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Previously oncereal. We'relike,man, is he like CIA orwhat?
He looked at us and then he jumped behind ourbike.
We thought he'sdrunk,huh?
They will kill you just for the amusement of being able to shootyou.
And it quickly became very apparent to us that the Taliban knew this is fuckingbullshit.
He's inPakistan. ["Pomp andCircumstance"] From this American life inW.B.E.
Chicago, it'scereal. One story told week byweek.
I'm SarahCanig. ["Pomp andCircumstance"] Right after Bo Bergdahl first went missing from his outpost inAfghanistan, word came down that the higher-ups wanted someone from Bo'splatoon, second platoon blackfootcompany, to record a message to Bo that they'd play on localradio.
They wanted it to be a voiceboe wouldrecognize.
So they chose a guy Bo was friendswith, a guy fromLouisiana.
And he has a very thick Louisianaaccent.
Sobasically, he went up there and they didn't likeit.
So they came down and they gotme.
That's JoshCordor, originally fromPennsylvania.
He didn't want to make a message toBo.
He says he felt a little disloyal to hisplatoon, calling out to the guy who was causing them suchturmoil.
Butthe,the,the,the,the,the,the, the told mecome, they brought me upthere, two officers brought me upthere, and they put a piece of paper in front ofme, which is a script andsaid, readthis.
What was thescript? It waslike, itwas, it was kind of cheesytoo.
It waslike, heyBo, this isJosh.
We really missyou. Youknow, we just want you to comeback.
We hope you'resafe. We hope everything's goingokay.
Youknow, so comeback,Bo.
I kept thinking later on thatmy, like for the entire fiveyears, maybe they played the samething.
I waslike, wonder how long my voice has been going on in Pakistan andAfghanistan.
Telling Bo to comehome.
Safe tosay, Bo never heard themessage.
Also safe tosay, Bo was trying really hard to comehome.
His first urine captivity starts with an escape and ends with anescape, like shitty bookends to a terribleyear.
In between theescapes, Bo was learning necessary twisted lessons ofsurvival.
How to smile when you're inagony.
That if you ask for something such aswater, you're likely to get less ofit, or less of somethingelse, such asfood.
If you're severelydehydrated, you can't really drink your own urine because it turns into a salty brown sludge that filth and stink are your bestweapons.
The more disgusting youare, the less your captors want to come nearyou, which means you can squirrel things away in yourbedclothes.
The smaller and meeker you can make yourself the more likely the Taliban are to let youalone.
And as painful as it is to beforgotten,ultimately, that's what youwant.
Like the best description I could probably give youis, if you'reokay, literally not even ananimal, down to cure someone taking abag, throw it into thecloset, shutting the door and just forgetting aboutit.
Right. That was basically how they treatedme.
Thatthose, the majority of thetime, in the firstyear, when I was in thathousehold, with malice andgene.
Malice, sanguine Zadran was a commander in charge of keeping Boprisoner.
Up until2013, when sanguine was killed in a dronestrike.
It was basically my interaction was a few times a day that they'd give mefood, no boys would bringit.
And then maybe you wanted to fight themon.
One of the otherguys, one of the men would come like check onme.
Otherwise, it was literally just locked in a room andforgot.
Back inAfghanistan, the storm of search and rescue operations for Bo had slowed and thendwindled.
They'd keep their eyes and earsout, ofcourse.
But at a certainpoint, the military had to callit.
While Bo was in the worst place he couldbe, if anyone was gonna rescuehim, locked in a room across the border inPakistan.
It seemed like a very strong possibility that he was a Talibansympathizer.
I'll put it thatway. And it seemed that the unrated version islike, what a fuckingasshole, youknow?
That was Mark Bol's first casual assessment ofBo.
When he heard the early reports that Bo had walkedoff.
And it was a lot of people'sassessment.
And it's understandable based on the information dripping out at thetime.
An early propaganda video reports that Bo had converted toIslam.
Yeah, and then I also remember there was the thing of him like that there had been some kind of reporting that he was riding around on ahorse.
I remember thattoo. I'm just looking at one from the DailyMail.
And itsays, one of his captors said that he converted to Islam and was going under the name Abdullah and wasquote, very relaxed in ourcompany,unquote.
It has also been claimed that Burda was so trusted by his kidnappers that they let him sleep without restraints and go bird and rabbit hunting with an old Britishrifle.
Oh, you knowwhat? That remindsme.
I heard another one that he playedsoccer.
Information likethis, I learned that intelligence analysts referred to it as strayvoltage.
By that they mean it's almost certainlyuntrue.
But still added up to people judging from theoutside, it didn't lookgood.
Mark said it made him feel like maybe Bo wasn't someone he should be caringabout, which is the opposite feeling you usually get when you hear about aPOW.
But then after Bo came back and was in Germanyrecovering, Mark talked to someone in the Intel world who knew what was goingon.
I actually remember somebody tellingme, ohyeah, he's doing a ton of Inteldebriefings.
And I waslike,oh, that'sweird.
I thought he was some kind of like Talibanguy.
And they werelike,no,no,no,no,no, he'slike, he'snot, and this was during the period when all the press reporting wasabout, youknow, how mentally damaged he was and how he wasgradually, youknow, reactivating to the world and everyone was likecautioning,like, youknow, don't expect him to pop up on TV anytime soon because he's severelytraumatized.
