Audible has the best selection ofaudiobooks, handsdown.
You'll always find the latest bestsellers, along with binge-worthy podcasts and exclusiveoriginals.
No matter what you'reinto, steamyromance, a-listmemoirs, fantasticsci-fi, inspiringmotivation, andmore, it's all there in the Audibleapp.
There are also thousands of included titles with more added everyweek, so you've always got something new totry.
There's more to imagine when you listen onAudible.
Find out foryourself. Sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slashcereal.
Previously, oncereal.
I wanted to be asoldier, but I wanted to be a World War IIsoldier.
And then we'reout, out there handing out watercolor maps ofAfghanistan.
We all felt like why are we uphere?
This is fuckingbullshit.
He's inPakistan. He served the United States with honor anddistinction.
The refrain was almost always that the guy is atraitor.
That's not something you can ever comeback.
I haven't seen from you or any otherjournalist, a real dig into how the army came to thatconclusion.
But as soon as you walk out thatdoor, get ready because there'sa- there's ashitstorm.
Youknow, and it's not going away anytimesoon.
From this American life in WBEZChicago, it'scereal.
One story told week byweek.
I'm SarahCanig. I'm driving to go pick up my drycleaning.
And I'm listening to episode seven or whatever itwas.
And I waslike, wait asecond.
I had a couple of conversations recently that I just want to tell youabout.
One was with thisguy,Justin.
He had emailedus, so I gave him acall.
Boom,boom,boom, January2006.
And Ilike, I paused theshow.
And I called my sister and I waslike,Jill, you are not going to believethis.
Bobergdaw seasontwo. And she'slike,yeah, but alot.
I waslike, I went to boot with thisguy.
Coast Guard bootcamp. And he remembers thenight, Bob brokedown.
He remembers standing outside on a freezing February night inKate,Manu,Jersey, while something strange happenedinside.
He remembers seeing blood and broken glass in the bathroom and yellow cautiontape.
Justin was 17 at the time and there are some details he couldn'trecall.
But he led me to another guy also from that boot campclass, JohnRafa.
John was an olderrecruit.
He was26. He rememberedBob.
He likedhim. He thought he was a niceguy.
Onenight, a couple of weeksin, John says there was a firedrill.
They did that alot. These wee hours firedrills.
Some commander would bang on the top of a garbage can and wake everybodyup.
And they'd all have to rush outside and musterup.
Each person had a number and they called out inorder,010203,etc.
It became clear there was a numbermissing.
Alsoclear, that number wasbow.
John was at the edge of thegroup.
So his commander sends him and another guy back inside to findbow.
We go running back and go running into thehead.
And there hewas.He,um, he had bloodied himself prettygood.
We were never sure exactly how he didit.
But there was quite a bit ofblood.
There was some blood on thewall, blood on themirrors, blood onthe, onthe,like, the sink of the countertoparea.
And he was bleeding from hisface.
Therewas, youknow, blood on hishands.
It looked like he had kind of smashes face into themirror.
Um, and he was huddled upcrying.
Uh, hewas, he was kind of baldout.
Um, and it was one of his moments you run in and you'relike,oh,shit.
Like, what the fuck did I just like stepinto?
Did you try to talk tohim?
Idid. And he was justweeping.
Uh, I wasjust, and it wasshocking.
But,uh, youknow, I liked theguy.
So I was trying to find out whathappened.
I, I rememberjust, kindof, crushing down next to him andlike,hey, do what's goingon?
Are youokay? And he was justweeping.
Justlike, goaway. Leave mealone.
This version is more alarming than the one I'd heard previously from bow or from the armyinvestigation.
It's why Justin emailed us in the first place tosay, it shouldn't look like a garden variety panic attack tohim.
And it seems it wasn't a military psychologist I talked to said you don't usually hospitalize someone much less eject them from the military based on a single panicattack.
So whatever was going on with bow must have been more serious thanthat.
So bow got sent home to John and Justin no big surprisethere.
They said Coast Guard training was very demanding psychologically and it was clear bow couldn't hackit.
The big surprise came much later when bow was rescued a friend of John Raffa's called him andsaid, can you believe that POW it's bow from bootcamp.
John said it took him a while to put ittogether.
Likeno, usually guywas, who is captured by theTaliban.
I'mlike, whobowing? Like what the hell was he doing in thearmy?
You were atlike, how do you survive five years with theTaliban?
You werelike, how'd that guyenlist?
Exactly. Are youserious?
Yeah. I waslike,what? Like it didn't make any sense to me that just blew my mindaway.
Like Isaid, he was a really niceguy, but if he couldn't handle the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard is stressful and there's a lot of things that happen in the CoastGuard.
I don't want to make it sound like it's a cakewalk.
But he should not have gone to anotherbranch.
Again, in hisinvestigation, General Kenneth doll found the army recruiter followed all the regulations when he signed bowup.
But I'll also wrote that he thought those regulations were inadequate in both case that his Coast Guard separation should have been looked at more carefully than itwas.
John spent eight years in the Coast Guardreserves.
Justin became a rescueswimmer.
It's like the special forces of the CoastGuard, the guys who drop out of helicopters into theocean.
Presumably they both know a thing or two about the militarymindset.
Justin had the same question asJohn.
Why they let that guy into thearmy?
Based on what I saw based on what happened during Coast Guard BlueCamp, not atall.
There's no reason why they should have every letterman atall.
Sometimes Bose case is summed up likethis.
What Bode did waswrong, walking off his post waswrong.
But the army shouldn't have let him enlist in the firstplace.
Plus five yearscaptivity, fiveyears.
So scales arebalanced.
The army messedup, bow messedup.
Let's moveon. But that leaves out areckoning.
And a reckoning is what the militarywants,understandably.
To a lot of people who served in Afghanistan and to theirfamilies, if you don't consider the consequences of Bose decision to walk offOP-Mest, it feels as if something important and painful has been paperedover.
And that doesn't feel likejustice.
They want anaccounting.
This is our last episode thisseason.
And so I want to try to answer thisnow.
What exactly should we blame Bodefor?
What's his fault and whatisn't?
And the heaviest moral charge againsthim, the elephant in so many discussions about Bode and about the trade and about the military proceedings againsthim, did any American soldiers die looking forhim?
