnosis. At the September hearing, the army prosecutor,
Major Margaret Kurtz, gave a preview of the army's thinking on the subject. She
read aloud one of the key points from the psychiatrist, Dr. Lang's, report:
quote,
"that in 2009, at the time of the alleged criminal misconduct, the accused
was able to appreciate the nature and quality and wrongfulness of his
conduct," unquote. In other words, mental illness or no, Bowe should be
held responsible for his actions.
The other
day, I checked back in with Mark, to see if the diagnosis made him think
differently about anything.
Mark Boal
I guess
it's an interesting data point. I don't know that it's the North Star of the
story.
Sarah Koenig
Mark
feels like he already knew walking off was not a rational thing to do. So
putting a label on Bowe's way of thinking didn't really change much for him. I
told Mark that, for me, the diagnosis made me let go of any lingering doubts I
had about the truthfulness of Bowe's account, like all the details that didn't
add
up—well,
yeah, if you're paranoid and doing some magical thinking, of course the details
don't add up. It makes me believe him—that he really was, in his mind, trying
to raise an alarm. Mark already believed Bowe, though. So aside from a legal
defense, Mark wasn't sure the diagnosis made much of a difference. And he
worried, in fact, that once they heard the diagnosis, people—maybe people like
me—would disregard everything Bowe was saying about his military experience.
Mark Boal
I do
think that, for you, the diagnosis...it makes him more credible to you, but it
also means you take him less seriously, I think, as a kid with opinions, you
know? As like an American soldier with opinions.
Sarah Koenig
No. I
don't think that's quite right. I think his assessments, in a general way...of,
like, the...like, I think we can all agree that the war in Afghanistan has not
been a success, right? I guess I more think he was right by accident.
Mark Boal
Oh,
right. What does that mean, "right by accident"?
Sarah Koenig
Like he
sort of happens to be right. [CHUCKLES] But he's not specifically right
in the particular instances he's necessarily giving as examples of the overall
failure.
Mark Boal
But he's
responding to real data points, right? I mean, he's not thinking that stuff
just from his log cabin in Idaho.
Sarah Koenig
I guess.
But if...I mean, again, I know we've...we've sort of argued about Omnah before,
but I feel like his beef with Omnah, remember, isn't like "We never should
have gone up there in the first place. We never sh—" You know what I mean?
I mean, his beef, really, at the end of the day, his biggest complaint is this
feeling of "our commander doesn't care about our welfare."
Mark Boal
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
And in
fact it was to the point where he was maybe going to send us on a suicide
mission to get rid of us because we were bad for his reputation.
Mark Boal
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
Right?
That's not...no.
Mark Boal
I mean,
there's a lot of different judgments that are stacked on top of each other. And
the last one is...is...is just deeply paranoid, and you can reject it on its
face. I don't think there's a commander in the U.S. armed forces who would do
anything remotely like what Bowe is suggesting, OK? So that—
Sarah Koenig
Right.
Mark Boal
—I just
think is just...but the other...but the judgments that precede that—that maybe
this commander has other priorities besides purely the welfare of his
soldiers—I think that's clearly on the face of it true. Because they did put
American lives at risk to retrieve equipment.
And that
is part of the calculation of war, and you can talk to people up and down the
chain of command, and they'll say, yeah, crap like that happens all the time, where you weigh someone's life
against a piece of equipment. And that may be an everyday calculation, but that
doesn't make it any less flipped up, especially if you're the kid that is...whose life is being
weighed to get the equipment back.
Sarah Koenig
Here's
where Mark and I diverge a little. He links Bowe's personal experience more
directly to the problems of the war than I do. He wants to be careful to
separate what Bowe's saying from who Bowe is. In a case like this, though,
that's the rub. And Mark sees that.
Mark Boal
I keep
going back to something that somebody said to me a long time ago, which was
like, I kind of agree with everything he said, but I still want to punch him in
the face. You know?
Sarah Koenig
It's like
that line from The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong,
Walter. You're just an butthole." I've heard something akin to that sentiment from a bunch
of the soldiers who served with Bowe.
Daryl Hanson
It was
nuts. I mean, the leadership was out of control. He was right about a lot of
the crap. We all talked about
it. We all worried about it.
Sarah Koenig
That's
Daryl Hanson.
Sarah Koenig
Does the
fact of his...what he describes as his good intentions matter to you?
Daryl Hanson
Yes, it
does. But an intention like that is not ever justified to me. It's something so
huge and such a big decision and that caused so many consequences with it, I
feel like you almost have to be God to make that kind of decision. He made like
a godlike decision.
Sarah Koenig
I want to
be careful not to suggest all the soldiers we talked to are in lockstep here.
Some of them, even when we talked to them last summer, said they'd already
forgiven Bowe and moved on. Others said they'd never get over it. In the past
week or two, my producer Dana and I checked in with about a half-dozen soldiers
to see if anything they'd heard from Bowe so far in the podcast had made them
feel differently.
Some said
they still thought he was lying about why he left. Others said they believe him
now and are trying to forgive what he did, but they just can't quite get there.
Here's Ben Evans.
Ben Evans
He may
have had the greatest intentions in the world, but yeah, I just don't...I
can't...yeah, I just don't... [SIGHS] Yeah. [LAUGHS]
Sarah Koenig
I talked
to John Thurman for a while recently. John's mother is a therapist. And like a
lot of veterans, he's also had counseling to help him deal with the
aftereffects of deployment. So I thought he'd be a little more touchy-feely on
the question of Bowe's mental health. I wanted to know if a diagnosis would
help John—not to say that what Bowe did was OK, but whether a diagnosis would
help John forgive Bowe, just personally. I got pretty pushy with John about it.
