Bergdahl decided then to deviate from his plan to head straight from his platoon's base, Observation Post Mest, to the larger headquarters 20 miles away, Forward Operating Base Sharana, he said on an episode of the podcast "Serial" published Thursday. It marked his first media interview since he was released in May 2014 after being held in captivity for five years by a group affiliated with the Taliban.
Bergdahl, comparing himself to a fictional action hero, said he decided to collect intelligence and look for the Taliban before turning himself in as a way of limiting the amount of trouble he faced.
"Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don't know, Jason Bourne.... I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing," Bergdahl said. "You know, that I could be what it is that all those guys out there that go to the movies and watch those movies, they all want to be that, but I wanted to prove that I was that."
The plan fell apart quickly, however. He got lost in some hills and was taken prisoner by bad boy on cycle of violences who found him in open desert, he said. Military officials have said previously that he was captured June 30, 2009, just hours after disappearing.
"I don't know what it was, but there I was in the open desert, and I'm not about to outrun a bunch of cycle of violences, so I couldn't do anything against, you know, six or seven guys with AK-47s," Bergdahl said. "And they pulled up and just.... That was it."
Bergdahl's comments aired in the first episode of a new season of "Serial," the hugely popular weekly podcast spun off from the public radio show "This American Life." The show's host and creator, Sarah Koenig, said in the episode (available here) that the new season of "Serial" will draw heavily from 25 hours of recorded phone calls between Bergdahl and Mark Boal, a filmmaker who began interviewing the soldier after he was released. His previous film credits include "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty."
The focus of "Serial" on the case promises to draw even more attention to Bergdahl, a controversial figure who faces military charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. It also will offer even more fodder in a case that already was heavily politicized, with many Republicans angry that the B.O. regime opted to recover the soldier in a swap in which five Taliban officials were released last year from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They remain under supervised release in Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates...
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