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Previously oncereal. Gentlemenly is a goodword.
He has very much agentleman.
Coast Guard boot camp is still kind of a traditional bootcamp.
Do you think he'slying?
And then all of asudden, he shows up in hisuniform.
Yeah. From this American life in WBEZChicago, it'scereal.
One story told week byweek.
I'm SarahKaine. I think the following will likely be a question at Bose CourtMarshall.
Did the Army screw up by accepting Bo by deploying him toAfghanistan?
Just to remindyou, Bo was separated from the Coast Guard in 2006 after he became overwhelmed and had a breakdown during basictraining.
The Army in order to enlist him two years later would have to wave its usualstandards, which itdid.
So the question actuallyis, did the Army recruiting process work like it was supposedto?
Bo's separation from the Coast Guard wasn't labeled a psych discharge onpaper, but that's essentially what itwas.
So did the Army misssomething?
We talked to a retired Armypsychiatrist,Dr.
Ellsworth CameronRichie.
She was deployed allover.
She was chief of forensic psychiatry and also of inpatient psychiatry at WalterReed.
And she was psychiatry consultant to the Army SurgeonGeneral, the top mental health advocacy position in theArmy.
Dr. Richie's assessment of how all this went down withBo.
Eh, she thought the whole thing sounded prettynormal, like standardpractice.
The fact that the Army didn't have all the details about Bo's hospitalization in the CoastGuard, notuncommon.
She said getting access to more detailed medicalinformation, especially between branches of themilitary, in this case Coast Guard andArmy, was hard because the military's network system wasn't sohot.
Information sharing wasincomplete.
But she also didn't feel like anything we told her about Bo'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 hadrecommended.
Even if Bo had been assessedby,say, an Armypsychiatrist,Dr.
Richie said it probably would have been onesession.
And unless you showed obvious outward signs of psychosis or something likethat, you're really depending on the potential recruit to self-report any psychologicalproblems.
So it's quite possible Bo would have been okayedregardless.
At the end of theday,Dr.
Richie toldus, the best assessment for whether someone's gonna make it in the Army doesn't happen in the recruitment officeanyway.
It happens during the sustained high-pressure test of basictraining.
And Bo did really well in Army basictraining.
So that's oneview. Now for a secondopinion.
Somewhere the ball hasdropped.
This isDr. MichaelValdivino's.
He's a clinicalpsychologist.
He's in the Air Force for about seven and a halfyears.
And he worked in the CERprogram, which teachessurvival,evasion,resistance, andescape.
He knowsBo. Infact, Valdivino's led the CER psych team that helped reintegrate Bo right after hisrescue.
Those first few weeks when Bo was at the hospital inGermany.
Twothings. Valdivino's has permission from Bo to talk to me about theirconversations.
Andalso, he was not officially Bo'sdoctor.
His job was to reintegratehim, not diagnose him oranything.
He never even saw Bo's medical record backthen.
So he's not breaking any doctor patientconfidentiality.
Well, threethings, Iguess.
The lastbeing, Valdivino cares aboutBo.
So he's not dispassionate on the question of what happens tohim.
Valdivino's view is that the army recruiter should have looked harder at Bo'ssituation, should have asked more questions before signing himup.
Even if the recruiter didn't have the particulars of Bo's Coast Guard discharge in front of him or information about Bo'shospitalization, he says the mere fact that Bo had been separated at all from a branch of the military begged morescrutiny.
Youknow, it's a pretty big deal to get separated from themilitary.
At the veryleast, I would think that this recruiter would be a little bit more concerned aboutthat.
And what would have taken it maybe a few steps further tosay,hey, let me assure that this guy is a good fit for what he's about to getinto.
Because what a separation like Bo's tellsyou, just on itsface, is that for whateverreason, this person couldn't hack it in basictraining.
And the army recruiter's job is to send that potential recruit straight back into basictraining.
