by Matt Farwell
Kim and her brother took it much worse. Mark Farris’s heart sank at the news. The last they had talked, Bowe was planning a two-week wilderness trip on the Yellowstone River in a sea kayak. It was a wild idea and would be a tough trip, but Farris thought it could work; the Army would not.
“If there was a human being unfit for the Army, who should never have joined the Army, it was Bowe,” said Farris. “He was naive, idealistic, good-spirited. A very gentle person and a gentle soul.”
Anna Fontaine was equally concerned. Why was this a better idea than the Coast Guard? “You tried this before. It didn’t work. Why are you putting yourself through it again?”
Bowe told her that he was older now and had matured. “I was naive then. Now I know what to expect.” Anna had grown up in the South near Army bases and told him he wouldn’t like the rough culture. It didn’t matter. “He was dead set on it,” she said. “He was gung ho.” Her parting words to him were: “Keep your head down. Don’t be a hero.”
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DURING TWO WEEKS of in-processing as an infantry trainee at the Army’s 30th Adjutant General Reception Battalion, Bergdahl learned that the Army didn’t care for his feelings, his opinions, or his time. He stood in one line after another for physical exams, for drawing equipment, and for having his head shaved. His free time was spent in an open-bay starship barracks filled with bunk beds and his fellow recruits.
Second Battalion, 58th Infantry (“House of Pain”) was one of six training battalions on Sand Hill, the section of Fort Benning reserved for basic training. Each battalion was led by a lieutenant colonel. Within the battalions were six companies, each led by a captain and a first sergeant. There were four platoons in each company, led by drill sergeants. Some drill sergeants took pleasure in the sadism of the job or were coming unglued after combat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. On graduation day, one drill sergeant assembled the soldiers he’d spent the last fourteen weeks training and told them one thing: that he couldn’t wait to see their names among the death notices in the Army Times.
But Bergdahl was assigned to Alpha Company, 2/58, the “AlphaGators,” and his drill sergeant was different. Sergeant First Class Olivera was a no-nonsense combat veteran focused on preparing soldiers for war. Olivera felt that screaming and bluster was a waste of time. He was there to train, not to bully. When he saw a private make a mistake, he would tell him to stop, then walk him through the problem and the best way to fix it. Bergdahl would have followed Olivera anywhere. “You wanted to take his orders,” he later told General Dahl. His peers were a different story. He thought a quarter of the soldiers who graduated from basic training with him should have failed. Some went out and got drunk on their one all-night pass, returned to base with beer, and abandoned the empties in the laundry room. One soldier with a chipped tooth went on sick call to Salomon Dental Clinic, got the tooth fixed, and said, “Well, I got what I wanted out of the Army,” a sentiment Bergdahl found as offensive as the trainees selling contraband tobacco at ridiculous markups.
“Yes, my standard was high,” Bergdahl later admitted to Army investigators. He didn’t think the Army should keep people who didn’t want to serve. Still, they all graduated together, and when Bergdahl invited his parents to the ceremony, he allowed himself a rare moment of happiness when they said they would come. On Fort Benning, Olivera congratulated Bob and Jani for their good work. “Bowe was good to go when he got here,” he said.
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BERGDAHL WAS ASSIGNED to a paratrooper unit in Alaska that needed soldiers for an upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Soldiers assigned to the legendary 1/501. Parachute Infantry Regiment were normally required to have attended Airborne School, the three-week course on Fort Benning that qualified soldiers as paratroopers, but the Army was so desperate for soldiers, it waived internal standards and Bergdahl never attended Jump School.
The forerunner of all the Army’s airborne units, 1/501 had adopted the Apache warrior Geronimo as their mascot, wearing his stylized profile on the unit crest pinned to their red berets above the right eye. When deployed to Afghanistan, 1/501 became “Task Force 1 Geronimo.”
Despite its historical lore, the unit’s recent past was as troubled as Bergdahl’s. In 2007, the 1/501 completed a rough deployment to Iraq in Iskandariyah, thirty-five miles south of Baghdad. “It is really fucked-up here,” 1/501 paratrooper Gabe Trollinger wrote to a friend over email. “There is nothing to be accomplished here other than see people you care about hurt, usually due to the complete lack of imagination of your officers.”