Some people very high up in the military world are sayingyes, people did die looking forBode.
Michael Flynn is the highest ranking person I've interviewed sofar.
He's a retired lieutenantgeneral.
He was head ofDIA, the Defense IntelligenceAgency.
Back in2009, when Bode wentmissing, Flynn was inAfghanistan.
He was General Stanley McChrystal's director ofintelligence.
McChrystal, in case you'veforgotten, was commander of US and coalition forces for all ofAfghanistan.
SoFlynn, just underMcChrystal, he's a bigdeal.
I explained to him that this was one of my outstanding questions about Bosestory.
This very thing oflike,well,wait, did people die during this search for Bergdahl asa, youknow,yes?
The answeris,Sarah, the answer isyes.
Okay. So if somebody was on a mission to go find anAmerican, youknow,there's, youknow, did the guy did a soldier walk down a road and an IED blewup.
And if this soldier was walking down that road in an area where he would not have been had it not been for the search forBergdahl, then in fact hismission, their tactical mission wasto, youknow, conduct a patroland, and try to find intelligence or try to find any indications of where this soldier mightbe.
And infact, was blown up by that IED or otherswounded, that's a nobrainer.
I agree that doesthat. Those aredots.
Those aredots. Those aredots.
I, those aredots.I, Iconnect.
Here's the problemthough.
General Flynn's no brainerscenario.
I haven't found one likethat.
When he said those are dots heconnected.
He wasn't thinking of any particular cases of soldiers whodied.
Just, he wasthere. He says he knows it to betrue.
There have been lots of mediastories, declarativestories, citing specific cases of soldiers who died because of thesearch.
Usually there are sixnames, all from Bosebattalion, the first of the501st.
And we know for sure there was a massive search forBo.
He walked off OP Mest on June30,2009.
And for the month of July people were sent out all over Pactika province and beyond doing nothing but missions to find the dustone.
But rathermiraculously, no one died on thosemissions.
The six names of soldiers whodied, they were all on missions that happenedlater, seven to ten weeks after Bodisappeared.
And none of those missions was a search and rescuemission.
We've looked into all theseincidents.
There were four ofthem.
We've talked to soldiers who were there and to people higher up who planned and organizedthem.
Official information on these missions isthin.
We've seen Army investigations on only two of the fourcases.
One of those was just asummary.
They were bothredacted.
So we can't tell what the precise mission orders and objectiveswere.
We put in four requests with the Army long ago on all thesecases, but haven't gotten anythingback.
Again, the Army itself hasn't formally investigated the question of whether people died looking for Bo that we knowof.
But somehow this idea that people died looking for Bo to a lot ofpeople, it's not aquestion.
It has traveled out of the realm of the murky and has solidified into concreteinformation.
To the point where a clothing company made a fuck Burggdall t-shirt with six stars underneath to represent quote the six honorable soldiers from the first to the 501st that lost their lives all because ofBurggdall.
Why are some people so sure aboutthis?
Where did it comefrom? On September4th,2009, one of those sixsoldiers, DarrenAndrews, was killed in Pactica province in a village called Palau right nearOPMest.
He was a second lieutenant of PlatoonLeader.
Hisparents, Sandra and AndyAndrews, have been told by the Army that Darren was killed in an RPG attack on a mission to arrest a high-valuetarget, a Talibanguy.
When the attackhappened, he apparently pushed aside othermen.
He was awarded the silverstar,posthumously.
About five yearslater, his parents were on a long drive to the hospital for Andy's cancer treatment when President Obama announced Bo'sreturn.
Andy says the way he remembersit, the Rose Garden ceremony hadn't even finished before someone contactedthem.
He and him got theretalking, I don'tthink, and Sandra got acall.
And thisgasses, I won't let you know we're fixing to break this story until the truth of what reallyhappened.
This phone call was someone in Darren'sunit.
This was the first Andy and Sandra we're hearing that Darren was actually killed on a mission related toBo.
And then we were on the phoneliterally, she was on the phone literally from the time we left Cameron until we got tohim, the Anderson 3 hours later withNBC,CBS,ABC.
I don't everybodyknow.
Youknow, when itbroke, it brokehard.
But the guys started texting and sending messages on Facebook and calling and tellingme, youknow, we're not going to stand by and let them say he is ahero.
Your son and the other guys were a hero and we're not going to stand forthis.
That sameday, the six names were put out there online by daythree.
The story had anchored in the mainstreampress.
To Sandra andAndy, it was such a jolt that first call because after fiveyears, they'd come to accept the original Army issue version of what happened to Darren that he'd been killed on a mission to arrest a Talibanguy.
They weren't looking for someone else toblame.
They were doing okay with what they thought theyknew.
Youknow, we'd kind of fit the story into ourlife.
We had talked aboutit. And now all of that wasgone.
We had a whole new story to get usedto.
And a lot moreanger. Sandra said they felt angry at Bo for one thing and they felt they'd been lied to by the Army by Darren's commander because no one had ever mentioned burgl to thembefore, which felt fishy to them like there was a coverup.
Two and a half weekslater, the Andrews is went toWashington, DC to testify before a congressionalcommittee.
Andy Andrews told the committee that six different soldiers who served with their son had told him and his wife that Darren was killed while searching forBo.
Sandra says at the veryleast, Bo was a contributing factor in hisdeath.
It may not have beendirectly, butindirectly, he wasresponsible.
So thisstory, the sixnames, the lineup of photos in thepress, as far as I cantell, it originated at the ground level from Bo's platoonmates.
And while they didn't have documentation to back up what they weresaying, the defense department wasn't seconding theseclaims, these guys did havereasons.
They weren't just making itup.
TakePalau, that's where Darren Andrews died on September4.
I was unclear what exactly that mission wasabout, and I didn't understand what the connection to Bowas.
So I asked John Thurman to explain it to me because he was on that Palaumission.
And I also knew John was in the camp of soldiers who thought Bo was responsible for the people whodied.
They said we're going outfor, youknow, up to 10days.
And that's basically all Iremember.
But what was themission?
Well, I don't actuallyknow.
That was definitely way above my paygrade.
We were going to be going intoPalau.
And we were going to be looking around and going house tohouse.
And we had quite a few attachments that had never seenbefore.
We had a female engagementteam.
And we also had a combat camera team that was withus.