And then I was also hearing that likeprivately, hewas, Imean, maybe all that stuff wastrue.
And I'm sure itis, but at the sametime, he was doing a lot of Inteldebriefings.
So I waslike,wait, he's doing Inteldebrief, that doesn't sound like atraitor.
When I finally heard Bo talk about his time with theTaliban, Ithought,no, he does not sound like atraitor.
As brutal as Bo's first year in captivitywas, at least he hadplans.
His single-minded purpose was to getout.
As best as Bo canrecall, the firstescape, if you don't have the one where he ran 20 or 30 feet before he gottackled, happened the first week he was in Talibancustody.
Talibanfighters, by theway, have confirmed that Bo did escapeonce,briefly, earlyon.
And thenagain, for a longertime, roughly a yearlater.
That firstweek, Bo says he was being held at a house of somekind.
His feet were tied withropes.
A chain was wrapped in several loops around hiswrists.
He said he'd noticed that the previousmorning, a car had arrived withwater.
And as soon as itdid, everyone went inside another room fortea.
So when the car came again with thewater, Bo says he saw hischance.
He managed to manipulate the slack in the chain so that he could slip it over hisknuckles.
He untied hisfeet. The wooden doors of the room he was in were latched from the outside with a thickwire.
So he had to stick his hands through the crack to undoit.
So I'm like sticking my handout.
Imean, goodgrief. If anyone was standingoutside, they would have fully seen me fiddling with the damnwire, basically trying to open thedoor.
But no one doessee. He runsoutside, turnsright, and then realizes he's in some kind of shallow valley orplateau.
He sees three houses about 200 yardsoff.
He startsrunning. He'sshoeless.
He says there's mostly jagged rocksunderfoot.
But he sprints his bestiecan.
At the firsthouse, he sees somekids.
I see me and they startscreaming.
They run towards thehouse.
And I see a woman come running out of thegate.
And she sees me and does like that onefooted,like,stutter,stop,bang, and she runs back into thehouse.
He keepsgoing. She's a group of men standingaround.
The men also seehim. So Bo runs towards sometrees, passes the secondhouse, comes to thethird, decides to climb onto theroof.
And I get to the top of theroof.
And there's like a mud puddlethere.
And I'm stayinglow. I basically just slide onto theroof, which happens to be covered inmud.
And I rolled a few times to try and cover myself because I eat moremud.
And it almostworked. But the men find him upthere, lead him backdown.
Is it kind of an interestingmoment?
I don't know if I told youthis.
I get to theground,right?
And I guess the old lady from thehouse, like some old woman from thehouse, had come out at thecommotion.
And all these young guysare, everybody's talkingloudly.
I'm covered inmud. And this old woman comes up tome, and she tries to start trying to wipe the mud off myface.
And one of the young guys grabs her by the arms and just like kind of chucks her behindthem.
She like yells at them and they leave meoff.
Start to finish the escape lasted maybe 10 or 15minutes, bothsays.
But the aftermath wassevere.
They brought Bo back to where they'd been holdinghim.
And once eveningcame, Bo says they beat him with a rubberhose.
At first it was one guy who spoke someEnglish.
He'd twirl and twirl thehose, and then whack it against Bo'sfeet.
Or if Bo covered his feet with hishands, he'd whack hishands.
He doesn't know exactly how long thatlasted, but it was a longwhile, hesays.
The next morning a whole group of men came in with a guy who seemed to be anelder, and they all took turns hitting Bo with thehose, until the older man called them off and took his ownturn.
And then thatevening, both things it wasevening, he's notsure.
He says he was blindfolded this wholetime.
They movedhim. They moved him into a new place because I'm pretty sure they'relike,oh, he saw where wewere, or someone might have seenhim.
And so we got to movehim.
How areyou? And then in the newplace, how are you inprison?
Or how did theycontinue?
In the newplace, they put me on a Afghan bed and changed my feet to the end of the bed and changed my hands to the tops of thebed.
So I was basically spread eagle on the bed andblindfolded.
And that's how I spent basically the majority of the next threemonths.
Threemonths, Bo waschained, spread eagle to abed, andblindfolded.
He was allowed to get up twice a day to use atoilet, hesays.
That'sit. In a statement Bowrote, it was released as part of his legalcase.
He said that because of the heat andsweat, his body got sore and raw where it was in contact with thebed.
His eyes burned from the pressure of theblindfold.
He could never wipe the salt fromthem.
He developed open wounds on hisankles, an infection which seemed to spread to hisforehead.
They'd beat the bottoms of his feet and other parts of his body with a coppercable.
Bo says there came a day when he tried to walk and his guard saw his legs were shaking fromweakness.
Afterthat, they rearranged one of hisarms, secured it down my aside instead of over hishead, which allowed him to at least situp.
The room had dirt walls and a dirtfloor, Bosays.
Every three or fourweeks, he could shower and wash hisclothes.
By the time six monthshit, Bo haddiarrhea.
He would have diarrhea for roughly three and a halfyears.
No toilet paper or regular access towater.
Most of thetime, his food was scant and cameunpredictably.
In the broadeststrokes, his captivity consisted of twintorments, isolation andsickness.
Or as Bo's principal military debriefer describedit, there were roughly three phases to Bo'scaptivity.
Phaseone,torture, phasetwo,abuse, phasethree,neglect.
The timedeprivation, too much light or too much darkness and too much randomness just wears away at you and just drives your nerves into theground.
