The following excerpts are from Michael Hastings, the journalist killed in a fiery car accident –
Three years ago, a 23-year-old soldier walked off his base in Afghanistan and into the hands of the Taliban.
Rather than put their kids in the local school system, Jani and Bob home-schooled Bowe and his sister. Devout Calvinists, they taught the children for six hours a day, instructing them in religious thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. “Ethics and morality would be constant verbiage in our conversations,” his father recalls. “Bowe was definitely instilled with truth. He was very philosophical about perceiving ethics.”
By the age of five, Bowe had also learned to shoot a .22 rifle and to ride horses. He developed a love for dirt bikes and immersed himself in boy’s adventure tales – anything that had to do with sailing and the ocean – as well as cartoons. His favorite was Beetle Bailey, the comic-strip antihero who shambles through life in the Army as a permanent fuck-up.
At 20, Bowe went even farther afield in search of the kind of boy’s adventure that had mesmerized him for years: He decided to join the French Foreign Legion, the infantry force made up of foreigners who want “to start a new life,” as the legion’s recruiting website puts it. He traveled to Paris and started to learn French, but his application was rejected. “He was absolutely devastated when the French Foreign Legion didn’t take him,” Bob says.
Returning home from Europe, Bowe drifted for the next few years, working mainly as a barista at Zaney’s, a local coffee shop in Hailey. But he kept dreaming of ways to pursue something bigger. In 2008, he spoke to a family friend who was working as a missionary in Uganda about going over to Africa to teach “self-defense techniques” to villagers being targeted by brutal militias like the Lord’s Resistance Army. He and his father even fantasized about the creation of a special operations unit to “kill these fucks” in Africa, imagining that “someone needed to run an op with some military people dressed up like U.N. people” to take out warlords in Darfur and Sudan. Before a spot in the friend’s missionary program could open up, though, Bowe had decided on a different adventure.
But what Bowe found in the Army, according to his parents, was a “deception” – one that started from the moment he was recruited. Bowe had been enticed to join the Army, they say, with the promise that he would be going overseas to help Afghan villagers rebuild their lives and learn to defend themselves – “the whole COIN thing,” says Bob, citing the shorthand for America’s strategy of counterinsurgency. “We were given a fictitious picture, an artificially created picture of what we were doing in Afghanistan.”
He surrounded himself with piles of books, including Three Cups of Tea, about a humanitarian crusade to educate girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan…
Bowe’s behavior, too, seemed odd at times. Fry remembers hearing “all kinds of crazy stories about him.” He often came across more like a boy on an adventure than a soldier preparing for war.
Returning to Alaska after Christmas, Bowe said something that would stick with Fry months later, long after they arrived in Afghanistan. “Before we deployed, when we were on Rear D, him and I were talking about what it would be like,” Fry recalls. Bowe looked at his friend and made no bones about his plans. “If this deployment is lame,” Bowe said, “I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.”
With his customary zeal, he’d been preparing for the deployment by learning how to speak Pashto and reading Russian military manuals. Almost as soon as he joined his fellow soldiers, he began to gravitate away from his unit. “He spent more time with the Afghans than he did with his platoon,” Fry says. His father, recalling that time, would later describe his son to military investigators as “psychologically isolated.”
Then, on June 25th, Bowe’s battalion suffered its first casualty of the deployment. A popular officer, 1st Lt. Brian Bradshaw, was killed in a blast from a roadside bomb near the village of Yaya Kheyl, not far from the outpost. Though Bradshaw was in a different company, the 24-year-old’s death rocked the unit, shattering the sense of invulnerability that accompanies those who have just arrived in country. Bowe’s father believes that Bradshaw and Bowe had grown close at the National Training Center, and his death darkened his son’s mood. It was all too much for Bowe. On June 27th, he sent what would be his final e-mai to his parents. It was a lengthy message documenting his complete disillusionment with the war effort. He opened it by addressing it simply to “mom, dad.”
