American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  In reality, Bowe spent his days mowing grass and greasing the hinges on rusty gun targets. When he did hang out with the SEALs and Delta Force guys, it was as their designated driver for drinking and gambling trips to the casinos twenty minutes south of the range. They knew he wanted to be like them, and they discouraged it in the strongest terms possible. If he so much as tried, the SEALs told him, they would blacklist him from BUD/S, the twenty-four-week Basic Underwater Demolition initiation training every SEAL must complete. “They didn’t want to see him go in,” Bob said. “He was too good a kid.”

  But their warnings didn’t faze him. He had a goal now. He was just about finished with his weed whacker and paintbrush initiation, and Shaw was planning to start training him for a position as a shooting instructor. “There was no indications at all about him leaving or doing anything, then all of a sudden, just one day, he said he was joining the Foreign Legions.”

  Bowe craved action, and if the SEALs would block him, like they said they would, then surely, he reasoned, the French Foreign Legion would welcome him with open arms. It would be the ultimate adventure. The French Foreign Legion is a legendary combat outfit. Though it was part of the French military, its soldiers (but not its officers) were from elsewhere. The French Foreign Legion didn’t care who you were or where you came from; if one could make the cut and sign the five-year contract to fight for France, France would supply a new identity—a nom de guerre—and guarantee a constant rotation through troubled spots around the globe.

  Bowe told only a few people about his plan. Kim thought it was crazy. Bob knew it was doomed. Still, he bought a one-way ticket and made his way to Fort de Nogent, where potential legionnaires are first screened. At the time, with battle-hardened former soldiers from the Eastern Bloc and Africa streaming into the service, the French Foreign Legion did not have any trouble meeting its recruiting goals. They gave Bowe a basic physical exam and told him it wasn’t going to work out. He felt that they were laughing at him. It was his eyesight, they said.

  Bowe returned home devastated and smoking French cigarettes. He told his mom that his soul was crushed. In truth, he was relieved. From the moment he stepped off the plane, nothing had gone as he had expected. Navigating the foreign city was completely overwhelming. He hadn’t anticipated, for instance, that everyone would be speaking French. To his friends, there was no accounting for such surprised reactions to predictable outcomes; it was just Bowe being Bowe.

  Back in Idaho, his conversations turned dark. He told his mom that if he ever had children, he didn’t want a son, “because he’ll be just like me.” He looked at job listings in big cities, a process that reaffirmed his disinterest in a normal life. “I am not the type of person that is going to get a job because it has a good paycheck,” he told later General Dahl. “I want a job where I can see my effort and see that I am making a difference.” In October 2005, he thought he’d found what he was looking for and asked Kim to drive him to the Idaho National Guard recruiting office in Twin Falls. He had decided to join the United States Coast Guard. He didn’t tell his parents this time.

  * * *

  —

  THREE MONTHS LATER, the January wind whipped off the Delaware Bay in twenty-mile-per-hour gusts in Cape May, New Jersey. Bergdahl was wearing the same blank gray T-shirt, blue shorts, and white Coast Guard–issue sneakers as every other blank-faced seaman recruit standing in line waiting to piss in a cup. Already, this wasn’t what he thought it would be. The company commanders didn’t offer him calm or patient instructions. They got right up in his face and screamed.

  “Seaman Recruit Bergdahl! Why are you here?!”

  Bergdahl froze up. Twelve years later, he tried explaining it to General Dahl. He was fascinated by the ocean and loved boats. (His email address was cutlassclipper@hotmail.com.) The Coast Guard defended America and saved lives every day.

  Eye contact with company commanders was forbidden. The slightest deviation from orders could bring them back, red-faced and screaming. Nervous recruits were singled out for special treatment, put on the spot in the middle of drills and in front of their peers with crude questions and sexual innuendo—whatever worked to rattle the new arrivals. Company commanders also knew tricks to impose order. When one recruit forgot to shave one morning, or ran out of time, every man in Quebec Company was ordered to go back, shave again, and line up for inspection. A single missed whisker restarted the entire process. Only after the full company had lathered up and shaved six or seven times, their faces and necks raw and bloody in the winter’s ocean wind, did the torment finally stop.