Yeah. Youknow, in the constant worryof, am I gonna die today or something worse gonna happentoday?
Am I gonna get food today or am I gonna be able to go to the bathroom without some kind of problem happening or is thisconstant?
So I'd sayis. The conversations between Bo and Mark started just a few months after Bo cameback.
Bo talks a lot about how he's numb or distant ordisconnected, which actually has the benefit of helping him talk about whathappened.
Still, the details about the worst episodes are sometimes hard to say and hard for Mark to takein.
As astory, it'sreally, it'soverwhelming.
Youknow, I can comprehend it in little bits andpieces.
Like the isolated stuff as it goes along these details that you're giving me each one of them makessense, youknow?
And they're kind of not that hard to imagine because you're good at describingit.
But then when you accumulate them all together and you think about this stretch of time and you think about just day in and dayout, that's when it becomes sort of incomprehensiblydark, youknow?
No. It'sjust, and I understand why theguys, the seer guys and the psychologists were so surprised that you weren't a totalvegetable, youknow?
No. Because I think that that'sa, that would have been enough to basically put95% of people in a turn them intopotatoes.
Yeah. Bo was being held by theHakanis, a group run by very powerful Pashtun family allied with theTaliban.
Their base to NorthWaziristan, which is in Pakistan's tribalregion, borderingAfghanistan.
The Hakanis had agreed to hold Bo for theTaliban.
And the guy in charge of Bo's physical person was MullahSangin.
But Bo says he only saw Sangin maybe half dozen times over theyears.
Inall, Bo says he was kept in maybe eight differentlocations, differentcompounds, different rooms made of mud orcement.
Bo says especially at thebeginning, the Taliban questionedhim.
But he said they weren't what you might normally think of as aninterrogation.
The questions were strange and sometimesincoherent.
Questionlike, youknow, youknow, the officers on yourbase, how did they get theirprostitutes?
We know that you guys bring costumes onbase.
And youknow, they're trying to find every 30 ofthem,oh, youknow, youguys, youknow, what kind of alcohol youdrink, we know you all drinkand, youknow, what aboutdrugs?
And they askyou, is Obama gay andsweet-spin-ed?
And then they ask youabout, youknow, how good a camera's to the drones that haveor, youknow, they ask youanything.
Thankfully, the guy who did speak English and was asking me likeinformation, like militaryinformation, he knew everything and he wasn't interested in what I had to say because he didn't trustme.
And so he never really asked me anything that was that Ididn't, youknow, one that I couldanswer.
At one time he asked me how many bombs could fit on a bomber and I had no idea because I'm not a Air Forcepilot.
This hodgepodge of perfectly reasonablequestions, how do the droneswork?
And then a kind of crazytalk, is it true all American women are prostitutes that they sleep withanimals?
It makes you wonder whether they're just trying to rile-bow up or whether their understanding of our world is as paltry as our understanding oftheirs.
Something I learned reallyquickly, was if you show hesitation in telling themsomething, then they think they're on tosomething.
But ifyou, if they ask you a question and you just start talking tothem, like if you're talking to a normalperson, then they get extremely suspicious because theythink,well, if he has no problem telling methis, then there's something wrong with thatinformation.
So eitherway, they pretty much assume you'relying, which is maybe why they didn't really press them too hard on any of thisstuff.
High-ranking Taliban told us through reporter Sammy Yusuf's eyethat,yeah, Bo didn't give them any useful intelligence orcooperation.
Besides, Bo said the Taliban get most of theirinformation.
Information they consider more trustworthy from Afghan interpreters who work with USforces.
So Bo's value wasn't in what heknew.
It was in the sheer fact ofhim, a US soldier that belonged tothem.
So getting information for me wasn't like their mainpriority.
Getting videos out of me was what they wanted todo.
You might have seen some of these videos on theinternet.
Bo said they made probably a dozen of them that were neverreleased, but a small handfulwere.
Bo said the Taliban spent a lot of time makingthem.
They're moraleboosting.
Plus, he says the Taliban love to embarrass the United States anyway theycan.
But you can't make too many videos or release too many because every time youdo, you're exposingyourself.
Details about the staging or someone's accent or the production values or the decor might give your locationaway.
Bo says they'd sometimes make a number of videos during the sameshoot, changing the backdrop or his clothes or his hair or his beard to pretend the videos had been taken at different times in differentlocations.
The guy who made Bo's videos spokeEnglish, seemed Westerneducated.
He had a slight Britishaccent.
He'd come into Bo's room always with the same irritatinggreeting.
Tosay,well, lookup.Yeah, that was a person who's been reaching the guy who could speak fairly goodEnglish.
That was always theirthing.
They werelike, what thefuck?
And you'dsay, I'm going to take a video of you and you need to think about what you're going to say through PresidentObama.
And you need to talk about how terrible the whole army is and how badly you were treated in it or how corrupt the call physicians are and stuff likethat.
And did you have to work on youranswers?
Well, like the first time he talked tome, I gave him answers in use all the side ofthat.
But the moment he turned the cameraon, I couldn't even forget how that was supposed tosay.
Afterthat, they wrote everythingdown.
One would expect that they would just be treated me as my country's army has treated their Muslim prisoners inbackground.
In the BontanmoBay, I would rock in many other secret prisons that I didn't around theworld.
So when I bear withthis, I was continuouslytreated.