“The future is too good to waste on lies,” Bowe wrote. “And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be american. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”
The e-mail went on to list a series of complaints: Three good sergeants, Bowe said, had been forced to move to another company, and “one of the biggest shit bags is being put in charge of the team.” His battalion commander was a “conceited old fool.” The military system itself was broken: “In the US army you are cut down for being honest… but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to do what ever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank… The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools.” The soldiers he actually admired were planning on leaving: “The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.”
In the second-to-last paragraph of the e-mail, Bowe wrote about his broader disgust with America’s approach to the war – an effort, on the ground, that seemed to represent the exact opposite of the kind of concerted campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of average Afghans envisioned by counterinsurgency strategists. “I am sorry for everything here,” Bowe told his parents. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.” He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP. “We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.”
Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read as a suicide note. “I am sorry for everything,” he wrote. “The horror that is america is disgusting.”
********* On June 27th, at 10:43 p.m., Bob Bergdahl responded to his son’s final message not long after he received it. His subject line was titled: OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!********** (emphasis mine -bfh)
“Dear Bowe,” he wrote. “In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones’ conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like minded men when possible.” He signed it simply “dad.”
Bowe Bergdahl had a different response. He decided to walk away.
In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?
Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.
Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.
So the Taliban got back 5 top-level terrorists and we got back a starry-eyed moslem fellow traveler.
And the Taliban has found out what the exchange rate.
Charming.
Fucking DAMN you Obama!
boy, bob’s beard just smacks of sympathy for the taliban to me
just like jonny walker lind
You know crazyeighter, I was thinking the same thing. What does this get Obama? More lawless thugs running around the world ready to take us down a notch or two?
Man! There sure is a difference between the army & The Corps!
The French figured him out right away. Our recruiters, not so much.
Did anyone see a clip of f—face with his crazy parents in the Rose Garden? He said something about “leaving no man behind”. Yeah, about that – BENGHAZI!!!
This is just a sensitive soul. Sensitive, I say.
it’s just like elmo to rescue a deserter.
His first mistake was joining the military, especially one controlled by socialists.
We have a long way to recover from the mouthpiece of the taliban named talibob standing next to obama saying this is long overdue and about not leaving anyone behind. .. what a crock of feces! Anyone read the tweet talibob sent out about Guantanamo? And how quickly the attempt was made to delete it? Yet where is the response to the cacophony surrounding Bengazi? Why did we have people there? What happened to America?
How much you want to bet this turd-brain is going to be guest speaker at the Dem. convention in ’16.
The narrative came congealed and gift-wrapped:
Obama, willing to do whatever it takes to save POW, asserts the necessary unitary authority to do what’s right.
Ergo, sending 5 high level murderers back to a battlefield in exchange for a traitor to his traitor father. One day, Bowe will run for office. Next STotU speech, he’ll be in the box with Michelle.
He’s the John McCain the Democrats always wanted! So much for name, rank and serial number – he’s begging and pleading for anyone to save him from a mistake he freely chose.
And the ball-less Republicans are going to stand by and let it happen lest they be painted as abandoning a POW in a war they started.
Sound about right?
Susan Rice was a piece of work this morning on Stephopottamus.
Maybe our Marine in a Mexican prison should convert to IZSLUM so Obama will give a shit about him!
I gotta tell ya, I’ve never done any research into this guy’s story, but from what I’ve just read it would seem pretty obvious that Bowe’s loyalties do not lie with the US, and I kinda doubt he ever gave a flying Funk about all the lives of the brave loyal and trustworthy soldiers he so callously put at risk having to come search for his dumbass while he was no doubt bitching to the (other) enemy about how MEAN and greedy the US is. It’s telling that his hippy-flippy family blamed the military for “endangering” him by mounting a massive rescue effort and “TOLD the Army to STOP” looking for him, and then proceeded to criticize the Army for not doing enough to find their special little guy! I have to afford the guy a certain level of respect because he did enlist and volunteer to go “to the war”, but it sounds to me like he had intentions to use the US to get him there and help get him prepared so he could desert them and go join the other side if he didn’t like the way it worked when he got there! I guess he figured he’d go get a firsthand look at the war and then decide which side he wanted to be on!!! And really, it was never going to be the US that he wanted to “fight” for. I mean the only reason he ever even enlisted was because he got rejected from the Frog Fern Legionaires!!!