In Bo'scase, the same situation he washed out of two yearsearlier.
Finally, Volvino says Bo told him that the recruiter did know about his problems in the CoastGuard.
Because Bo says he told therecruiter.
Bo said he was afraid not to tellhim, since not a good idea to keep things from thegovernment.
Youknow, when hesaid,yeah, I told himeverything.
And when he specifically askedme, you told him exactly what happened when you broke down in training and went to the hospital and the incident in thebarracks.
And hesaid,yes, I told him all thesethings.
As part of hisapplication, Bo did a test that he had not consulted with a behavioral health care provider in the last sevenyears.
When General Dahl asked him aboutthat, Bo said the Coast Guard treatmentquote, wouldn't have triggered the idea of consulting a psychologistunquote.
Dahl found that to be consistent with Bo's other paperwork since on his medical historyforum, Bo checked yes to the question of whether he'd ever received counseling of anytype.
He said he was thinking of counseling he'd had when he was 10 yearsold.
General Dahl concluded that the Army recruiter on paper did everything he was supposedto.
Read thecodes, followed theregulations.
But in afootnote, Dahl seemed to agree that this system isn't goodenough.
That Bo's situation probably should have been looked at morecarefully.
He wrote that when you're deciding whether to reinlesssomeone, few things are more relevant than a priorseparation.
He addedquote, 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 actionunquote.
And where was Bo's head at thistime?
It'sfunny, once you hear how Bo thought about themilitary, why he wanted tojoin,hardly, it does help explain why he decided to walk off hispost.
Did you think that you were going to be a careersoldier?
This is where I was made that my mind did get lost in thefantasy.
I wanted to be asoldier, but I wanted to be asoldier, the fact that I wanted to be World War IIsoldier.
I wanted to be 1800soldier.
I wanted to be a samuraisoldier,fighter,warrior.
I wanted to be more thananything.
I wanted to be kung fufighter.
Honestly, I love the idea of just basically yourhands, and that'sit.
Right. Bo loved Bruce Lee when he was akid, but he wascool.
He watched his movies later at hisbooks.
Bo studied Asianwarriors, especiallysamurai.
He learned about the Bouchidocode, which stresses honor and loyalty andself-sacrifice.
In Bo's childhoodbedroom, his dad kept a collector set of old army manuals way up high on abookshelf, said his dad loved militaryhistory.
Bo climbed up there and got the booksdown.
Even when he couldn'tread, he'd study thepictures.
So I've been a part of this being a soldier in mymind.
I was very much less thanhistory, but that's where I ended up getting to having problems was because I wanted to be asoldier.
But the only option I had was to be a modernsoldier.
Bo's idealsoldier, the one fromhistory, fights for a cause he or she is completely personally committedto.
That soldier rallies behind military leaders that he or shetrusts.
The modern soldier turns out to have no choice about those essential aspects ofcombat.
Instead, he's a brainless private that does whatever the government tells him todo.
Gohere, gothere, go fight thesepeople.
He's just atool. That's how Bo sawit.
And the thingis, Bo knew this was going to be the case when he signedup.
He sort of knewit. He thought he could handle that gulf ofmeaning.
I was aware of thatproblem, and that was something that I had to deal with everyday.
It's like in order to play thegame, you had to play by the rules as they werebeing...
As theywere... But it doesn't mean you're not going to struggle every step of theway.
Youknow, andthen, when it's nothappening.
This is one of the things aboutBo.
He at once recognizes that his expectations wereunrealistic, that he sees things differently from otherpeople.
But at the sametime, he will fiercely defend his vision of how things shouldbe.
He does not letgo, especially when it comes to what he saw inAfghanistan.
Do you think what you witnessed and what you were reacting to was the army in an especially badway, or was it just the army being itself and kind of messed up in a kind of averageway?
Does that make anysense?
Yeah. Maybe it wasnormal.
Maybe what I was looking at was simple everyday,army,however, the way I was looking at it was this is messedup.