As a humanbeing, I think I needyou.
In thisvideo, Bo's wearing a camouflage jacket and helmet andsunglasses.
He looks reallyweird. He said the sunglasses were so you couldn't see his eyes reading thepaper.
Andalso, maybe because the Taliban think sunglasses lookcool, whichagreed.
I had nobody to pry me up my clothes and take pictures of menaked.
I had no dogs barking at me and bitingme.
It's my country has done the Muslim prisoners in the jails oflanguage.
When he made thatvideo, Bo says the bed he was chainedto, spreadeagle, was just off to hisleft.
The videos hit this theme alot.
How well he's being treated compared to how the US treats Talibanprisoners.
How about it would you have been treatingyou?
He says how are Mujahideen treatingyou?
They're treating me better than I have been treated and just as a guest in a regular household inAmerica.
The video is also hit other common Taliban talkingpoints.
One of which is that the US government is lying to the American public about how many American soldiers have been killed inAfghanistan.
The Americans claim that so many few hundreds of big so far were this true or was it morehigh?
I believe the death toll of Americans in Afghanistan is higher than what the government allows the world toknow.
The army has moral guidelines for how a soldier is supposed to behave if he or she is captured by theenemy.
It's called the Code ofConduct.
Itsays, among otherthings, if I amcaptured, I will continue to resist by all meansavailable.
I will make every effort toescape.
I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to mycomrades.
And whenquestioned, besides Namor and ConcertialNumber,quote, I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of myability, I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies are harmful to theircause.
Soldiers I talked to from Bose battalion told me the fact that Bose appears in these videos at all that he's answering theirquestions, repeating their talkingpoints.
That right there is an obvious violation of the Code ofConduct.
Theysaid, even if someone has a gun to yourhead, and by theway, Bose says there were guys with guns on these videoshoots, you don't participate in the enemy's propagandacampaign.
Well, that's actually an interpretation of the Code that military officials do not agreewith.
That is not the standard the Army is asking soldiers to live upto.
You are not expected to die refusing to make avideo.
In the first and second GulfWars, American POW showed up in propaganda videostoo.
And the military didn't blame them forit.
They understand that as aprisoner, you're going to be compelled to do things you don't want todo.
Andalso, while the US military isn't going to encourage you to be in a video if you'recaptured, there is an upside to beingfilmed.
Your government has proof you'realive.
At a military hearing on Bose'scase, TerrenceRussell, the guy who debriefedBose, said in thesevideos, Bose did what he had todo.
And that as the videos goon, you can see him getting better atresisting, at minimizing the propagandavalue.
In the very firstvideo, the Talibanreleased, mid-July2009, about three weeks after Bosedisappeared, Bose sitting in front of a table with some green liquid in a bigmug.
MarkAspo, what itwas. MountainDew.
MountainDew.Like, if you want to piss those people off in thatcountry, all you do is cut off their sugarsupply.
It's in this video that Bose explains how he wascaptured.
Oh, how canwe, we use the risk to captureit?
It was captured outside ofthis.
It's caughtup. What were youdoing?
I was behind thepatrol.
I was slaying behind the patrol when I wascaptured.
This was widely reported back in theUS, that Bose said he was caught while lagging behind on apatrol.
Andagain, a bunch of the soldiers I talked to mentionthis, that when they heard it and made themmad, because it's such obviousnonsense, US soldiers do not lag behind on patrols inAfghanistan, and then just disappear without anyonenoticing.
It's not athing. So when they heard it was in thevideo, some of them saw it as evidence that Bose was lying about whathappened.
Bose waslying. Hesays, ofcourse, he waslying.
He says he knew that Americans listening would know it wasbaloney.
That was thepoint. There was one way in the video of basically tellingpeople,hey, what I'm saying in this video is the lifepre-staged.
It's pre-rehearsed and has nothing to do withreality.
Was it all rehearsed orstaged?
Yeah. Itwas. So none of it wasyou, the realyou.
Imean, wouldyou? It was a desperate me trying to figure out how to stay on edge of not cooperating with them and yet cooperating them with them to the point that they don't shootme.
The guy's guarding Bose don't speakEnglish, which makessense.
Why wouldthey? But also that same hiring King Taliban told us they don't necessarily want someone like Bose near anyone who speaks English because they might saysomething, justinadvertently, and it could help them with anescape.
But even if they couldn't really talk tohim, Bose says they interacted withhim.
They messed withhim. They throw things at him or point an AK-47 athim.
Justkidding. Once they tried to make him smoke a cigarette with a little firecracker init, when he handed itback, he yelled bang and one of theguards.
Afterthat, the guy gave him lessfood.
Bose learned not to sleep in the daytime because it left him open to theseguys.
They might take anyopportunity.
Picture being shaved by the Taliban with a straightrazor.
He'shandcuffed. Eventhen, when he couldn't be morevulnerable, they'd have a laugh at hisexpense.
And what they really find hilarious is a guy who has abeard, but he doesn't have amustache.
OK.OK. So what happened was the jokes came in the sense that they shaved my face in the way that most of them usedthem.
Isee. And they take videos or takepictures.
You have to laugh at yourself in order to keep things from gettingworse.
Butbasically, the reality of the situation was the butt of the joke wasme.
And that just was something I had toaccept.
SammyUsafsai, the Afghanreporter, interviewed some people who had dealings with Bose while he was incaptivity.