Itnow makes perfect sense why Obama and the Islammunists were happy to exchange 5 top Taliban POWs for 1 American born Taliban wannabe!!! He’s the kind of fella Obama and the Demoncraps would like to have the entire US Military comprised of. Just one more disrespectful question… Does he like boys or girls? Just aksing.
If he were to follow his damned conscience, he’d honor his contract with the army.
I have only met one Calvanist so far, and according to what he told me and what I have read, they believe in predestiny – everything is just running on a script, all your decisions have already been made, God knows what your decisions are/will be, and nothing you can do will change a thing. You already have your ticket to heaven or hell. Whacky philosophy if you ask me.
I’m waiting for a Democrat leftist fucktard to complain that the swap was racist on the USA’s part.
“Talibani freedom fighters are valued as human beings just as much as Americans are. With a five to one swap ratio, America is saying that Talibani freedom fighters are only one-fifth human beings. That’s racist!”
This follows the leftist fucktard argument that before the War Of Northern Agression, “the racist Southerners viewed enslaved African-Americans as being worth only three-fifths of a man”. But the fact is it was DEMOCRATS in NORTHERN states who insisted on counting blacks as only 3/5ths for census purposes. The DEMOCRAT NORTHENERS wanted to water down the South’s census numbers to keep their representation numbers low in the House of Representatives.
@SgtZim, Calvanists actually believe that their eternal destiny is predestined, that in the fullness of time God foreknew whom he would have mercy on and offer them the gift of Grace and that they would respond to it with saving faith. It’s wrapped-up in the concept of irresistible grace and total depravity, unless God makes the first move, people’s hearts will not seek Him out. The other version of Protestantism is Arminianism which teaches that God offers the gift of grace to all, and it is entirely up to the individual if they choose to respond to it. In either case, neither sides believe every thought and action etc. are predestined, just that God knows who will be saved in the end (no sheep are lost so to speak).
Sorry to be off-topic, just wanted to offer some clarification.
As to the topic at hand Bowe definitely seems to have some mental illness/deficiencies.
@SgtZim – I don’t want to turn this thread into a philosophy of religion discussion, but your comment about Calvinism (i.e., Presbyterianism) is grossly oversimplified.
You are limiting the prescence/hand of God to your own limited understanding of him. Whether you believe in predestination or not, you still have to make choices in this life that define who you areand who you will be. Is it already predistined? Only God knows for sure.
Besides, Bowe Berghahl turned away from Calvinism long before joining the army.
This has been bantered about on military blogs for a while, but I didn’t feel it should be debated until he was safe.
Don’t expect any serious investigation of this guy’s action. He’ll probably get a Presidential Medal of Freedom. And what of the good soldiers that were killed looking for him?
Forget about who this soldier is. The important thing is that our president broke the law. Not only that, we should have exchanged one of our soldiers for 1/5 of one of the taliban terrorist. When will the amerikan press and congress get the kahunas to report about this lawless president and challenge him in court ? I think BMO really is a muzslim ! Read more in the washington post story by karen tumulty.
You Know, with everything going on over just the last year, where are the real Americans in our government?
Really….
Are all the lawyers democraps?
Are there any true American idealists left?
Everything this administration does seems to be trying to provoke us citizens to react badly.
My God. Are we really that far gone?!
I’ve been waiting to see a leader rise, and although some have shown promise, none merits my sword.
I’ve been holding off saying this, but shit, enough is enough.
Let it all fucking burn!
“So the Taliban got back 5 top-level terrorists and we got back a starry-eyed moslem fellow traveler.”
Even worse, when that shitbag arrived in country, he was a PFC.
However, during his years of “captivity,” the worthless PR machine/social experiment that the US Army has become, regularly promoted him.
Now this “starry-eyed moslem fellow traveler” is an NCO.
@cav medic….probably with full back-pay!
DISGUSTING!!
What did the fiery crash reporter know and was about expose?
Hey no problem. Ship the five terrorists back in fifteen or twenty little boxes.