This shouldn't be likethis.
So here I got a list of whether it was off the chart from regularstupidity, or if it was everydaystupidity, what I was looking at wasproblems.
What I was looking at was things that needed to befixed.
So to simplysay, ohwell, that's just the normal everyday armylife.
And Schrogg and I can think of a pair of badissues,problem.
That shouldn't be accessible toanybody.
MUSIC Mark's conclusion aboutBo, after all those months of talking tohim.
He's not a conscientiousobjector.
But he's also not your casualdeserter.
He throws up his hands and justsays, I don't care about any ofthis, I'm out ofhere.
Mark thinks he's the opposite ofthat.
He's a rare person who will act rightly orwrongly, it turnsout, but still he will act according to hisprinciples.
And his principles are wrapped up with the very institution that so many people now feel hebetrayed.
It's a disillusionment of somebody that really believes in thearmy.
He's somebody that thinks that military leadership is a sacredposition.
He wants the army to bebetter.
Right. It's a military is huge forhim.
Right? It represents something that there's got to be a better word thanhuge.
But it represented something very powerful tohim, even before hejoined.
And to his sense of himself as aman, to his relationship to hiscountry, to all sorts of big identity questions that were floating around forhim.
And it's still really important tohim.
He still kind of wants his day of reckoning with thosevalues.
That's in a way why he hasn't taken the more pragmatic route through all ofthis, which would just be to sort of stick your hands out andsay, whatever you guyssay, likeguilty, just get me out ofhere.
Let's get overwith.Yeah.
I think he doesn't want to cross the line ofsaying, I had nopoint.
Which is not to say that Bo wants all this attention on himnow.
He wasn't seeking this big anaudience.
And by theway, he's not asking to be some kind of like Paulrevere.
He justwanted, hedidn't.
Bo never wanted the discussion that's happeningnow.
Right. His whole goal was to talk to was like an interfamilydispute.
He wanted to talk to people in themilitary.
Yeah. He there was actually a reporter that was sentto, there was like embedded or something with his unit that was hanging aroundthere.
And it's like he pulled the reporter aside andsaid,hey, get a load ofthis.
This will make a greatstory.
He didn't dothat. He wanted to be heard within themilitary.
So obviously that didn'thappen.
And obviously he behaved in a way which runs counter to like every single military precip ever known since the dawn oftime, which is you don't walk away from yourbrother.
So he's not a great messenger for hismessage.
But that's also it makes it kind ofinteresting.
In Bo'scase, no one saw it coming and walking off like hedid, because it's sounthinkable.
But a few people say they did start to see signs that Bo wasn't totallyOK.
At the September hearing in Bo'scase, GregLeatherman, Bo's weapons squadleader, testified that at some point he noticed something was up withBo.
Quote, it started to kind of feel that he wasn't adjusting to the deployment like the rest of the guyswere,unquote.
Leatherman said he wasn't incrediblyalarmed, but he figured he ought to say something to one of the higher ups about it just incase.
One day he's on a patrol somewhere southeast ofShirana.
And he finds himself sitting next to his firstsergeant, PabloJimenez.
Quote, and so I told first sergeant that I thought that Sergeant Bergdahl should chat withsomebody, whether it be combat stress or achaplain, or even if it were just the company commander just sit downand, heyman, how's everythinggoing?
Bo's lawyer asked Leatherman how him and his responded to hissuggestion.
I'm just going to read you that part of thetranscript.
Answer. First sergeant said that he didn't want one of his guys to tell him what was wrong in hiscompany.
So it was not my place to tell him if he had problems inside of hiscompany.
Question. I think when we interviewedyou, you had even more colorful language of what hesaid.
Yessir. Could you tell usthat?
Sure. Hesaid, fuckoff.
Hesaid, shut the fuckup.
No one needs to hear what a fucking E5 has to say about a guy in mycompany.