A big shot who came by and talked to BonoSelle, a guy who cooked forhim, a friend of one of theguards, someone from Molosangin'sentourage.
What Sammy took away from these interviews was that keeping Bergdahl was number onestressful.
You have to keep him away fromeverybody, not only fromdrones.
You have to keep him away fromAl-Qaeda, Arabs andbandits.
And because if somethinghappened, but then you areresponsible, you will bebeaten.
You are arrestedby, so that'swhy.
These guards are watching the only US soldier who's ever been taken prisoner in thiswar.
Other groups might want to steal him fromthem.
Sammy said the guards had heard talk that some Arabs and masks had almost made it to the house where they were holding bow and that Molosangin had captured andexecuted.
Some people he thought were being paid by the US for information onbow.
So even though it's a prestigiousjob, it stillsucks.
Yeah. Isee. It's still mentally a lot of pressure andboring.
Andboring, Ithink. It couldhappen.
Andboring. That's the other thing Sammy heard in theseinterviews, how tedious it was forthem, which is probably where the stupid and sometimes sadistic jokes comein.
These guys are mostly youngmen.
They're stuck inside a compound or some other prison location while their pals are maybe out and about enjoyingthemselves.
Youknow, havingfun, dancing or something ordancing, buthere, youknow, you arebored.
Nobody has allowed to come tovisit.
Because of thisguy, we are introuble.
We cannot goaround. We cannot go to thecity.
We cannot make a phone call because there wasnothing.
So even for theguards, youknow, they were not reallyhappy.
Right. Butstill, since they were theorders, then I'm sure the Molosangin was promising them alot, but I thinkthat's...
Yeah. This is big chicken and you will have more money andeverything.
Sammy talked to a friend of one of the guards who told him that to amusethemselves, they'd think up things to do to bow or how to get rid ofbow.
They had a long hypothetical discussion about circumcisinghim.
They talked about selling him or maybe calling in a phony tips the Americans that they had Osama binLaden.
So there'd be a raid and they could be done withit.
In otherwords, they're young guys shooting theshit, followingorders.
Bose keepers would make him watch execution videos of beheadings or suicidebombers.
Bose had the very first day they gothim.
They showed him a video of Mujahideen executingprisoners.
He talks to Mark a lot about these videos and part because he's still affected bythem.
Certain details lodged in hishead.
Inone, a man is about to bebeheaded.
He looksterrified, he'ssilent, and a rooster iscrowing.
ForBose, the videos were obviously disturbing on theirface, but they were also a grizzly warning that this could happen to him at anytime.
Every group I wentto, they all had their own videos to showme.
And were they showingit?
You'relike, this is shit that we've done or just off the other people we know aredumb.
The majority of them was this is what other people havedone.
A few of them havebeen, this is what our people havedone.
And there is one guy whowas, I wouldsay,literally, youknow, basically out of hismind, infact, to the point where the other Taliban calledhim, CrazyTaliban.
Whatwas? What were the best forthat?
They used CrazyTaliban.
Oh,OK. Theyhad, theyused, because he had been inbackground.
And so they called him CrazyTaliban.
And hewould, he would tell me that he wouldkill, he'd killed like one time on one of hisshifts.
He told me hekilled, he'd be capitated toguys.
And then a few monthslater, he cameback.
And he told me that he had doneanother.
Oh, while he was in theinterim,when, while he hadn't seenyou?
Yeah, while he hadn't seenme.
And the people he waskilling, he called them just just in those of the guys who were basically their Afghans who betrayed their brothers orAmericans.
During all thistime, Bo is scheming andplotting, gathering information that he hopes will get him out and that he can deliver back to theUS,which, by theway, hedoes.
TerrenceRussell, at the militaryhearing, said he and otherdebris, intelligencedebris, seerpsychologists, FBIagents, all found Bo eager to download whatever intel hecould,and,quote, remarked on the quality of information Sergeant Bergdahl wasproviding,unquote.
Also, they praised hisrecall.
Bo said he was trying all the time to store in his memory mental pictures of every detail hecould.
For thismission, he pretty much starts from zero when he's chained down andblindfolded.
When he can'tsee, helistens, tries to discern the daily patterns of the people who kept him when theyslept, when theyate, how their familieswork, who's related towhom.
He didn't know if it would be useful to him or to someone else backhome, but incase.
As he gets moved around from house to house and is allowed marginally more freedom to see and tostand, he sponges up new bits ofinformation.
He ends up staying a while at a house owned by a guy he thinks was namedday.
By thistime, Bo was sofilthy, he smelled sobad.
He said the young women and little boys were not resented having to deal withhim.
They might spill his food onpurpose.
Once a boy beat him over the head with his ownchain, as best as Bo couldtell, it was because he'd beenhumming.
Bo started to suss outinformation.
There's one little kid who came in and he was really enthusiastic to show me this hat that he had and it was given to him by hisbrother.
He was actually a blue baseballcap.
Oh,okay. And he showed it to me and on the baseballcap, that the name of the school in the quarters that the name of the town in the other side is thatNorth, with the EarthStand.
All inEnglish?Yeah, all inEnglish.
Oh, so like somebody had given it tothem, like some like NGL orsomebody.
Well, that was their schooluniform.
So maybe that was the name of the place he wasin.
North was EarthStand. Now he just have to figure out exactly where North was Earth Standwas.