He was a really good sport.
John Thurman
You know,
we all experienced the same thing, and we didn't walk off.
Sarah Koenig
I know. I
know. But...you're saying, we all experienced the same thing, and we drove on.
John Thurman
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
And what
I'm saying to you is you didn't experience...well, yes, you—
John Thurman
We didn't
see it from his lens.
Sarah Koenig
You
would...no.
John Thurman
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
He was
getting scared by it.
John Thurman
Yeah.
Sarah Koenig
And you
weren't.
John Thurman
Right.
Um—
Sarah Koenig
Like,
you're not perceiving danger in those reprimands, and he is.
John Thurman
Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, I don't think there was danger in those reprimands, 'cause I—
Sarah Koenig
I know,
dude! I know!
John Thurman
[LAUGHS]
Sarah Koenig
That's
not the...we're not arguing whether he's correct.
John Thurman
Oh, I
know. I'm sorry.
Sarah Koenig
We're not
arguing whether he's correct.
John Thurman
Yeah. Um,
I really, really, really try to see it from his side, through his lens. And I
understand that he and I have very different brains. Um, perception or not, I
mean, I still can never forgive him. I can't. And it's on principle.
He broke
that intimate bond that we all share with each other. That's not something you
can ever come back from. I don't care where your head was, Bowe, you still flipping did it. You walked
off, and you betrayed us.
Sarah Koenig
It's
like, you stop there?
John Thurman
Yeah. It
stops there. And that's just that. That's the infantryman in me taking over.
Sarah Koenig
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool
civilian from a family of civilians. My father was in the army in World War II,
but he didn't deploy overseas. The only war stories I remember him telling me
were about, like, carousing in Denver. (Sorry, Dad.) So it wasn't immediately obvious
to me why some of the people Bowe served with were not even just mad—they were
hurt, deeply hurt, in some cases.
What I
understand now is that that bond, that brotherhood they feel, it's not just a
cliché. Well, it is a cliché, but it's also profoundly true. I think about it
this way. In my life, who would die for me, really? My mom, maybe. Who would I
die for? My kids.
And so
imagine you're in a platoon. You become so close, so fast, to all these guys
around you. You recognize each other's cough, or their silhouette in the dark.
You would die for the other guys in your platoon. Even if you don't like them,
you'd do it. And they would die for you. It's not even hypothetical. It happens
all the time.
And
because of that, personalities aside, these guys become family to one another.
If you walk away like Bowe did, you break the promise you all have made to each
other. You undermine the whole enterprise. Your family starts to crumble when
you need it most.
And
that's what the soldiers say happened during the search for Bowe. Bowe's friend
Chris Ingalls said it was like the soul of their platoon just dwindled. People
shrank into themselves. Even afterwards, Second Platoon felt like they were
blamed for Bowe leaving, that they were sort of banished from the larger family
of the battalion.
A
sergeant everyone told us they just loved, a guy named Larry Hine, was moved
out of the platoon and replaced by a commander who was, to put it gently, much
stricter. After helping with Afghan elections in August of 2009, the platoon
went on to a town called Mata Khan and embedded with Afghan security forces.
And they did well enough there that they got commendations and a visit by
General McChrystal. But still, overall, a lot of them just felt robbed, like
their whole deployment lost its meaning.
When I
talked to Daryl Hanson again, a couple weeks ago, he said after hearing the
podcast, he'd softened some toward Bowe.
Daryl Hanson
I don't
have as much hate as I do towards him.
Sarah Koenig
OK.
Daryl Hanson
Even
though the world knows Daryl Hanson would have shot him, which I still
would've! I wouldn't shoot him today, but I would have at the time. And I think
all...you know, but today, I'd probably shake his hand and be like, "Dude,
think about it next time, you know, before what you do. Think about it a little
bit more, you know? Was it worth it?
Sarah Koenig
Almost
all the soldiers we talked to said they still thought Bowe should go to
court-martial. And Mark, though he thinks it's taking too long, also said it
makes sense for Bowe to go through the military justice system. After all, Mark
says, the United States did put a lot of time, and money, and energy into
getting Bowe back. And that's as it should be. But we did take extraordinary
measures. Next time, on Serial.
Serial is produced by
Julie Snyder, Dana Chivvis, and me, in partnership with Mark Boal, Megan
Ellison, Hugo Lindren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira
Glass is our editorial adviser. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor.
Research by Kevin Garnett. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Copy editing
Anaheed Alani. Emily Condon is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick
Thorburn, Fritz Myers, and Mark Phillips.
The show
is mixed by Kate Bilinski. Kristen Taylor's our community editor. OtherSerial staff:
Seth Lind, Elise Bergerson, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks this week to
Jonathan Menjivar, and Rich Orris from Strange Bird Labs for his great work
keeping our website going strong. Check it out. There is lots of stuff on that
website right now. The address: serialpodcast.org.
Serial is a production
of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.
Ira Glass
Coming up
on the next episode of Serial.
Man 2
I had
previously had discussions with Somali warlords, Asian dictators, and Afghan insurgent
leaders. So, given that range of contacts, I didn't find anything unusual about
these.
Man 3
The
Taliban are like simple, straightforward people. Do you want to deal or not?
Man 4
He's done
more serious time than anyone could possibly imagine.
Man 5
I mean,
the released video, and holy crap, there's Bowe again.
Man 6
The old
strategy to win this with money, to win this with soldiers, with military
might, was doomed.