So I don't actuallyknow.
This isn't unusualactually.
That a low level soldier doesn't know the overallmission.
What's communicated to him is pack for X manydays.
And then before they go out eachday, they're briefed by their immediateleader, in this case DarrenAndrews, who tells them we're going to go to thislocation, we're going to knock on doors or hand out stuff or meet with Afghan securityforces,whatever.
I've asked a lot ofpeople, not justJohn, but battalionofficers, people doingIntel.
What was the purpose of the Palaumission?
Here's what I'vegathered, bigpicture.
The trip to Palau was part of alarger, roughly 10 day operation to push into the Yaya Kelldistrict.
US forces had been pretty successful in othertowns, but farthernorth.
They were working up there with local leaders doingcoin, essentially makingfriends, helping build local government andsecurity.
But not so much in YayaKell, which was right near OPMast.
The villages around there had quite a bit of Talibanactivity.
They were not friendly to USforces.
And so the battalion had planned this mission to try to push back inthere.
That area wasstrategic.
It was between the Pakistan border and a main highway in Afghanistan that goes up to Kabul and then all through thecountry.
The way the battalion planned these largeroperations, they weren't just about oneobjective.
You try to accomplish a bunch of things atonce.
You had all kinds of US government agencies doing their stuff at thetime.
The State Department or the Department ofAgriculture, they might be assessing which little grapes are best to grow and whatevervalley.
So you might have themalong.
On this Palaumission, John remembers a female engagement team that likely would have been headed up by a social scientist whose job was to help the US military understand Afghanculture.
John doesn't remember looking for a specific high-value Taliban guy on thatmission.
But other people I spoke to who were there do rememberthat.
That they in fact did detainsomeone.
Ziptite hishands, guardedhim.
But then we're told by higher ups to let himgo, which theydid.
Again, I haven't seen the mission order or the after-actionreport.
So I can't besure. But here's what John remembers from his vantage point in the driver's seat behind the wheel of anemerald.
He remembers they had a lot of trucks thatday, maybeseven.
They made a cord on in the village and John and the gunner were waiting in the truck while the other guys went door todoor.
About 45 minutespassed, Johnsays.
So my gunner and I were sitting in the truck and we just we had this eerie feeling and we were talking aboutit, youknow, over some cigarettes likethis.
This town just doesn't feelright.
It didn't give us a goodvibe.
And I remember a bunch of kids were congregating under this gigantic treethere.
And then they all started to filter back into theirhouses.
And my gunner had actually been in Iraq on the deployment prior toours.
And hesaid, youknow, I got a bad feeling we're about to get fuckedup.
Because when the town clearsout, usually it means that the Taliban is going to stand somethingup.
They're bringing the civilians back in so that they don't gethurt.
And they've put the wordout.
Youknow, we're going to attack the Americanstoday.
So we radio up and everybody kind of knows what's goingon.
They all get ready toleave.
And then someone comes out from behind a wall and shoots an RPG at one of theirtrucks.
They shootback. They're in a narrowspace.
I was truck three and I just see the first truck justexplode.
Not the whole thingobviously, but I see the mine roller and the hood separate from the vehicle and they had rolled over a pressure plateID.
And then from thenon, youknow, it was RPGvolley.
So it was small armsfire, recoilousrifles,mortars,everything.
Because once they took out that firsttruck, we were stuck because you're all behind thattruck.
Correct.Yeah. And that's that's a technique that the Taliban had sort of adapted when the Soviets had invadedis, youknow, take out the firsttruck, shoot up the lasttruck.
And then everybody in the middle is completelyfucked.
Darren Andrews had been in John'struck, the thirdtruck.
John says Darren ran out to the firsttruck, the one that had just gotten blown up to help the guysthere.
They set up what's called a casualty collectionpoint, a little field traumaarea.
And then so many RPG started comingin.
John says he watched Darren Andrews getkilled.
He watched MattMartinick, John's goodfriend, who'd also been in histruck, gethit.
Matt would die in a hospital in Germany a weeklater.
John and the gunner are inside the truck during the ambush stuckthere.
His gunner is firing at whatever hecan.
Andhow, but like how long are you sitting there just like taking thisattack?
I think I think the initial attack kicked off somewhere around1500.
And we didn't get back to mass till 0 5 06.
Oh mygod, you're out there allnight.
Yeah, it'sterrible. Ohman.
I mean my gunner and I just acceptedit.
I said tohim, Isaid, youknow, I think we're probably going to dietonight.
And hesaid,yeah, I think weare.
So it washorrible. The wholething.
Peopledied. People wereinjured.
But I asked Johnagain, how was any of this connected tobow.
And hesaid,well, we were always supposed to belooking.
He said his platoonleader, Darren Andrews didn't mention bow before they set off for Palau thatday.
But he did mention bow back atFob, Shurana a few days before they set off on the wholeoperation.
I remember the tenant Andrewssaying, youknow, and if you hear or see any signs ofBergdahl, we need to know aboutit.
Imean, and that that was just the amendment toeverything, youknow, before any bigpush.
And it wasn't it doesn't also sounds like it wasn't terribly specific to any onemission.
No. Gotit.Okay. Now I'm beginning to understand why you could have a mission that is simultaneously not specific to Bergdahl and also involvingBergdahl.
Right. Isee.Oh, so it'shard.
It's hard because it's like an umbrella over everything you'redoing.
Exactly. That's the perfect way to describeit.
So if you close theumbrella, then you can't make the argument it was looking forBergdahl.
Right. But if you openit, youcan.
So it's just depends on who's living under theumbrella.
Butagain, youknow, from my from my small scope as specialistThurman,I, I don't know who knows what aboveme.
Right. Youknow, I only know what Iknow.
John told me it's totallypossible.
This was a specific mission to look forbow, but that information just never filtered down tohim.
John's battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker would probably know I haven't been able to talk tohim.
But I did talk to his number two command sergeant major KenWolf.
He's out in the militarynow, but at the time he was the highest NCO in thebattalion.
He knew thecommanders, he knew the privates and he cared aboutthem.
It took me quite a long time to persuade Ken to talk tome.
He has no love lost forbow.
He thinks he'sselfish, plain andsimple, traitor to hisunit.
Butfinally, after many emails andnegotiations, Ken agreed on onecondition.