Everywhere he washeld, hesaid, except for one place in themountains, he was pretty sure he wasn't too far from when he assumed was an Americanbase.
He could hearartillery, he could see helicopters losing altitude toland, he could hear the scream of planeengines.
Infact, what he was hearing was almost certainly a Pakistanibase, but Bo couldn't knowthat.
The best he couldfigure, he was still inAfghanistan, very near theborder.
Bo had no special training and had to survive any ofthis, had to deal withabuse, had to gatherintel, had to resist while making it look like you'recooperating.
As an armyprivate, he'd had what's called A level C ortraining, the most basic level ofsurvival,evasion,resistance, and escapetraining.
And what it consisted of at the time of Bo'sdeployment, according to Bo's seniordebriefer, wasquote, here's the code ofconduct,unquote.
So he's just puzzling it out as hegoes, trying things and then trying themagain.
Day's house is a sort of mudhut.
Bo attempts to dig himself out something like fivetimes.
To get rid of the dirt he loosed from thewall, he'd mix it with his own urine orfeces, and then smear it back on thewall.
The pebbles and rocks were harder to disposeof.
At the samehouse, there was adog, a pretty aggressive dog that the little boys andmen, especially were scaredof.
Bo said the women sometimes gave itleftovers, so it was nicer tothem.
Bo knew if he tried toescape, he couldn't have the dog freaking out and barredup.
He couldn't have the dog freaking out andbarking.
So he started sneaking a bit of food out to it when he was led to thelatrine, which was right near where the dogslept.
In thatway, Bo made peace with thedog, who eventually began sleeping in the room where Bowas, which is captures thought was totallyweird.
Incidentally, someone who analyzed Intel in Bo's case told me one of the rumors they heard along the way was that Bo had apuppy, possibly a German shepherdpuppy, which the analyst took to besilliness.
But maybe this sometimes vicious guard dog was the so-calledpuppy.
Over themonths, Bo managed to gather smallitems, which he turned intotools.
And by the end of that firstyear, takentogether, they'd become his escapekit.
He had a length of PVCtube, maybe eight incheslong.
He'd been able to keep with them since the very firsthouse.
In one of therooms, he shoved it into the wall and peed outit, so his urine wouldn't just be in theroom.
The pipe will reappear later as part of acrossbar.
He found a nail in a mudwall.
He could make holes withit, scrape away dirt withit, clean his fingernails withit.
And when the timecame, he'd spend weeks rubbing the head of it on a rock until it was just the right shape to get theold, tiny shackles off hiswrists.
He stored the nail in the sole of hisshoe.
But probably the biggest score was thekey.
The men and boys had come into hisroom.
One of the boys was holding a bunch of keys on a string and he droppedthem.
And when hedid, one of the keys gotaway.
It fell right near the mat where Boslept.
So Bo slid itunderneath.
He said nobody seemed to notice it wasmissing.
It wasn't the key to the padlocks he needed toopen.
But Bo says the locks were these cheaply made Chinese locks and that by wiggling the key justso, he could hit the sweet spot and pop themopen.
And with that one key and using thattechnique, it allowed me toopen, Ithink, the three padlocks that they're using hold my of the chains around my feet and the chains that were chainedto,yeah, the door or where it was that they were chainingit.
So over theyear, over themonths, I was able to keep thiskey.
Bo had tried many miniescapes.
He'd gotten as far as a courtyard up to awall.
But they wereforays,really.
His biggest best chance came when he was at a remote place in themountains.
This was the farthest he ever was from a populatedarea.
It's basically a Talibanprison.
Bo calls it the mountainfortress.
Because it wasliterally, it looked like a fortress because it had this really tall battle and tight-fing that it was like a lookout tower orsomething.
And I know it was old because the wood that was used to make the rafters and the pillars and the stairs and everything was just this really oldwood.
And it was actually handchiseled.
You could see the chiseledmarks.
In the mountainfortress, Bo was kept in a second-storyroom, which waspadlocked.
But there was a window without bars onit.
This place was soold. And he seemed so pathetic by thatpoint.
He says his guards weren't taking extraprecautions.
Bo had thenail, thekey, the PVCpipe, plus a wooden stake that was in theroom.
He had an empty leader bottle of MountainDew, ahat, ablanket, hissandals.
He went forit. And so in the middle of thenight, Ibasically, I put everythingtogether.
I practiced all the nights before counting the hours down to the point where everything wassilent.
So I knew everyone was asleep from the mostpart.
And I practiced the nights beforeputting, like with nosight, just allfeeling, putting everythingtogether, putting the tie and my bedtogether, giving the padlockoff, giving my hand justoff, tying up the water bottles that Ihad.
So thenfinally, and once that allthat, I threw the makeshift rope about thewindow.
The rope was made from the two chains he'd nowliberated.
Each about six feetlong, hesays, plus hisbedding.
It ended up being quite a bit longer than heneeded.
The drop to the ground was only about 15feet, but Bo didn't knowthat.
I used the PVC pipe and PVC pipe to stay as a crossbar to brace in thewindow.
And it allowed me to climbout.
There's a reason maybe you haven't heard other American POW escapestories.
It's because there hasn't been a successful one since the VietnamWar.
Again, the code of conduct says you're supposed to attemptit, but the Armyunderstands, especially sinceVietnam, that the odds are usually and overwhelmingly againstyou.
If you're a POW and you assess the situation and youdecide, it's highly unlikely I can make it out that window without beingshot.