In May 2007, a sniper from 1/501 named Evan Vela shot and killed an unarmed captive Iraqi man with a 9mm pistol—twice in the head—on orders from Staff Sergeant Michael Hensley. The Army considered it murder, and Vela was court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in the United States Disciplinary Barracks on Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Strangely, Hensley escaped punishment for anything but planting a drop weapon on the Iraqi after the murder and disrespecting an officer.
A year later, Private Bergdahl arrived at 1/501 and was assigned to 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company. He was crammed into a room in the overstuffed Geronimo barracks with two other soldiers: a personable but chronically unwashed private, and Cody Full, a tough-talking Texan who attracted both drama and dirt. Bergdahl, who didn’t drink or swear or dip chewing tobacco, stuck out. He tried to roll with it, but several soldiers would recall that he looked “lost.” Joseph Coe, a fellow private who grew up as a Christian missionary, thought Bergdahl was a Mormon. While the other guys went out to drink at strip clubs, Bergdahl and Coe went to Barnes & Noble with Gerald Sutton, another private in 2nd Platoon.
Bergdahl was getting better at making friends but was still an oddball doing his own thing—a sin in the infantry. He knew he wasn’t like the other guys, and to him that was a good thing. They goofed off. He used his downtime to learn new languages he downloaded from Rosetta Stone, study maps of Afghanistan, and read the ways of the warrior from lofty texts like The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi’s seventeenth-century treatise on swordsmanship, martial strategy, and samurai honor. “I will learn Russian I will learn Japanese. I will learn French. I will learn Chines [sic],” he wrote in his journal. He embraced the discomforts of soldiering, training himself to sleep on the concrete floor, wake up at 5:00 a.m., and breeze through the formation runs that left others winded. When the men lined up in the barrack hallways before morning PT, he closed his eyes and sat in motionless meditation.
“He was different, which is why the other people didn’t like him,” said Coe, one of the few who did. “He wasn’t well accepted.”
But Bergdahl wasn’t a total outcast in Blackfoot Company. Sutton admired his fitness and strength, Coe related to his strict Christian upbringing, and Private First Class Odilon Nascimento was impressed by Bergdahl’s moral code. “If he found a million dollars, he would find the owner,” Nascimento later told General Dahl’s investigators. Bergdahl’s bunkmate, Cody Full, was less impressed and did not hide his disdain. When Bergdahl closed his eyes to meditate amid the barracks’ ruckus, Full threw bottle caps at his head, and Bergdahl responded by not responding at all.
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BERGDAHL LEARNED that his battalion would spend a month at Fort Irwin National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert. They would prepare for deployment by playing war games that the Army ran for $25 million each. The OPFOR—opposing force—at Fort Irwin was the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, who knew their terrain in the Mojave Desert the way Taliban fighters knew theirs. It was a point of pride for a visiting unit to beat the OPFOR. Ambitious units arrived prepared, having studied maps and reports of prior engagements: They knew the best spots to hide in Bike Lake, lie in ambush among the Valley of Death, escape along the John Wayne Foothills, or mask movement for a counterattack in the shadow of Furlong Ridge. But even the best-trained uni
ts usually lost.
To Bergdahl, NTC seemed like a $25 million dollar waste. His platoon fared badly in mock battles, the inevitable result of what he saw as a lack of discipline, exacerbated by weak leadership. He couldn’t believe that these men were preparing for war. But he carried on, reading and rereading the Ranger Handbook and Army field manuals, studying maps, sharpening other soldiers’ knives, and taking pride in keeping his equipment clean. At NTC, when leadership noticed that Bergdahl was in shape, a good shot, and “squared away” (a good soldier), they made him a SAW gunner. He carried the Squad Automatic Weapon, the M-249 light machine gun. This seventeen-pound, belt-fed machine gun could fire two hundred 5.56mm bullets in less than fifteen seconds, though soldiers were trained to use shorter bursts to prevent the barrel from melting. Carrying it meant Bergdahl had the most firepower in his four-man fire team. He took to the weapon—always had it clean and in better shape than anyone else’s in the platoon.