And Isaid, Roger forSergeant.
In hisreport, General Dahl includes a statement from him and who says he doesn't recall this conversation with Leatherman or any conversation likethat.
And that Boquote, showed no red flags or emotional problems as far as I couldtell.
Unquote. Bo's friends said from his messages and Leather's home they could tell he wasn't very happy with how things were going inAfghanistan.
And inretrospect, you can sort of see his thoughtschurning, plansforming.
On June27, just three days before Bo leftMast, he wrote a letter to hisparents,Venti, in which he sounded pretty disgusted with how the army was operating inAfghanistan.
He wrote a more loving letter to a girl he was romantically involvedwith.
He wrote groupemails. One wastitled, Who Is JohnGalt?
His friend Chad was on thatemail.
I saw it and I waslike,oh, I'm inred.
It'sOK, here wego. Youknow?
John Galt is a character from AtlasShrugged.
The very first line of the bookis, Who Is JohnGalt?
And after about 1,000pages, you finally learn that John Galt is this geniusindustrialist.
You sort of single-handedly has shut down the world's economy in order to fixit.
He stops themachine. In thebook, he finally revealshimself,delivering, I kid younot, a 60-page speech laying out hisphilosophy, orrather, I enrancephilosophy.
Andhonestly, just as anexercise, you can grab almost any sentence from that John Galt speech and apply it to what Bo ended updoing.
Forinstance,quote, a code of values accepted by choice is a code ofmorality,unquote.
Andnow, just forkicks, stirin,say, the Bouchitocode.
The part that teaches that it's your duty to try to write a moralwrong, regardless of whether you'llsucceed.
That's maybe a potentcocktail, if you'rebow.
Here's the text of Bo's June 27themail.
Quote, it is not the being of value who fails thesystem.
It is the system that has failed theman.
For man should not stoop to fit thesystem, but the system should be made and remade to fit the man who holds value asworth.
I will serve no bandit norliar.
For I know John Galt andunderstand, this life is too short to serve those who compromise value and itsethics.
I am donecompromising.
His friend Nick read thatemail, along with everyoneelse.
Were you justlike,oh,oh.
Or did you thinklike,oh, this is hisbow, like sorting through hisbow, beingbow.
Oh,yeah, these are the kinds of things he wouldsay.
Kim Harrison was on those emails too and had gotten other messages fromBo, and she was starting toworry.
She said she could tell he was frustrated that he thought his situation wasdangerous, that he was trying to hold himselftogether.
Here'sthe, he's writing thesethings, he's notes sendingemails, he's sending all these crypticthings.
He's in a state of mind was obvious tome, mentally where he wasat.
It wasstretched. It was on thatprecipice, do you know what Imean?
Where a person can make badchoices.
Like really badchoices.
I don'tthink, youknow, it's not suicidal or that kind of thing atall.
It wasjust, he'sfrustrated, he's onedge, and not really completely logical in these rightmind.
But is this what you understood at the time that you were using this inhindsight?
No,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no, no As lawyers said this carefullyphrased, but also somewhat vague thing regarding Bo's mentalhealth, he said aquote, neutral army psychiatry board has now concluded that back in June 2009 that Sergeant Bergdahl possessed a severe mental disease ordefect,unquote.
And this pastweek, I finally found out what he meant bythat.
In May of lastyear, Bo's defense team asked for what's called a 706 sanityboard, a mental healthassessment, and connection with the charges againstBo.
An army forensicpsychiatrist, a well-regarded doctor named ChristopherLang, met with Bo and gave adiagnosis, skits a typo personalitydisorder, that he said Bo would have had as of the time of the allegedmisconduct.
And I'm guessing this too will be part of Bo's defense at the court martialproceeding.
Dr.Valdevinos, the seer psychologist who knowsBo, said that when he heard thisdiagnosis, hethought,yeah, I think they hit the nail on thehead.