  The nights were rarely peaceful. Sleep was interrupted by fire drills, sometimes just one, sometimes one after the other after the other until dawn. When the lights flashed on at 2:00 a.m., the recruits scrambled out of bed, hurried into their socks and the sneakers the commanders called their “go-fasters,” and ran outside to line up in tight formation, “nuts to butts,” and count off in the thirty-degree night. Then it was back to their bunks, shoes off, socks off, lights off. Forty minutes later, as sleep washed over them, the lights and sirens flashed and the whole exercise unfolded again.

  On the night of February 15 the drills started right after supper. At the second formation, one recruit from Quebec Company was missing, and the company commander wanted answers.

  “I think that’s Seaman Recruit Bergdahl,” one recruit said.

  Two recruits sent to retrieve him found him curled in a ball in the corner of the bathroom, hugging his knees tight to his chest, crying, tears mixing with blood. “There’s blood on the mirror, blood on the sink, on the counter. Blood on the fucking walls,” said John Raffa, one of the men who found Bergdahl. Bowe wasn’t bleeding out, and Raffa didn’t think it was a suicide attempt. He asked him what had happened. Bowe told him to go away and leave him alone.

  As it had in Paris, the gap between his expectations and reality had proved unbridgeable. Prior to boot camp, he had meditated to quiet his mind and had run through the steps of what would be required of him. And yet, he had arrived into a situation entirely out of his control. This was real pressure: It was as if every moment of anxiety from when he was a kid and his father had been angry with him had compressed into an unbearable wave of panic. He thought of himself as a failure, he told Dahl. “And suddenly, I am responsible for someone else’s life.”

  Bowe was loaded into an ambulance and driven to the Samuel J. Call Health Services Center, the Coast Guard’s largest hospital. “I can’t do this,” he told the doctors, visibly shaking. They determined the bloody scene was the result of a nosebleed. He was prescribed Tylenol, Ativan to calm him down, and Ambien to help him sleep. The next morning a Coast Guard psychiatrist examined him and recommended a discharge on medical grounds. “Disqualified for continued service in the U.S. Coast Guard due to the following condition(s): ADJUSTMENT DISORDER WITH DEPRESSION,” it read.

  On February 25, 2006, they issued him a Department of Defense Form 214 (DD-214), making his release from active duty official. Should former Seaman Recruit Bergdahl want to try boot camp again, he would need stress management counseling and clearance by a psychologist prior to reenlistment.

  * * *

  —

  EVERYTHING WAS UNDER CONTROL, Bowe said. Kim was shocked. A few weeks earlier, he had sent her ten pages of scrawled and incoherent journal entries torn out of a notebook. She had been worrying about him ever since, and now he was standing in her kitchen talking about the mental breakdown that he had faked to get out of the Coast Guard.

  She didn’t believe him. “I don’t think anyone believed him,” she told General Dahl’s investigators eight years later. Kim asked Bowe to be honest with her about what had happened in New Jersey. He didn’t like it anymore, so he got out of it, he said. “You don’t just ‘get out of it,’” she told him. That wasn’t how the military worked.

  Bowe went back to Strega. There was more work for him there in the w
inter, and only a few people knew where he had been or what he was doing on the East Coast. The winter of 2006 was a big snow year in Idaho’s capital ski town: Sun Valley set a single-season record with 360 inches, and at Strega, Bowe was in charge of snow removal. While his friends lingered over earthenware mugs of yerba mate, he shoveled. He cleared the walkway through the courtyard to the street, then he cleared the sidewalk along Second Avenue. When he was done with the grounds, he climbed the building and shoveled the roof. In the back alley, he sculpted the snow and ice into the tables and chairs of a fully functioning smokers’ lounge.