Second Platoon returned to Alaska before deploying. During an inspection back on Fort Richardson, Command Sergeant Major Ken Wolfe, a career soldier in his mid-forties and the battalion’s senior noncommissioned officer, gave a speech to his men about the war they were headed to fight. “I know you all joined because you want to rape, pillage, and kill. That’s why I joined,” Wolfe began in his Texas drawl. “But you need to think about COIN.” Wolfe emphasized that in Afghanistan they would be as focused on winning over the local Afghan farmers, merchants, and truck drivers as they would be on killing the Taliban.
COIN was an impossible contradiction for infantrymen who, from their first day at Fort Benning, were trained to kill. It was something that Bergdahl couldn’t have missed in fourteen weeks on Sand Hill, marching in formation, shouting, “Kill,” in unison each time his left boot struck the ground. Another marching cadence in the Infantry Training Brigade went: “Trained . . . to kill . . . kill . . . we will.” Army indoctrination was not subtle; Wolfe’s point was that the war in Afghanistan would be.
Bergdahl didn’t get it. He was so stunned by Wolfe’s opener that he missed the rest. “I didn’t join to be a rapist, murderer, and killer,” he thought, and wondered how many of his new comrades had. Before he returned home for Christmas, he learned that sexual assaults and rapes had become rampant at Fort Richardson. He was appalled. His notion of war came from his books, where warriors were held in higher esteem because they lived by a higher code. Now the code was gone.
“These soldiers that we’re supposed to be relying on for support, they don’t even have the ethics not to rape a woman,” he told General Dahl.
As Christmas approached, Bergdahl’s attention turned to his own health. Just before break, he had cut his hand on a metal bunk-bed frame, a minor wound that by the time he reached Idaho on December 25 had turned into a staph infection. At 2 a.m. on December 27, with his arm red and swollen up to his elbow, he drove to the emergency room south of Ketchum and was administered IV antibiotics. As doctors ordered him back for twice-daily IVs, he applied iodine and his usual stoicism. When he visited his parents for what they all knew could be their last time together, his father reminded him that some men don’t come home from war, and he reminded his father that he wanted to be buried at sea. His sister said she would pray for him.
Back in Alaska, Bergdahl regained his strength and prepared to deploy with the rest of Task Force Geronimo in February. With a new pair of boots that he wanted to break in before he left, he packed his rucksack and went for a two-mile march—and managed to get a massive blister on his left heel. The barracks were filthy, and with deployment approaching he grew increasingly worried about another infection. One morning as he was changing his socks, Sutton and the others took one look at his swollen foot and took him to the emergency room.
There, doctors cut out the infected tissue—a chunk the size of a half dollar—and marveled at Bergdahl’s luck. The surgeon said if he’d waited a couple more days, the infection would have spread into his ligaments and bone—he would have needed an amputation. The battalion deployed to Afghanistan the next day, without Bergdahl.
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BY LATE SPRING, Bergdahl was well enough for combat. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are,” he wrote in his journal. “I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.” On May 9, 2009, he boarded a commercial flight to Kuwait and traveled on to Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in Afghanistan and the war’s logistical hub, built on the bones of a Soviet airfield outside Kabul.
Bagram was bursting with activity. Three years earlier, as a resurgent Taliban streamed across the border, the United States had responded by sending more troops. Worried about a potential Taliban buildup, President Bush and the Pentagon had approved the first mini troop surge at the end of 2006, extending the tour of soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division for four months to temporarily double combat strength in-country. When Bergdahl joined the Army, there were just under thirty thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By the time he arrived in Bagram, there were forty thousand. The number was expected to top one hundred thousand by the time President Obama’s new strategy to recover the drifting war was implemented.
In transit at Bagram, Bergdahl slept on a cot in a commercial circus tent crowded with soldiers in limbo: sleeping, playing video games, and horsing around between smoke breaks. That was a nice diversion from the mandatory briefings, where officers and sergeants gave orientation talks to soldiers new in-country. Using PowerPoint, the briefers droned on about the rules of engagement (when soldiers could shoot, when they couldn’t, whom they could legally kill, how they could get in trouble for killing the wrong person), and briefings on ISAF’s strict prisoner policy (upon capture, detainees had to be processed and sent to Bagram within ninety-six hours). There were briefings on when soldiers could cross the border into Pakistan—generally only in hot pursuit. “Don’t take cross-border lightly” was the message to the soldiers headed out to the FOBs (forward operating bases).
