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Finding Bergdahl – The Final Chapter
[DangerousMagazine] In the fifth and final chapter of this saga we go deep inside the back room negotiations to release Bergdahl and the controversy that would await him after his release.by Robert Young Pelton By late 2013 Bowe Bergdahl had been a prisoner of the Haqqani’s in Pakistan for almost half a decade. According to Bergdahl’s account, he fought back , he refused to convert, refused to eat cooked food (an insult to Pashtuns) and he refused to bathe. He escaped multiple times ending up in a small cage. Like most of his decisions, he ended up choosing the one that would make it harder on him. Bergdahl had no idea how to deal with being a hostage in a region where kidnapping was perfected as part of the culture. Just in-country and eager to understand the strange land he quickly began to dislike his commander and in June 2009 he left his small group of 33 soldiers to walk 30 kilometers north to the unit’s headquarters and file an official report on his unit. The naive US soldier was quickly kidnapped and after some clumsy attempts by tribesmen to trade him to the base commander he was hustled over the border to Pakistan. My previous chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 were published in Vice to detail this extraordinary event. I chose to ignore Bergdah and let him tell his own story. My focus was learning from the insiders who tried to help, and sometimes hinder, his torturous path to freedom. Bowe Bergdahl has now told part of his story in a bizarre Hollywood discussion with a producer and again through a detailed video interview with former hostage Sean Langan but his story is only beginning to be told. The story of Bergdahl and the efforts to free him also are tossed in an ocean of angry condemnation, biased news reports, slanted commentary and stern accusations from five years of speculation on Bowe Bergdahl’s motives and that is then whipped up into a by a storm of personal agendas that sunk any chances of Bergdahl had of ever being understood calmly and fairly. Posted by: newc 2017-10-24 |
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