He wanted to be able to saythis.
The families who who lost sons during thisdeployment, they let them know that their their sons did not die looking for a PFCBergdahl.
Their sons didn't die looking forhim.
Explain why why you're saying like why you know this to betrue.
Because all you all you've got to do is look at a map and look at a timeframe.
Okay, so timeframe.Again, the incidents that resulted in the six deaths in their battalion happened between August 18th and September5th, about two months after bowleft.
We looked and we looked and we looked and we didn't findhim, but youcan't.
And this is where it gets very difficult for people tounderstand.
Because you can never know one in the army is ever going to say we stop looking foryou.
Right,right. But here's adeal.
Youknow, it's it's been 45 plusdays.
At thispoint, we know where he'sat.
And he's inPakistan. Allright, a vanilla unit like the 501st is not leaving its battle space and going into Pakistan to findhim.
That's what Ken means by look at a map because if anyone was going after bow inPakistan, it would be a special forcesteam, not an infantryunit.
Kensays, ofcourse, they were going to keep their eyes and earsopen.
But if you're acommander, you're balancing no man left behind with some very practicalmatters.
Your intel regarding the dust one is dryingup.
You're unlikely to find him in Afghanistananyway.
There's an Afghan presidential election to preparefor, award awin.
So you're not sending your guys on search missionsanymore.
In terms ofoperations, they needed to get back towork.
Ken says that Palau mission had nothing to do withbow.
What some of the soldiers will sayis,okay, maybe notdirectly, but it's still connected to bow because the search for bow affectedeverything.
They talk a lot about second and third ordereffects, a concept that's drilled into soldiers that everything they do has consequences once or twiceremoved.
The search changed the course of theirdeployment, changed the landscape of their overall mission in a bunch of detrimentalways.
And that led to peopledying.
I put their argument toKen.
Well,sure, the September 4 mission wasn't expressly only to go look forBergdahl,say.
But because we had been out looking for him for the past twomonths, we had been making inroads in certainplaces.
And because we had to pull away from that and focus on looking for him and we became much morekinetic, we became moreaggressive.
We were going into places we hadn't beenbefore.
We were stretchedthen.
That it gave the insurgents a foothold in places where we had kept them atbay.
And now those places were moredangerous.
That's one of the arguments they'llmake.
Imean, is that a fairargument?
It doesn't hold water because you are in a very bad neighborhoodregardless.
You can get killed anyday.
Imean, if you could have been on a random patrol in Palau on the 29th of June and hit an ID aswell.
Imean, I getit.However, youknow, it's purely speculation andhypothetical.
Speculation and hypothetical to Ken are a far cry from say knowledge andunderstanding.
Ken says there were so many factors factors beyondbow.
These soldiers are not taking intoaccount.
So many factors they aren't awareof.
I'll give you a perfectexample, hesaid.
And hedid. He told me this whole story about Yaya Cal and the surroundingvillages.
The interactions had been in conflict there since the early1970s.
Loyalists in the monarch kicking around the communistsympathizers.
Well, and then when the communists comein, they kick the loyalistsaround.
Well, and then when the Taliban comesin, youknow, they kick the communistaround.
And then when we comein, we kicked the Talibanout.
So now theyretaliate.Well, some of thesefolks, they went across the border into Pakistan because they didn't want to get kickedaround.
And then when they cameback, they found that their houses were occupied by the people who were kicking themaround.
Right?So, so they'reangry.
I just come back from Pakistan and when I left here 10 yearsago, this was my house and now you're living init.
Well, there isno, you can't go down to the county courthouse in Shurana and pull up this deed thatsays, this house belongs tome.
So what do youdo? You fight overit.
So it didn't matter that PFC Bergdahl walkedoff.
There was conflict that was so much deeper thanBergdahl.
And quitefrankly, so much more important than Bergdahl just to solve the problem in Pactica that theseguys, they don't understand the guys that are making thesearguments.
And it'snot, and it's not because they're badguys.
It's not because they're illinformed.
It's because they aren't privy to the same information that Iam.
Andhere's, here's thedeal.
That story I just toldyou, you know how long it took me to learnthat?
It took me ninemonths. It took me nine months of rolling in there all the time and talking to people before they laid that whole story out forme.
Right. Their mission is different than mymission.
My mission was to go out there and figure out what the problemis.
Why, youknow, why every time we rolled through this oneplace, we got blownup.
For the soldiers who see all of thisdifferently, Ken doesn't begrudge them theirperspective.
He just wishes they hadn't been so public aboutit.
These young men that are saying thesethings, I love every one of them and every one of those guys know that they can get a hold of me and I'll do anything in the world for thoseguys.
They knowthat. And what they'redoing.
I just don't think that they thought itthrough.
And by not thinking itthrough, they didn't understand the ramifications of theirverbalization, what that was going to have on thefamilies.
Again, Ken's not being protective of bowhere.
He just thinks the record ought to be setstraight.
And he doesn't want the memories of the guys who died to be dragged into theBurghdal,Marass, to be solid by it by the politics ofit.
He thinks it's not fair to those men or to theirfamilies.
Allright, here's something else I've heard along theway.
Maybe some of these guys think they were looking forbow, but really their commanders were only using bow as anexcuse, as topcover, to get extra assets and to go kick indoors andRCE's.
We were actually looking forthem.
They did come a point where he did just become an excuse to go out and dothings.
This is a guy I'm callingScott.
He arrived in Afghanistan in Ghazni inmid-July.
His job wasclassified, which is why he doesn't want to use hisname.
All he could say was that he was attached to an eliteunit.
Hesaid, before bowleft, in order for a unit to leave thewire, you had to havegood, actionableintelligence.
But when hedisappeared, thoselimits, those thresholds for going out becamemuch, muchlower.
So if you had very unreliable information about bowburghdals,whereabouts, you could goanywhere.
And so we would just use him as an excuse to go wherever we wanted togo.
How do you knowthat? Imean, you weren't there before he walkedoff.
So how do you know the threshold gotlower?
Because every other mission that we tried to goon, that he didn't involvehim, was much more difficult to get outside of the wireon.
So someone wouldsay, I think we need to go do X and would betold, forget it unless it involves looking forburghdal?
Yes. Imean, I sat through live briefings where missions were turneddown.
