'He’s back and my friends are still dead.'
From Elliot Ackerman, The New Republic:
When I fought in Afghanistan there were many stories about how Bowe Bergdahl was captured. In one video released by the Taliban, Bergdahl said he had lagged behind on a patrol
and been taken. For years, it stood as a kind of accusation against his
comrades in Blackfoot Company: They had left him behind. But, on the
day Bergdahl disappeared, June 30, 2009, there was in fact no patrol,
according to other soldiers who were there. On that night, instead of
patrolling, they slept in the earthen bunkers of OP Mest, an outpost
scraped from a hillside in Afghanistan’s rugged and remote Paktika
Province. Life at OP Mest had been miserable: weeklong rotations in the
scorching heat, no showers, no food except for Meals Ready-To-Eat.
The
next morning, Sergeant First Class Larry Hein took muster. Then the
misery really began. Bergdahl was gone. At 9:00 a.m., Hein called over
the radio to report a missing soldier. Bergdahl was then classified
DUSTWUN—Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown. A
little before 5:00 p.m. that afternoon, the senior officer responsible
for Paktika ordered that “all operations will cease until the missing
soldier is found. All assets will be focused on the DUSTWUN situation
and sustainment operations.” Drones and intelligence aircraft were
diverted; recovering Bowe Bergdahl became Blackfoot Company’s central
mission.
Beginning that August, Bergdahl’s battalion lost six soldiers in a three-week period—all
of these fatalities occurred on a mission that was related to, or
influenced by, the effort to find Bergdahl. In this remote part of an
increasingly remote war, suffering and loss—the senselessness of Afghanistan—often
played out in Bergdahl’s name. By March of 2010, Bergdahl’s infantry
battalion had returned home without him. Before they left, the Army
mandated they sign non-disclosure agreements. Bergdahl’s story wouldn’t
be theirs to tell.
'No one’s serious
about a rescue mission. It’d be too risky. Maybe if Bergdahl
had actually been captured they’d do something, but he deserted.'
I served in the Marines,
in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and later, in special operations in
Afghanistan’s rugged Paktika Province, for a good part of 2010 and 2011,
working out of a remote firebase a few kilometers from the Pakistani
border. At night my colleagues and I would climb on our bunkered roof, a
tumbler of scotch or a cigar in hand, and watch the drone strikes
against al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership in South Waziristan. During
those days, Bergdahl’s case loomed ever-present. The irony that an
iconic figure in a war that had largely been deserted by the American
people was probably a deserter himself was never lost on us. It seemed
just our luck.
Among sailors, a crew member who brings bad luck is
known as a Jonah. It’s a long-held superstition, deriving from the Book
of Jonah. Then the sailors said to each other, ‘Come, let us cast
lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.’ They cast lots
and the lot fell on Jonah. And like the hapless crew that sailed
Jonah to Tarshish, we found ourselves in a storm fighting in
Afghanistan. With Bergdahl’s disappearance always in the background,
imaginations ran wild. Why did the Taliban in Paktika execute attacks
with such unusual precision and lethality? Some hypothesized that
Bergdahl had informed them of our tactics. Why did Afghan civilians
refuse civil aid that they so obviously needed? Others believed rumors
that Bergdahl had participated in a propaganda campaign against us. None
of this could be substantiated, but over there Bergdahl became the idol
of discontent for so many.
He was the Jonah.
And this wasn’t only among the rank and file. One
of my colleagues, a CIA case officer, was charged with collecting
information on Bergdahl’s whereabouts. For months after his
disappearance, his location was known with a high degree of precision.
At various levels of government, certain options had been floated as to
what a recovery mission might look like. After flying in and out of
Kabul for endless rounds of inter-agency meetings, my colleague grew
frustrated by the Army’s inaction. He questioned the efficacy of these
deliberations. A senior officer pulled him aside. “No one’s serious
about a rescue mission,” he said. “It’d be too risky. Maybe if Bergdahl
had actually been captured they’d do something, but he deserted.”
My
colleague flew back to our firebase and returned to his desk. He
continued to track Bergdahl. Anytime someone in southeastern Afghanistan
claimed to have credible information on Bergdahl, my colleague had to
stop what he was doing and travel for hours to debrief the source,
cursing all the while. Bergdahl became the idol of his discontent also.
His Jonah.
During
my eight-year military career, I only met one deserter. It was eleven
years ago. I was 23, a newly minted Second Lieutenant on my way to Iraq.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico, where I underwent training, we had to
get decals for our cars. Behind a counter in the Provost Marshall’s
Office, stamping an endless ream of forms, stood a man in his early
sixties. He was silver-haired with a ruddy complexion. He wore the same
Marine pattern camouflage utilities as me, but his shirt bulged where
age had made him soft. On his collar, he wore no rank. He was a private.
As he stamped my form, I couldn’t stop looking at him—the
oldest private I’d ever seen. He didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure I wasn’t
the first. We exchanged pleasantries. I can’t remember much of what we
said, but I remember what he called me, “Sir,” and the way he smiled
when he said it.
Later I learned that the 60-year-old private had
deserted during the Vietnam War. He’d gone to Canada and reentered the
country some years later. In 1977, on his first day in office,
President Carter pardoned military deserters
who had not yet been convicted or punished as well as those who avoided
the draft. Although it was given pro forma, individuals were still
required to apply for clemency. During the Iraq War, the Marine Corps opened dozens
of long-cold desertion cases. The old private I met had seen this
renewed effort and turned himself in. Offered a brief stint in the brig
and a fine, he finished out his enlistment instead.
And that’s what I remember most about his smile: He seemed to recognize both the sanctity and absurdity of his choice.
Among
veterans of the Afghanistan War, Bergdahl’s return has unleashed a
range of emotion. For some, he’s the POW returned home with a hero’s
trappings. In a conflict that has eschewed war’s traditional definitions
of front lines, combatants, and armies, however, it’s difficult to
pinpoint exactly what he’s become. Over the last five years, Bowe Bergdahl has been, more than anything else, a symbol, used by many: his former comrades, the Taliban, and the White House—which
revealed the details of the prisoner swap a few days after President
Obama’s speech last week announcing the 2016 withdrawal from
Afghanistan.
For many, though, he continues to be an emblem of
discontent, the Jonah of their Afghan voyage. Just after the news broke,
Cody Full, a former soldier from Bergdahl’s squad, sent out his
recollections of the disappearance in more than one hundred tweets. He concluded by writing: “So without B going missing we wouldn’t have been in certain places. And without being in those places,
2 brothers wouldn’t have given the ultimate sacrifice. They went out
like fucking Hero’s.” A few tweets later, referring to his
non-disclosure agreement, he wrote:
“Anybody got a lawyer btw?” When I spoke to Nathan Bradley Bethea, one
of the officers from Bergdahl’s battalion, he put it more succinctly:
“He’s back and my friends are still dead.”
The only thing that
seems clear in any of this is the suffering. For five years, Bergdahl
suffered in captivity as an idol held by the Taliban. The soldiers sent
to recover that idol suffered, too. Each will decide whether they wish
to forgive him—or whether he will continue to be...
...their Jonah.
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