Bergdahl’s ordeal
His desertion caused harm, but he’s not a traitor
In June 2009, Bowe Bergdahl, then a 23-year-old Army private, walked off his base in eastern Afghanistan and got captured by the Taliban. Several soldiers were seriously wounded attempting to rescue him. One was permanently paralyzed. Finally, the price of his release in May 2014 was five captured Taliban. The deserting Bergdahl now gets off with a dishonorable discharge.
Those are the surface-level facts. But Bergdahl’s plan was to run through 20 miles of hostile territory to get to a forward operating base called Sharana, and there to inform the general of what he believed to be incompetent and dangerous behavior in his unit.
This was not just a terribly conceived plan — it was delusional. Bergdahl suffers from schizotypal personality disorder, which had gotten him discharged from the Coast Guard in 2006. The Idaho native was allowed to enlist in the Army two years later under a medical waiver at a time when the Army was desperate for soldiers.
“The available military record shows that when Bergdahl left his place of duty, he was an exemplary, idealistic young soldier who lived with mental illness, not a traitor,” wrote Rob Cuthbert, a former Army soldier who worked for the Veteran Advocacy Project, in a New York Times opinion piece.
Bergdahl has frequently admitted he “made a horrible mistake” when he left his post, and for that mistake Bergdahl has paid. He endured torture and beatings and dysentery and starvation and the constant threat of sudden death for five years — three of which were spent inside a 7-foot cage. The experience left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, muscular nerve damage in his lower legs, degenerative back damage, and a loss of range of motion in his left shoulder that prevents him from lifting heavy objects.
After his rescue, Bergdahl’s debriefings yielded a “gold mine” of intelligence, according to Amber Dach, a 16-year veteran of military intelligence and the primary analyst assigned to Bergdahl’s case. If Bergdahl is a traitor, he certainly didn’t act the part while living under the Taliban: He fought, resisted, tried to escape multiple times — once eluding the Taliban for eight days — and returned with a lot of valuable information.
Bergdahl is a confused young man whose life is wrecked. Desertion is a serious matter, but he is not a traitor. It is easy to second-guess and say he should have served some time for his crime. But mercy seems more than justified in this case.