It's highly unlikely that even if I do make itout, I'll be able to blend in with the localpopulation.
And it's highly likely that if the enemy findsme, they will torture or killme.
Sono, I'm not gonna try to go out thatwindow.
That is right andfine. No one will fault you forit.
Tome, more thananything, this moment in the mountain fortress puts all the talk about Bo being a sympathizer torest.
Bo did not sympathize with theTaliban.
He loathed theTaliban.
So much so that even when he'ssick, when he doesn't have anyfood, when he's already been punished for escaping the firsttime, he knows what that'slike.
Andstill, he goes out thewindow.
At thebottom, he makes a bag out of hisblanket, puts his water bottle init, slings it over his shoulder and startswalking.
Bosays, apart from beingrescued, it was maybe the best moment of his fiveyears.
It was like a hugeweight, which was lifted off myback.
And it gotsuddenly, mysickness, suddenly all the pain just didn't matteranymore.
And it was justwalking.
It's high desertterrain, cold atnight, hot in theday,rocky.
There are bushes and trees that Bo said look like Joshua trees and somethingpining, not a lot ofcover.
But his immediate objective is not tohide, though he'll have to do a lot of hide inobviously.
But rightnow, he's trying to get as far away as he can from thefortress.
He wants to spread the search party as thinly aspossible.
He heads what he hopes issoutheast, intending to go intoPakistan.
He figures he's got a better shot at encountering someone non-hostile to him inPakistan.
But the terrain is sodifficult.
He's in theseshort,steep, mazymountains.
You get overone, there's immediately anotherone.
And they're all about the sameheight, so it's not like you can reach a peak and get yourbearings.
See the twinkle of a friendly fob in thedistance.
He climbs anddescends, sometimes scooting on hisbutt.
All thewhile, he's listening for water to replenish his waterbottle.
He reaches a valley and it'spopulated.
He keeps having to veer this way orthat, skirt offense or house or a sheep herderstent.
So, stupidly trying to put distance between me and thetent, I wasn't taking my time and taking it slow andeasy.
And I step off acliff. I don't know howlong, I don't know how big of a drop itwas.
It was a big enough drop for me to think on the waydown.
It was like the initial drop was like a goodgrief.
But then I kept falling to the point where I got over the surprise that I wasfalling.
And I started tothink, and I started thinking you've got to be kiddingme.
It cannot be this fardown.
Bo lands on a dry riverbed on his leftside.
He said the word oof actually came out of hismouth, just like in acartoon, loud enough so that some dogs started barking their headsoff.
Maybe about30, 40 feet away from where I hadfallen.
There was acreek. So I wanted to fill up my water bottle because that's what I was lookingfor.
So I drank as muchwater.
And like when I pulled the water bottleout, that was when I realized that I couldn't actually move my fingers to theleft, my lefthand.
So that couldn't get that topoff.
So that was myfirst, youknow, first inklingthat, youknow, what I did to my left side was a lot worse than what I was feeling at thetime.
You're adrenaline must have just been pumping so hard this wholetime.
Yeah. Iwas, and I think that's the reason why I didn't feel what I ended up feeling about maybe 15 minuteslater.
He's done something terrible to his left leg and his leftarm.
And the pain of that starts to wash overhim, and then juststay.
It's gettinglater, it's gonna be lightsoon.
So Bo uses this small length of bar that had been used to hold his feettogether, and he uses it to claw at the earth at the base of a tree to make ahole.
It's mulchy and then just rocksunderneath, but it's goodenough.
He piles the dirt around the hole to make aberm, and then sticks branches into theberm, so it blends into the landscapebetter.
Then he gets into the hole and pulls his blanket overhimself.
And then I take a bunch of that pine needles from the tree and I sprinkle them all over theblanket.
And I sit there and wait me out by thattime.
The sun was already starting to come up over therises.
So that was his first night offreedom.
Inall, Bo says this escape lasted about ninedays.
In interviews with Sammy and another mediareports, the Taliban admit this escapehappened, though their versions vary in terms of how it happened and how long itlasted, generally they say two to threedays.
Bo's debriefers settled on 8.5days.
Once morninghits, Bo has to stay put in thehole.
He can't move around in theday.
And where heis, it'spopulated, and it'srural, so people walkeverywhere.
There are footpaths crisscrossing all over theplace.
Over the comingweek, while he's hiding in holes or trenches during theday, Bo says there were so many closecalls.
Sheep that came close andspooked, women outgathering something or other from thebushes.
Men, he could tell there were men withguns, he could hear the clack of themetal.
There was a scare with aflashlight.
The time when he heard the familiar beeping of those Motorola-typewalkie-talkies, the Talibanuse.
A time when little girls wandered off the road and up the hill where he washiding.
These little girls have got advantage ofhim,maybe, maybe three orfour.
This tiny littlething, they come walkingalong.
And apparently they're looking for flowers orsomething.
Yeah. Suddenly they see her off theroad.
They come almost directly towardsme.
They pass right by hisfeet, keepgoing.
They're talking to eachother, immersed in whatever they'redoing.
And then they come back down the hill and both says they passed right by hishead, tiny obliviousgirls.
Bo can't walk properly because his left side is hurting sobadly.
So he's crawling along on a combination of elbows and knees or on hisbutt.
It's not goingwell. On top ofeverything, he really has no idea where he'sgoing.