  There were new people in Strega that winter, and Bowe was making an impression. “I never met anybody who had so much self-discipline,” said Matt Larson, a local photographer who helped organize classic film nights at the tea shop. Larson didn’t know anything about Bowe, but watching him shovel for hours, he had seen him turn the common chore into a monastic ritual, “like a purification of self through physical activity.”

  When the snow melted, Bowe saw an ad for an apartment in Hailey, and at twenty years old, decided it was time to live on his own. The landlord happened to be the county sheriff, who, as an old acquaintance of Bob’s, made an exception to rent his apartment to a tenant so young. Even as Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling explained his rules—no partying, no loud music, no mess—he realized Bowe wouldn’t be a problem. A few weeks later, Femling was driving through a cold spring downpour when he saw Bowe walking without a coat. He pulled over, rolled down his window, and offered his new tenant a ride. Bowe said thank you, but he couldn’t take the offer. He didn’t want to get the sheriff’s seats wet. Femling looked at his dogs in the cab of his truck and then back at Bowe. “Hey, this is a truck!” he said. “You’re not going to hurt it. Jump in!”

  Bowe again politely declined, and Femling drove away confounded, watching him in his rearview mirror walking alone in the rain. Days later at the apartment, Bowe told Femling that he was thinking about either joining the military or going to work in Alaska on a commercial fishing boat. He loved the ocean and big ships, he said. One day, he wanted to sail around the world.

  Femling told Bowe that when he was eighteen, he’d had the same impulse and regaled him with stories about the summers he had worked in Bristol Bay to pay his way through college. He told Bowe to go for it.

  * * *

  —

  FOR BOWE, Alaska was not a great experience. Yes, he and his friend Dylan Fullmer, who also grew up in the Wood River Valley, were hired for two months to work on Bristol Bay. As the strongest man on the boat, Bowe did most of the heavy labor, pulling and cleaning lines and hauling vast numbers of fish. He breathed the ocean air all day and was rocked to sleep by its swells each night. But the realities of the work, killing so many creatures for human appetites, sickened him. He and Dylan shared cramped living quarters with the boat’s captain, a heavy smoker and drinker who passed the time with crude jokes about women and started charging Bowe for trifling expenses, cutting into his paycheck. As they fell asleep one night, Bowe told Dylan that he had better journeys in mind: His next plan was to ride his bike around the world. Dylan thought it was absurd. But Bowe was serious. It would be simple, he said: He would use boats like bridges to span the continents.

  When fishing season was over, Bowe returned to Idaho, confusing the kids at Strega with his constant coming and going. Hadn’t Kim just thrown him a going-away party? He continued to boomerang, telling different stories about the places he’d been and the things he’d done. He had been piloting a speedboat running boat parts between South Padre Island and Mexico, he told one friend. His motorcycle broke down in California, he reported to another. When a shooting instructor from Mississippi called to catch up, Bowe told him that he had been working as a bodyguard for a rich man sailing around the world. Bowe got shot in the leg, he claimed, so the job ended, and he came back to Idaho to cool off and lie low.

  “There were a lot of unfilled blanks,” said Mark Farris. “He would just be ‘Some Where Else,’ doing ‘Some Thing Else.’ And there would never be a cogent narrative or explanation.”

  There was one adventure that ended well. In the summer of 2007, he was hired onto a boat crew that sailed from the East Coast to California through the Panama Canal. When they disembarked in San Francisco, he bought a new bicycle with his paycheck and rode the Pacific Coast Highway to visit his grandparents in Santa Barbara. Sleeping in a garbage bag by the side of the road, he was content. But when his bank account ran dry, he returned home and moved into a spare room at his ballet teacher’s place in Hailey. Anna Fontaine was twenty years older than him, like a big sister, and had a habit of staying out late at the bars. Bowe fell into a routine as her designated driver. As usual, he needed a new plan.

  With winter approaching, he decided to chase the sun and ride his bicycle from Idaho to Tierra del Fuego, the farthest accessible point by land. He packed his bike and saddlebags with the minimal gear and no end date in mind. He made it as far as Northern California when he was clipped by a tractor-trailer. He was stoic when he called Anna with the damage report: He was fine, but the bike was trashed. Well, she said, rehearsals for the annual Christmas performance of The Nutcracker had started, and she always had a role for her best male dancer. Great, Bowe replied, and he headed home.