And I sat through live briefings where missions were accepted that probably shouldn't have been to go look forhim.
So is thistrue? Were people just using the search as a way to get unrelated missions okayed or as a way to scamassets?
I asked and I asked and finally I found Lieutenant Colonel PaulEdgar.
He was the guy in charge of managing the search forbow.
He was operations officer for thebrigade.
If you're planning a mission for the 501st and you wanted specialassets, usually aircraft ordrones, you had to go throughPaul.
Around midAugust, I thought that there were a couple of requests from subordinate units that were taking advantage or attempting to take advantage a little bit of doing something else in the name of looking for for bowburghdal.
And when his team sawthat, they disapproved thosemissions.
Paul says he didn't see rampant abuse oranything.
He said it was more like a natural inclination to try to sell your ownmission, spin your objectives in a way that was going to be most persuasive to yourbosses.
Forinstance, a couple of the people who helped plan missions lower down at the company and battalion level told me that if you wanted extra support for your operation in August or Septembersay, you might sandwich bow inthere.
So the operation paperwork might well have included among otherobjectives, language saying they were facilitating recovery of dust one or in support of dust one recoveryoperations, dust one meaningbow.
If you hadthat, you were more likely to get additional assets such as thehelicopter.
On the otherhand, to get approved in the firstplace, you had to have actual intel backing itup.
Maybe it wasn't the strongestintel, but still it had to be legitimately connected to bowswhereabouts.
And then on yourmission, you were actually questioning people aboutbow.
You couldn't just invent something and get assets forit.
Because firstoff, that's justwrong.
Resources arescarce. And so you're very aware that if you're getting use of anaircraft, someone else who needs it just gotdenied.
Andsecond, if you tried to manufacture areason, someone like Paul was going to catchit.
So a little cheatingmaybe, littlemassaging, but not ascandal.
But all this leads to another big question hovering over the search forbow.
Bymid-July, common sense told you bow is probably inPakistan.
Sowhy, through August and intoSeptember, are US soldiers still looking for an Afghanistan atall?
Why might an operation plan for September include a legitimate objective of facilitating recovery of the dust one when the dust one is long gone across the border in MiramShah?
Within two or three days of bowsdisappearance, news outlets were quoting Taliban sources saying bows kidnapping was directed by Mullah Sangin that bows case would be referred to Sirajid andHakanee, those guys operate inPakistan.
On July20th, right after the Taliban released the first proof of life video ofbow, ABC ran a story with theheadline,Exclusive, Missing USSoldier, Maybe inPakistan.
Soagain, why were they still looking inAfghanistan, 30 dayslater, 60 dayslater, andbeyond?
Well, firstoff, Afghanistan is the only place they really can look since they can't go tromping intoPakistan, sovereignnation,ally,etc.
And Paul toldme,sure, they saw those news stories saying bow is inPakistan, and they had their own intel that bow is inPakistan.
But they also had intel just as persuasive that bow is inAfghanistan.
What I would say is that we had stuff just as strong as a newsreport.
Yes.Right.Okay. And I'mnot, and I'm not dissing newsreports.
Well,no, sometimes news isright.
But if you see somethingon, youknow, if I see something on CNNInternational, and then I go across the hallway to our brigade intelligence cell and talk to a number of folks and overlay some differentinformation, unless bows standing there in front of a known landmarker in Pakistan with today's newspaper or something likethat, I'm goingto, I'm going to look very seriously and consider very seriously the credibility of our information versuswhat, what I read onCNN.
And the probability that bow was in Pakistan wasn'tenough.
Infact, Paul said his best guess was that bow was initially captured by some JVTaliban, and that rather than spiriting him across the border intoPakistan, the Taliban had sent a big cheese from Pakistan back into Afghanistan to handle thesituation.
So Paul wasn't at allconvinced, bow wasn't still inAfghanistan.
And that's our literal when they say they needed to know for a fact that bow was in Pakistan before they would change course generalFlynn, the guy who is Macrystal's intelligence chief at the time made this clear tome.
Ifyou, if you think probably a few weeks afterlike,yeah, he's probably inPakistan.
So what do you want me tosay,Sarah?
Do you want me to say that we're going to give up onhim?
No. So I'm not going to saythat.
I'm not going to sit here and we will never giveup.
Youdon't, Imean, I'm anAmerican.
Youknow, I'm going to hold out hopeuntil, until the last possible thing that we can potentiallydo.
Andeven, and we would even pull intelligence threads even aftermonths.
Imean, I'mnot, I'm not a satisfiedperson.
If you ever talked to an intelligence officer who says they'resatisfied,there's, there's something we call bullet proofintelligence.
And when you get bullet proofintelligence, that'srare.
That israre. And even when you think your intel is bulletproof, you doublecheck.
Flynn says we've consistently underestimated our enemy in thesewars.
They usedeception. They lie effectively withbow.
We never got to100% on hislocation.
So the search for bow in Afghanistan was never called off becauseagain, it's an armyvalue, an American value that you don't give up on a comrade who's fallen into enemyhands.
As one battalion officer said tome, even if they're adickhead, you will do everything youcan.
But, but one last word onthis, zoom out one level to US Central Command because it wasn't just the army calling the shotshere.
Sent comm ultimately controlled defense department assets in Afghanistan at thetime.
Plains,helicopters,drones, predators within without weaponsattached.
About two weeks after bow wascaptured, so midJuly, a ground level analyst at sent comm informed theboss, we think he's inPakistan.
But this analyst wastold, you can't write that in yourassessment, not unless you have bomb proofevidence, meaning two independent corroboratedsources, which is not the normal standard for an intelassessment.
Rather, that's the standard usually reserved for recoverymission, say when you're actually sending people into harm'sway, not for an intelassessment.
But in thiscase, they weren't allowed to put it in areport, so theydidn't.
They waited another30, 40 days or so until sometime in late August or earlySeptember.
Which meant the intensity of the search for bow remained high in Afghanistan for several moreweeks, rather than tapering off in midJuly.
My source wasn't sure why they weren't allowed to call itearlier, maybe because this was an unprecedentedsituation.
Nobody exactly knew the implicationstactically,strategically,politically, of saying a US soldier was being held inPakistan, where the DOD had noauthority.