He's completelylost. He'd learned celestial navigation as akid, but now he can't recall how the big dipper relates to the NorthStar.
The water he's drinking isfetid, like it's seen too manysheep.
He's eatinggrass.Still, everythingwas.
There wasn't enough grass in that countrythere.
Make adifference. It was like anything when I did maybe every now andagain, I'd be able to pick like a little 20 or 30 little strands of grass and eatthat.
It says his bow isshrinking, getting smaller and morehelpless, moreprimitive.
His shit is completelygreen.
He's stuck in a hole allday.
He's down tonothing, noresources.
And right abovehim, some of the highest tech equipment in the world for seeing andfinding.
Drones, Americandrones, guided by Americaneyes.
And bow and these dronepilots, they can't reach eachother.
Go says he remembers one night being on top of amountain.
Looking up at thesky, Iremember.
And I was seeinglike, thick drones moving across thesky.
And youknow, it's justreally, it's not a bigfeeling.
You're soclose. Andyet, things are so stacked against you that it'sjust, youknow, it'simpossible.
But youknow, you can't do anything but just keepgoing.
Sometimes you think about what he'd do if a friendly convoy or patrol cameby, how he'd safely get theirattention.
If you ran at them in his Afghanclothes, they might think he was a suicidebomber.
So he figured he'd take all his clothes off because atall,skinny, naked white guy coming atyou, something to pauseover,perhaps.
If anyone had come acrossBo, they'd probably have taken in thefollowing.
He's in pain on his leftside.
He's in gastricdistress.
He'sstarving. He'sscared.
And he'slost. Did you ever think that during the course of the escape that maybe you made amistake, thatthe, youknow, beingout, that escaping was maybe more treacherous than just stayingput?
Youknow, I knew it was like before Iescaped, I knew it was going to bemore, there's going to be more immediaterisk.
Yeah. Youknow, in order to get myself out thewindow, I had to basically come to terms with the fact that this was very much like a suicidemission, youknow, it was like one wayout.
And I was looking for a needle in the haystack as far as beingsaved, as far as finding some safepoint.
But it waslike,OK, if I'm going to die either from exposure out there or being shot by aescape, it's better than having my head cut off because I saw enough of those movies forvideos, I saw enough of thoseto, youknow, knowwhat, what that would belike.
Toward theend, Bo was too debilitated to cover muchground.
His hunger pangs weregone, but he was blacking out when he stoodup, getting tunnelvision.
He didn't exactly stop caring about gettingcaught.
More like he stopped having the energy to beafraid.
He remembers one of the last nights watching the sun go down and his only thought was that it wasbeautiful.
On the lastday, Bo says he had passed out on top of amountain.
And when he cameto, he started trying to make some sort of brace out of sticks for his leftknee.
And he heard voices and rustlingbushes.
And belowhim, he saw the search party coming up themountain.
He wascaught. Because of thedrones, the men wanted to get him off the mountain as quickly as theycould.
They took him back to theprison.
One of the olderguys, both things he might have been a relative of Molossangin attackedhim, tried to rip his hairout, his beardout, which Bo says he mostly succeeded indoing.
But Bo says he was so out ofit, he didn't really feelit.
He wasn't beaten more thanthat.
He says maybe because they knew looking athim, he might not survive abeating.
They threw Bo in aroom, let himsleep.
The nextmorning, they cleaned him up and they took him to a meeting withMolossangin, whose principal message to Bowas, if you try to escapeagain, we'll just killyou.
Imean, did you apologize tothem?
No. Inever, I neverapologize.
For trying toescape?Yeah.
I'd probably wouldhave.
Yeah. And I think that it was the last time I saw stars until the night special forces picked meup.
That was a longtime. About fouryears, infact.
And while he'swaiting, so many people would be trying to get Bo away fromSongin, all these huge military and diplomatic forces about to kickin.
Just as the United States isrealizing, we need to get out of thiswar.
And then things get reallyinteresting.
Next time onserial. CERAL is produced by JulieSnyder, DanaChivasinme, in partnership with MarkBowle, MeganEllison, HugoLingerin, JessicaWeisberg, PageOne, and Anna PernaPictures.
Ira Glass is our editorialadvisor.
Whitney Dangerfield is our digitaleditor, research by KevinGarnett, fact checking by MichelleHarris, copy editing by AnnaHidalani.
Our music is composed by NickForburn, FritzMyers, and MarkPhillips.
The show is mixed by KateBalinsky.
Kristen Taylor is our communityeditor.
Other serialstaff, SethLind, EmilyCondon, EliseFerguson, and KimberlyHenderson.
Special thanks this week to BlakeMorrison, StudioRodrigo, ChrisRodin, and AndrewCook-Louis.
Our website isserialpodcast.org, where you can listen to all of ourepisodes, sign up for ournewsletter, read articles by the serialstaff, and check outmaps,videos, andmore.
Thisweek, we've posted a photograph that Bosa's was taken right after his bigescape, right after his meeting with MelissaAngin.
Again, that'sserialpodcast.org.
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Was it worse than arag? Thatdeployment, Imean?
Itwas,yeah, it wasworse.
You're in mylife. It washorrible,yeah.
Your operations order had something to do with Bo Burgdall then people were going to give it the stamp ofapproval.
Say, goahead, smash down some doors and ask somequestions.
I have someguilt.Like, maybe there's something I coulddo, but then whatif?