And there's very much that some of the things that he struggleswith, it permeates a lot of what's goingon.
You see this alot, play out through hislife, fromdevelopment, his teenageyears, to his youngadulthood.
It really does tell the story ofBo.
Unfortunately, youknow.
Again, Bo gave Valdevinos permission to talk about this withme.
He described the basiccharacteristics.
Folks who were diagnosed with typo personalitydisorder, they're generally folks who would rather beloners, youknow, they sort of lack closefriends.
They incorrectly interpretevents, including feeling like sort of external events have personal meaning tothem.
Youknow, they dress in peculiarways, sort ofeccentric, youknow, belief in sort of specialpowers, youknow, perceptualalterations, persistent and excessive sort of socialanxiety, youknow, which Bo really struggledwith.
Bo's grand ideas about hisfuture, about hiscapabilities, the romantic adventures he wanted to makehappen.
Valdevinos says those all fit theprofile.
He said for anyone with a psychiatric illness likethis, symptoms tend to get worse when you're understress.
One of the major symptoms is paranoia and the potential to misinterpretsituations.
And Valdevinos says it's not a stretch to say that's probably what happened when Bo was deployed toAfghanistan, where it's actuallydangerous.
It's obviouslystressful, but was not super tight with the guys in hisunit.
He starts to think his battalion commander is againstthem, might even send them on a suicidemission, which is very paranoidthinking.
And that all leads to a decision that isn't well entirelysane.
By thatpoint, I think the paranoia that all kind of pushed him over the edge and he said I'm doingit.
When you start thinking about the idea of him being Jason born and him doing specialoperations, it's sort of fed into that whole narrative that I'm going to be able to dothis.
I'm going to go and bring the help and not really thinking through the ramifications of walking off a base and to basically into theTaliban.
Most ofus, it would be an absolute boundary for us tosay,hey, even if I'm frustrated with mycommand, even if I'm frustrated with thismission, frustrated with thearmy, there's still something I think biologically that's going to keep us from literally walking off abase.
Right, like a self preservation at that point would take a goodeffort.
And so for him to actually dothat, you have to think throughlike,wow, how cookie thatdoes.
And when you look at the whole totalpicture, it starts to makesense.
Well, let me know things that what happened with Bo at the CoastGuard, what happened inAfghanistan, it's all thepeace.
The army knows about this diagnosis at the Septemberhearing, the Armyprosecutor, major MargaretKurtz, gave a preview of the army's thinking on thesubject.
She read aloud one of the key points from thepsychiatrist,Dr.
Lang'sreport,quote, that in2009, at the time of the alleged criminalmisconduct, the accused was able to appreciate the nature and quality and wrongfulness of hisconduct.
In otherwords, mental illness orno, Bo should be held responsible for hisactions.
The other day I checked back in with Mark to see if the diagnosis made him think differently aboutanything.
I guess it's an interesting datapoint.
I don't know that it's the north star of thestory.
Mark feels like he already knew walking off was not a rational thing todo, so putting a label on Bo's way of thinking didn't really change much forhim.
I told Mark that forme, the diagnosis made me let go of any lingering doubts I had about the truthfulness of Bo'saccount.
Like all the details that didn't addup,well,yeah, if you're paranoid and doing some magicalthinking, of course the details don't addup.
It makes me believe him that he really was in his mind trying to raise analarm.
Mark already believed Bothough.
So aside from a legaldefense, Mark wasn't sure the diagnosis made much of adifference.
And heworried, infact, that once they heard thediagnosis,people, maybe people likeme, would disregard everything Bo was saying about his militaryexperience.
I do think that foryou, thediagnosis, it makes him more credible toyou, but it also means you take him lessseriously, Ithink, as a kid withopinions, as an American soldier withopinions.
No, I don't think that's quiteright.
I think his assessments in a general way ofthe, I think we can allagree, the Warren Afghanistan has not been asuccess.
I guess I more think he was kind of right byaccident.
