Bergdahl: I’m hurt when people say ‘string him up’
UNITED STATES: Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier held in captivity for nearly five years after he walked off his base in Afghanistan, has said that coming home to the US has been worse than his treatment by the Taliban.
‘‘At least the Taliban were honest enough to say, ‘I’m the guy who’s gonna cut your throat’,’’ the 31-year-old sergeant said in his only face-to-face interview since he was released three years ago.
Comparing that with being back in the US army on ‘‘administrative duties’’ while awaiting trial for desertion, he said: ‘‘Here, it could be the guy I pass in the corridor who’s going to sign the paper that sends me away for life.’’ The interview appeared in The
Sunday Times Magazine on the eve of his appearance for sentencing at a military court in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He pleaded guilty last week to desertion and misbehaviour before the enemy and faces a maximum of life imprisonment.
Speaking to the British television journalist Sean Langan, who was himself held hostage by the Taliban for three months in 2008, Bergdahl revealed the terror he experienced at the hands of his captors, who kept him in a steel cage.
‘‘The endless weeks, months, years on my own,’’ he said. ‘‘In the end my mind became a broken record. Small things like staring at walls and staring at bugs on the ground - your mind becomes your own worst enemy and starts to go numb.’’
Bergdahl also discussed the vilification he had faced in America since being freed as part of an exchange for five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. ‘‘The only time I’ve been able to breathe was when I was released and picked up by US special forces in the helicopter,’’ he said. ‘‘I had a brief moment of liberty.’’
The soldier claimed he left his outpost in Paktika province in 2009 to report ‘‘leadership issues’’ in his unit to another base 30km away. But controversy over whether up to six US troops were killed searching for him - and anger over whether Barack Obama was right to free five men from ‘‘Gitmo’’ for a deserter - turned Bergdahl into a political pawn.
During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Donald Trump described him as a ‘‘dirty rotten traitor’’ and said he should be shot.
‘‘He’s a politician,’’ Bergdahl told Langan. ‘‘But I know I can’t convince the people who say, ‘Just string him up and shoot him.’ So you just move on.’’ But, he added: ‘‘Yes, it hurts.’’
Major-General Kenneth Dahl, who led the army investigation into Bergdahl, concluded that he was honourable in his intent but also ‘‘delusional’’ and had ‘‘outsized impressions of his own capabilities’’. Dahl recommended that he should not be sent to prison, and an army medical board found that he had been suffering from a severe psychological disorder.
Langan argued that Bergdahl ‘‘should never have been allowed in the US army in the first place’’. In 2006 he was ruled ‘‘psychologically unfit’’ by the US coastguard after just 23 days of training, yet the army gave him a medical waiver and in 2009 sent him to Afghanistan, where he walked off base after only six weeks.
Bergdahl told Langan he escaped from Taliban captivity several times because he had valuable information about the enemy to give to the US army. ‘‘I was gathering as much intelligence as I could and I didn’t want that to go to waste. And there was another reason. I didn’t want to get to that point of being executed. I’d seen the videos. I thought I could either die here or die escaping. Either way I was a dead man. It wasn’t a case of being scared of dying. It was a case of embracing the fact that I was a dead man.’’