Lieutenant Colonel MikeWaltz, the Special ForcesCommander, was one of the people who went on TV very early on and said people died looking forbow.
Men died searching for SergeantBergdahl, and we believed at thetime.
It's theshort-handing, the stating it as unneuanced fact that I have troublewith.
It seems reckless to throw around something like that without solidcause.
If you press for theevidence, Mike and others will argue on the basis of second and third ordereffects.
So many resources were diverted to look forbow, depriving otherunits, resulting infatalities.
On July4, just a few days after bowwalked, there was a big attack at an outpost in Pactica calledZaraq, in which two mortar mendied.
Maybe it wouldn't have gone down the way it did if they had the intel aircraft they'd askedfor.
Intel aircraft tied up in the search forbow.
In earlyOctober, another big attack on an OP located hundreds of miles north ofPactica.
Eight Americans werekilled.
It happened three months after bowleft, but it's also been linked tohim.
Plans to shut down thatOP, which was consideredvulnerable, had beendelayed, partly because of thesearch.
When I interviewed MikeWalts, I pushed him onthis, that the causality here istenuous, so why are people sayingit?
And hesaid,look, directly orindirectly, killed or almostkilled, why are we parsingthis?
There were real consequences to what bowdid.
Why can't we talk aboutthat?
Which made me realize this is the root of what these guys aresaying, what they've been saying since the day bow gottraded.
And thatis, don't tell me it'sover, he'sback, noharm, nofoul.
You couldspend, Ithink, the rest of eternityparsing,well, it was a supply run to the base atSalerno, and was thatindirect, youknow, that wasIED, and was that related ornot.
Butlook, Imean, for that period oftime, that's all we weredoing, and if you were hurtinjured, I listened to it on theradio, people being metavacked during ambushes from TCPs that they had set up trying to findBergdahl.
So, my own soldiers barely escaped deathfrom, youknow, essentially an ambush based on it that was set up based on information looking forBergdahl.
I'm absolutelyadamant, mymind, that soldiers were either put in harm's way or were harmed looking forthem.
So, I'msorry, I do get a bit notemotional, but I couldn't push back more forcefully that his actions just had noeffect.
And so the notion that it didn't really affect theelections, it didn't really do thatmuch, I think is just absolutelyuntrue.
I think it's a stretch too far to say people were killed looking for Bo or because ofBo.
But that's not to say there weren't majorconsequences.
For a month or sixweeks, the shape and mood of the war and of the US Mission and Regional Command Eastchanged.
Resources werediverted, people stopped doing some of the arguably constructive things they were doing to look forBo.
And people suffered looking forBo.
They suffered psychologically and physically in a couple of casesseverely.
InSeptember, a Navy seal named Jimmy Hatch went on CNN and talked to AndersonCooper.
Hatch said he was part of a team that flew two helicopters into a compound on the night of July9th.
Andthen, guys had to immediately deal with a pretty major gunfight.
And at thatpoint, what's thegoal?
The goal is to get that kid to find Boburp,though.
Fast. And we were close because things started rightaway.
Hatch didn't want to talk tome, but I spoke to another person who was on themission, who backed up Hatch'sstory.
That they had information Bo was there and that's why theywent.
He turned out Bo wasn'tthere, but a lot of Taliban were killed in thefighting.
Hatch was shot just above the rightknee.
His bone wasshattered.
In the CNNstory, he talks about how he became depressed andsuicidal.
One day earlier on July8th, Sergeant First Class Mark Allen was with a National Guard team going door to door in a village in DeelaDistrict, South ofMest.
They were a handful of Americans who happened to go along with a platoon of Afghan National Armysoldiers.
Their commander had offered themup.
We spoke to the commander as well as to one of the other guys on thatmission.
And they bothsaid,yeah, it wasclear.
The mission was to look forBo, which considering thedate, just a weekout, it makessense.
They gotattacked. Onesoldier, his right hand was badlywounded.
A medic took shrapnel and was shot in thehip.
Mark Allen was shot in thehead.
Hesurvived, but he's in awheelchair.
He can't walk ortalk. He's got a wife and twokids, and it's been awful for all ofthem,obviously.
So,yes, during the search forBo, people were very seriously injured in ways that permanently messed with theirlives, messed with theirfamilies.
One of the charges against Bo is that he endangered the safety of other soldiers and wrongfully caused search and recoveryoperations.
If he's convicted ofthat, he'll bepunished.
But punishment is very different fromblame.
Blame is moredelicate.
It comes up almost always in my conversations about Bo withsoldiers,commanders,civilians,diplomats,everybody,really.
And it can beslippery. It can lodge where itshouldn't, and it can skirt where it ought tostick.
When I was talking at KenWolf, those former command sergeantmajor, going through the list of names of men from the 501st who died during thatdeployment, Ken wasexplaining,no, these deaths are not to do withBo.
But he stopped short when we got to the name KurtCurtis.
Ken said thatone, he partly blameshimself.
It was a firefight in a medicalclinic.
They're going after a Taliban guy who'd committed some really brutalcrimes,apparently.
Staff Sergeant Kurt Curtis was shot andkilled.
Curtis was supposed to work from the base inAlaska, but Ken toldhim, our numbers arelow.
I need you to deploy toAfghanistan.
Curtis wasmarried. He'd been on something like four deploymentsalready, more than mostguys.
But hesaid,okay, I'll doit.
In lateAugust, Curtis was on the quick reaction team that was called out to the medical clinic in a town calledSarhausa.
Ken Wolf had been to that clinic manytimes.
He'd touredit. He said the people in the town had a lot of pride init.
So he knew the layout better thananyone.
And Ken said before Curtis and the other guys went outthere, they were briefed on how the roadwas, where the trouble spotswere.
I did not tellthem. And this is what haunts me this day because I just didn't think aboutit.
There's this clinic is twoparts.
It's inside a wall compound like most places in that part of theworld.
So you had kind of like the inpatient outpatientside.
And I never told these guys that there were really two differentbuildings.
And so they went in with the Afghanpolice.
Youknow, went to the firstone.
Noissues. Then they went in the secondone.
And Curtis was was ambushed when he went in thatbuilding.
The second building went along with hissquad.
And. And was killed there thatday.
But why would it have mattered if they had known there were two buildings like why does that partwork?