Officially in-processed into Operation Enduring Freedom, Bergdahl flew to FOB Sharana in Paktika Province. Sharana seemed like a mirage, a bustling port city in the middle of a lifeless desert. It was the biggest base in Paktika and one of the major hubs for the war on the border. It, too, was built on the bones of a Soviet base. In 2005, FOB Sharana became the staging point for military engineers overseeing road construction in Regional Command East (RC East). From 2006 to 2007, it grew sevenfold in size and population, and then kept growing as the war expanded under the Obama administration. Rows of shipping containers—“connexes” in military lingo—stretched for nearly a kilometer: red and blue and gray rectangles lined up like Legos, filled with ammunition, humanitarian aid, lumber, spare parts, communications equipment, donated books, pallets of water, cans of tomato sauce. The air hummed with the constant activity of helicopters, airplanes, generators, and rumbling gun trucks.
Bergdahl thought he was going to be taking cover behind sandbags, roughing it out in the desert—dirty, sweating, a soldier. But Sharana, despite its physical isolation, was not the frontier he had envisioned. It was Little America in Eastern Afghanistan. He was shocked by the creature comforts, like air-conditioned barracks with spring mattresses on bed frames, DVD players, hot water showers, and porcelain toilets. And he was appalled by the luxuries: a computer lab, a phone bank, a basketball court, coffee shops, and convenience stores, just like the post exchange in Alaska. At the chow hall, soldiers could have all the food they wanted, any time they wanted, free of charge. “I’m looking at this, and people are complaining to me that life is so hard over here. I’m going, ‘Are you serious?’”
Rules on FOB Sharana could be absurd, requiring that soldiers wear reflective belts over camouflage uniforms, shave before entering the chow hall, and keep their pockets buttoned and their boots bloused at all times. The American logis
tics system, after eight years, could accomplish minor miracles—like transporting weekly steak and lobster dinners to one of the most dangerous and inaccessible locations in the world. Yet there remained the question, asked from both the bottom and the top: What good was that incredible network, which brought in everything American soldiers and contractors needed, if they couldn’t win the war?
Bergdahl’s first night at FOB Sharana, his platoon was sent out. They were on duty as the quick reaction force (QRF) ready to roll out the gate if anyone outside the wire got into trouble. Bergdahl doesn’t remember the exact details of the QRF mission, but he knows he was a “little overwhelmed.” He’d only just arrived when the call came, his sergeants yelling, “We’re leaving now! You’re on patrol with us.” The mission was uneventful—no firefights or explosions—but it left a strong impression. Dangerous or not, it was his first combat mission, and he got almost everything wrong. He had forgotten to put fresh batteries in his night vision goggles. When the QRF convoy stopped, his squad leader ordered him out of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle (MRAP, pronounced “em-rap”) to check and clear culverts of IEDs, he obliged, even though he had no idea what he was doing and couldn’t see. When the squad leader told him to hurry up, Bergdahl thought his leadership was reckless. It was only then, outside the wire, in a combat zone, that he realized he was afraid and unprepared.
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A FEW WEEKS into Bergdahl’s deployment, 2nd Platoon received another QRF call. A platoon had hit a bomb near Omna, a district on a high plateau in central Paktika. Omna was east across the valley from the Taliban-dominated town of Yahya Khel, a way station southeast of FOB Sharana, accessible only by a thin dirt road up steep mountain switchbacks. No one had been hurt in the blast, but the platoon couldn’t tow their hulking MRAP down the switchbacks with just a tow bar or rope—they needed a wrecker, a tow truck on steroids. The Army normally hired local Afghans for that kind of work. But Bergdahl’s platoon was ordered to escort a wrecker to Omna, load up the damaged vehicle, and return it to Sharana. On the way up the switchbacks, they hit another bomb in the road. No one was killed, but now two vehicles were disabled on a mission that was rapidly bogging down.