Oh,right. What does that mean right byaccident?
Like he sort of happens to beright, but not he's not specifically right in the particular instances he's necessarily giving as examples of the overallfailure.
But he's responding to real datapoints,right?
Imean, he's not thinking that stuff just fromhis, from his catalog cabinetIdaho.
Iguess, but Imean,again, I know we've sort of argued about omnibusbefore, but I feellike, youknow, his beef withomnibus,remember, isn't like we never should have gone out there in the firstplace.
We nevershould, you know what Imean?
His beefreally, at the end of theday, his biggest complaint is this feeling of our commander doesn't care about ourwelfare.
Yeah. And infact, 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 hisreputation.
Yeah.Right? Like that's notno.
Imean, there's a lot of different judgments that are stacked on top of eachother.
And the last oneis,is, is just deeply paranoid and you can reject it on itsface.
I don't think there's a commander in the US armed forces who would do anything remotely like what bothsuggesting.
Okay. So that I just think isjust, but theother, but the judgments that proceed that that maybe this commander has other priorities in it besides purely the welfare of hissoldiers.
I think that's clearly on the face of it true because he they did put American lives at risk to retrieveequipment.
And that is part of the calculation of war and you can talk to people and up and down the chain of command and they'llsay,yeah, shit like that happens all the time where you weigh someone's life against a piece ofequipment.
And that may be an everydaycalculation, but that doesn't make it any less fuckedup, especially if you're the kid that is whose life is being weighed to get the equipmentback.
Here's our Mark and I diverge alittle.
He links both personal experience more directly to the problems of the war than Ido.
He wants to be careful to separate what both saying from who bowis.
In a case like thisthough, that's therub.
Mark seesthat. I keep going backto, to something that somebody said to me a long timeago, which waslike, I kind of agree with everything hesaid, but I still want to punch him in theface, youknow.
It's like that line from the bigLebowski, you're notwrong,Walter, you're just anasshole.
I've heard something akin to that sentiment from a bunch of the soldiers who served withbow.
He wasnot, Imean, the leadership was out ofcontrol.
He's right about a lot of theshit.
We all talked aboutit. We're all worried aboutit.
That's DarrylHansen. Does the fact ofhis, what he describes as his good intentions matter toyou?
Yes, itdoes. Imean,I, but it intention like that is not ever justified tome.
It's something so huge and such a big decision that caused so many consequences withit.
I feel like you don't want to have to be God to make that kind ofdecision.
He made like a God-likedecision.
I want to be careful not to suggest all the soldiers we talk to are in lockstephere.
Some ofthem, even when we talked to them lastsummer, said they'd already forgiven bow and movedon.
Others said they'd never get overit.
In the past week ortwo, myproducer, Dana and I checked in with about a half dozen soldiers to see if anything they'd heard from bow so far in the podcast had made them feeldifferently.
Some said they still thought he was lying about why heleft.
Others said they believe him now and are trying to forgive what hedid, but they just can't quite getthere.
Here's BenEvans. He may have had the greatest intentions of theworld, butyeah, I justdon't.
Ican't.Yeah, I justdon't.
Yeah. I talked to John Thurman for a whilerecently.
John's mother is a therapist and like a lot ofveterans, he's also had counseling to help him deal with the after-effects ofdeployment.
So I thought he'd be a little more touchy-feely on the question of bows mentalhealth.
I wanted to know if a diagnosis would help John not to say that what bow did wasokay, but whether a diagnosis would help John forgive bow justpersonally.
I got pretty pushy with John aboutit.
He was a really goodsport.
Youknow, we all experienced the same thing and we didn't walkoff.
Iknow. Iknow. But you're saying we all experienced the same thing and we droveon.
Yeah. And what I'm saying to you is you didn'texperience.
Well,yes. We didn't see it from hislens.
Youknow, he was he was getting scared by it and youweren't.