Because they they're tactical plan would havechanged.
And maybe Kurt wouldn't have died is what he'ssaying.
That's why Ken's haunted byit.
And JohnThurman, he feels guilt about what happened inPalau.
And it's hard for him to talk about the guys who got killedthere.
One of them Matthew Martini was a radio telephone operator likeJohn.
But that day John was the driverinstead, which means you stay in thetruck.
DarrenAndrews, their platoon leader had called Martini out of the truck to help when the attack happened because Matt was RTO thatday, notJohn.
And that was just bychance.
And it was actually we were drawing straws and I had drawn the longer straw on thatone.
And you literally drew straw like not metaphorically like you actually drewstraws.
Yeah,literally.Oh.Yeah, so that's why that one's been pretty hard for a really longtime.
John is the son of Air Force veterans who grew up in Texas and in Washingtonstate.
He danced Catillian and was a competitive figure skater as atyke.
In2007, when he was a fresh 21 yearsold, it's not that he was up to no good oranything.
He was selling shoes atNordstrom.
And he learned a lot aboutshoes.
But that was not the direction he wanted his life totake.
So he joined thearmy. I'm not even sure why I'm telling you this except to remindyou, to remind me that these guys who deployed to war zones are so young and then they'retraumatized.
All of them prettymuch.
And itsucks. It's not John's fault that Matt Martinezdied.
It's not Ken's fault that Kirk Curtisdied.
Two of the other deaths in the501st, Clay Bowen and MorrisWalker.
They were doing election prep on August18th,2009.
When their vehicle ran over anID, they were bothkilled.
They were in an armoredHumvee, not anM-rap, which might have protectedthem.
Who's to blame forthat?
Their battalioncommander, then defense secretary RobertGates, PresidentObama,Bo?
You just want to blame something orsomebody.
I blame theTaliban. Youknow?
Yeah. That's RisaDobler, Clay Bowen'smother.
When I first talked to John Thurman lastAugust, he blamed Bo for the deaths in the501st.
But by the time we had thisconversation,five, six monthslater, he had moved off ofthat.
Not toward clarityexactly.
Iblame... Imean, you can point the blame inanybody, but sometimesthey...
I don'tknow.Sorry. Sometimes I just think war is one of those things that it's hard to pin down who'sresponsible.
Iknow. And I feel likethat's...
that sounds like acopy.
No, it'snot. I've done a ton of therapy onit.
I stillhaven't. I've made like75% sense ofit.
Right. I still can't get that last25.
Because youknow, you start playing with variables and the whatifs.
And that's where you can drive yourselfinsane.
These things happen inwar.
It'snormal. I was talking to retired Lieutenant Colonel PaulEdgar, the former brigade level officer who managed the search forBo.
And he said something that surprisedme.
Hesaid, Bo is also normal inwar.
As asociety, we treat Bo as some aberration when really he's his case is simply a very normal part ofwar.
Paulsaid, we signed up forAfghanistan.
Not every singlecitizen,obviously.
But as acountry, reeling from the September 11thattacks, nobody put up too much of a fuss about going after Osama binLaden.
But when we signedup, we were also signing up for all the things we tend toforget, but that nevertheless attendwar,mistakes,accidents, people dying for avoidable or even ridiculousreasons.
An army recruiting system that lowers its standards when it needs morebodies.
Twenty something year olds who quickly become disillusioned and do something rash orcriminal.
It'sall,unfortunately,normal.
So there's a level of responsibilityhere, whetherit's, youknow, whether it's Bo and his particulars or thethings, the baggage of war that goes along with every single one that we signed up for as a society and to take all of that and to pin it politically and otherwiseon, youknow, this 20 year old is in myopinion.
It'svery, verywrong. When we first teamed up with Mark Bull for thisstory, Mark had just come to the end of his own extensive reporting onBo.
And I wanted to know if there was anything Mark still wonderedabout, any outstanding questions hehad.
And hesaid,yeah, he did haveone.
I think the biggest question that I have is what's the appropriate punishment for what hedid.
Andlike, how do you treat this guywho, afterall, youknow, was put through the ringer by the Taliban because he was an Americansoldier.
Is there some recognition that he was coming from a place which is basicallyaltruistic, Imean, maybe self servingtoo, but certainlynot, youknow, intending to causeharm.
So I don'tknow. I guess the question of how the country ultimately views him is interesting to me because it speaksto, Ithink, our capacity for forgiveness in someways.
And also the kindof, I think the ambivalence about Bo somewhat reflects the larger confusion about thewars.
The wars in Iraq andAfghanistan.
Marksays, because we don't think of them like World WarII, the quoteunquote, good war or likeVietnam, and a lot ofcircles, a badwar.
So what are thesewars? Because there's just like this incrediblelike, Hayes over thinking about the war on terror and because these wars just seem to beso, youknow, hard todefine.
It seems like as acountry, we don't know what to do with thisguy.
A few weeksago, ZachBarrow, one of Bo's platoonmates, got in touch withus.
I also interviewed Zach back in thesummer, but now he wanted to say somethingelse.
He'd been listening to the podcast and it was bothering him that Bo might be listening to and getting the idea that everyone was mad athim.
Zach was mad atfirst. He said it was kind of easier to bemad.
You go on any militarywebsite, everyone's angry withBo.
And you see your friends on TV talking about all the bad stuff Bo did and you getit, why they'remad.
But after he thought itthrough, Zach said herealized,eh, Bo's not what he was madabout.
Bo had just become a kind ofrepository.
Maybe like we're holding on to all this stuff and wanting to punish this kid for stuffthat, youknow, we're all the badsituation, bad stuffhappened.
Yes, he added to the badsituation, but I don't think maybe as much as people blamesometimes.
Imean, it was going to suck no matterwhat.
I feel like he's a young guy who is in a really stressful place and he made a terriblemistake.
And I don'tknow, maybe we just formyself, Iguess, maybe I can acceptthat.
I can understand that when you're young and you'redumb, obviously I didn't make thatmistake, but I could see how it happens topeople.
Another platoonmate, AustinLandford, told me he decided not to blame Bo anymoreeither.
He said when he was inAfghanistan, he had crazy thoughts sometimestoo.
Hesaid, I hated it overthere.
I wanted to leave extremely badsometimes.