  FOUR

  AN ARMY OF ONE

  Two years after the incident at Cape May, Bowe’s failure still ate at him. He never told his parents what had happened. “The day they shipped me out, a thought occurred to me and it stayed in my mind whenever I thought about the Coast Guard,” he told General Dahl, “and that thought was, I wanted to fix that.”

  Those who knew him knew Bowe was struggling with something. He would never say what it was, but the tension was plain. He spent more and more time in his room at Anna’s. There was no bed, no couch, no TV, but on his days off from work, he stayed there, sometimes for days at a time. Fontaine and her other new roommate heard him yelling at himself.

  “I can’t believe you did that!”

  “That was so stupid!”

  Some of his friends worried. But Bowe never complained, and, around men in particular, he carried himself with stoic severity. Women saw a more concerning aspect. In the Harrison’s kitchen, one of Kim’s friends grabbed his hand, flipping his forearm over to reveal the neat rows of cuts. “You have such nice arms,” she said to him. “What the heck are you doing to yourself?”

  “I’m getting ready,” he told her.

  “What are you getting ready for?”

  “Pain.”

  “Bowe?! What on earth! What are you talking about?”

  “I’m just getting ready.”

  “Enough time had passed where I got uncomfortable again with not doing something that was making a difference,” he told Dahl years later. His parents put him in touch with their pastor from Boise, Phil Proctor, who was ministering with seminary students in Northeastern Uganda. Bowe told his parents it sounded interesting; he could go to East Africa and teach villagers self-defense techniques. But the timing didn’t work out; all the seminary spots were taken.

  That spring, Bowe’s seeking came full circle. He remembered meeting another Coast Guard washout who told him that if he wanted to, he could reenlist: The Army was stressed for new warm bodies.

  His family knew he had been thinking about it.

  “Whatever you do, don’t join the Army,” his sister and Albrecht told him. It was a bit of the old Army–Navy rivalry coming through, but Sky also believed that the Navy took care of its own in a way the Army never had. His mother agreed, but didn’t think Bowe would actually enlist. Days later, when she saw him on the highway driving back from Twin Falls on his motorcycle, she knew he had.

  At the Army Recruiting Station, Bowe was a young man in a hurry. He told the recruiter that he wanted to become a scout, a soldier who takes risky missions to track down enemy positions. The recruiter to
ld him there were no more slots available for scouts, but he had three openings in the infantry, which would fill up fast if Bergdahl didn’t act quick. He offered him a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus to sweeten the deal.

  In the spring of 2008, the Army had lowered its recruiting standards to levels not seen since the end of the draft. Five years earlier, at the start of the Iraq War, 94 percent of new recruits had high school diplomas. By 2005, that number had dropped to 71 percent. New soldiers with what the Army defined as Category IV intelligence (those who’d scored in the thirtieth percentile or below), were accepted. As Iraq burned, their numbers rose, rising from just 0.06 percent of new recruits to 4 percent. Convicted felons who could secure a waiver from a sympathetic officer were accepted too. Physical fitness standards dropped. Recruiters fudged paperwork and coached problem cases like Bergdahl through background checks. His Coast Guard diagnosis was no longer disqualifying; he simply signed a form prepared by his recruiter stating that he had overcome his earlier issues. Bergdahl’s waiver was approved in late May 2008, and he was issued orders to Fort Benning, Georgia, for Infantry One Station Unit Training (OSUT), where civilians were turned into infantrymen.

  His parents didn’t take the news as badly as Bowe had feared. Jani was relieved that he would no longer be traveling the world alone. Bob thought the structured life would do him good. Reading the news at the time, he also believed that the Taliban was on the run and the risk of serious combat was low.

  “He’s barely going to get in on the war in Afghanistan,” Bob recalled thinking at the time. “It’s almost over.”