Right. Like you're not perceiving danger in those reprimands and heis.
Yeah.Yeah. AndI, Imean, I don't think there was danger in those reprimands because Iknow.
Iknow,dude. I know that's not the we're not arguing whether he'scorrect.
We're not arguing whether he'scorrect.
Yeah. Ireally,really, really try to see it from his side through hislens.
And I understand that he and I have very differentbrains.
Perception ornot. Imean, I still can never forgivehim.
Ican't. And it's onprinciple.
He broke that intimate bond that we all share with eachother.
That's not something you can ever come backfrom.
I don't care where your headwas.
But you still fucking didit.
You walked off and you betrayedus.
It's like you stopthere.
Yeah. That's it stopsthere.
And that's justthat. That's the infantryman and me takingover.
I'm a died in the wool civilian from a family ofcivilians.
My father was in the army in World WarII, but he didn't deployoverseas.
The only war stories I remember him telling me were aboutlike, carousing inDenver.
Sorry,dad. So it wasn't immediately obvious to me why some of the people both served with were not even justmad.
They werehurt, deeply hurt in somecases.
What I understand now is that thatbond, that brotherhood theyfeel, it's not just acliche.
Well, it is acliche, but it's also profoundlytrue.
I think about it thisway.
In mylife, who would die for mereally?
My mommaybe. Who would I diefor?
Mykids. And so imagine you're in aplatoon.
You become soclose, so fast to all these guys aroundyou.
You recognize each other's cough or their silhouette in thedark.
You would die for the other guys in yourplatoon, even if you don't likethem, you'd doit.
And they would die foryou.
It's not evenhypothetical.
It happens all thetime.
And because ofthat, personalitiesaside, these guys become family to oneanother.
If you walk away likeboated, you break the promise you all have made to eachother.
You undermine the wholeenterprise.
Your family starts to crumble when you need itmost.
And that's what the soldiers say happened during the search forbo.
Boast friend Chris Ingles said it was like the soul of their platoon justdwindled.
People shrank intothemselves.
Evenafterwards, second platoon felt like they were blamed for boleaving.
That they were sort of banished from the larger family of thebattalion.
A sergeant everyone told us they justloved.
A guy named Larry Hein was moved out of the platoon and replaced by a commander who was to put itgently, muchstricter.
After helping with Afghan elections in August of2009, the platoon went on to a town called Madacon and embedded with Afghan securityforces.
And they did well enough there that they got commendations and a visit by GeneralMcChrystal.
But stilloverall, a lot of them just feltrobbed.
Like their whole deployment lost itsmeaning.
When I talked to Darryl Hansen again a couple weeksago, he said after hearing thepodcast, he'd soften some towardBo.
I don't have as much hate as I do towardsthem.
Even though the world knows Darryl Hansen would have shothim.
Which I spent whatof? I went to himtoday.
But I would have at the time and I thinkall, youknow, but today I had probably shake his hand to belike, think about nexttime, youknow, forward youdo.
Think about it a little bitmore, youknow?
Would it workit? Almost all the soldiers we talked to said they still thought Bo should go to courtmartial.
AndMark, though he thinks it's taking toolong, also said it makes sense for Bo to go through the military justicesystem.
After all Marksays, the United States did put a lot of time and money and energy into getting Boback.
And that says it shouldbe.
But we did take extraordinarymeasures.
Next time oncereal. Cereals produced by JulieSnyder, DanaChivas, and me in partnership with MarkBowle, MeganEllison, HugoLindgren, JessicaWeisberg, PageOne, and AnnaPernipic-Jers.
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I had previously had discussions with Somaliwarlords, Asiandictators, and Afghan insurgentleaders.
So given that range ofcontacts, I didn't find anything unusual aboutthese.
The Taliban are like simple state-poweredpeople.
Do you want to deal ornot?
He's done more serious time than anyone could possiblyimagine.
Imean, the release video and holyshit, there's bowagain.