Hesaid, that could have beenme.
The army gave us somenumbers.
From 2001 to2014, more than 3,500 people were convicted of beingAWOL, and 980 of those were convicted ofdesertion.
Most of those happened here in theUS, people not showing up at theirbases, forexample.
But there have been cases not unlikeBo's.
A military therapist told us about a guy who left his fob in Kandahar in2012, apparently trying to walk to an outpost to rejoin hisplatoon, kind of the reverse of what Bo said he wasplanning.
He was quickly picked up by Afghanpolice.
He wasn't charged withanything.
And in2010, eight months after Bodisappeared, a young soldier sneaked off fob Shurana at3am.
About seven hourslater, Afghan police found him wanderingaround, and they handed him back over to thearmy.
When this kid wasquestioned, evidently he said he planned to walk to EasternEurope.
He had a sleepingbag, first aidkit, food andwater,sunscreen, an ornamentalsword, an ornamental battleaxe, hisjournal, and an English tapashto translationguide.
According to an armyreport,he,quote, planned to make it look like he had beenkidnapped.
He had cut his left hand and left a trail of blood from his bunk to the fence line of thefob, and then cut his way through thefence.
You haven't heard of him because he didn't get kidnapped byTaliban, because he wasn't declared dustone, because there was nosearch.
You haven't heard of him because no one noticed he was even gone until the Afghan policecalled.
You haven't heard of him because we didn't trade five guys out of Guantanamo Bay to get himback.
We talked to someone in this guy's commandgroup, and he told us as agroup, they sat down and they talked about what to do about thissoldier.
Quote, unlikeBergdahl, which gained a lot ofpublicity, this was very lowkey, didn't make thenews, so there was no pressure from anybodyhigher.
The kid wasn't charged with anycrimes.
The guy from the command told us he was sent home to get the help heneeded.
About a yearlater, he was medically retired from thearmy.
That military therapist we talked to said these soldiers who walk off intoAfghanistan, the army treats them asheadcases.
It's sodangerous, you kind of have to be crazy to doit, orsuicidal.
He compared them to astronauts taking off their helmets inspace.
Bo's court martial is scheduled to start inAugust, but right now the proceedings are stayed because the defense and the government are fighting over this massive trove of classifieddocuments.
More than 300,000pages,apparently, and who knows what's inthere.
So it seems very unlikely to me that anything's going to start thissummer.
In one of the recordings of Mark andBo, there's this part where Bo explains that most of the time he was a prisoner just dealing with theday-to-day, his mind felt kind ofnumb.
But then he said there were a couple oftimes, briefmoments, when he got thissurge, like he could breathe for asecond.
One of thosetimes, he said was during his firstyear, he was being held in a mudcompound, the one where he said he made friends with the dog and had tried to tunnel himselfout.
One night Bo managed to slip outside into thecourtyard, and he lookedup.
It was completely emptynight,like, weather or morningclouds.
It was just no light pollution or anything likethat.
This is full sky ofstars.
I'm just sittingthere, and after so many months of beating therules, to speed thatempty, like just asfast, space aboveme, it was really in a sense that things went so far beyondme.
Yeah. It is just that relief of knowing that this stupidity doesn't go any further than that littleplanet, or the littlecountry, or a littlehouse, or whatever itis.
Youknow, if something is as big asthat, then it's almost like you don't have to bescared.
Mark still talks to Booccasionally, not as much as he usedto.
Mark says there isn't much more to say until the military settles Bo'scase.
Bo and the army areadversaries, legallyspeaking, but Bo is still asoldier.
As soon as he wasrescued, somewhere in a governmentoffice, someone filled out a department of the army formed4187.
They changed Bo's status from missing captured to present forduty.
After knocking down this huge long serpentine of geopoliticaldominoes, Bo was assigned to an office job on his base in SanAntonio.
He's fighting the charges againsthim, which means he waits a lot longer than he thought he'd haveto, but waiting is something Bo knows how todo.
Serials produced by JulieSnyder, Dana Chivis and me in partnership with MarkBowle, MeganEllison, HugoLindgren, JessicaWeisberg, PaigeOne, and AnnaPertepictures.
Every episode for the past 10weeks, I've spun through the credits pretty fast because none of you really give a hood about thecredits.
But Ido, I care somuch, and if you listen to this wholestory, I'm telling you you docare, you just don't knowit.
This reporting project wasenormous, but it's always metalking.
So what you don't know is that entire sections of this story were doggedly and expertly reported by DanaChivis.
And then Kevin Garnett and WhitneyDangerfield, they also hunted down so muchinformation, really interesting stuff that I didn't even know to lookfor.
Ira Glass sat in on endless edits no matter when theyfell, even if he was in a taxi coming home after a red eyeflight, he dialed into helpus.
I won't go on andon. It's just that I've been waiting all season to say how stupendously grateful I am for the cracker jack skill of everyone I workwith.
Not least MichelleHarris, our factchecker, BenjaminFalen, he did additional research for us thisweek.
Ani Hadalani did our copy editing Joel Lovell helped edit thisweek.
Emily Condon is our lineproducer.
Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn and FritzMyers.
Fritz was on call for us allseason.
Matt Block played trumpet for our theme music on Thanksgivingweekend.
Carl Burton did the artwork for eachepisode.
Thanks also to Rich Orris for his work on thewebsite.
The show is mixed by KateBelinsky.
Kristen Taylor is our communityeditor, other serialstaff, SethLind, EliseBergerson, and KimberlyHenderson.
Finally, a special thanks this week to Mark Sparrow and BenShryer.
Ourwebsite,serialpodcast.org.
We will be watching thosecases.
It moves through the court and it's possible we'll update you depending on what happensthere.
Plus there's just a lot of great stuff on the website rightnow, including newstuff.
So please check it out and sign up for our mailinglist.
Also, do not forget to listen to this Americanlife.
You will be sohappy. Listening on Audible brings you more with the best selection of audiobooksanywhere.
Expect moreromance, moremystery, more inspiring motivation and revealingmemoirs, more businessinsights, and calmingmeditations.
Listening can transform your day and even your life by changing your mood and yourroutine.
With podcasts and exclusive originalstoo, Audible gives you the power to choose where you want togo.
There's more to imagine when youlisten.
Find out for yourself when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com slashserial.
