American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE HE STEPPED OVER the wire and into the quiet dark of the Paktika night, Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl had a plan. As he saw it, there was an epidemic of moral corruption in Task Force Geronimo. He had seen NCOs routinely violate their oath. The battalion commander appeared to be unstable and seemed to care more about his men’s shaving habits than their safety. Orders for the next suicide mission could come any day. Bergdahl wasn’t the only man in the platoon who worried about Baker. But no one cared. The other guys were happy eating Burger King and sitting around the PlayStation back at the FOB. Something had to be done, and if Bergdahl didn’t act, no one would.

  More than three years had passed since his stress-induced breakdown in Coast Guard boot camp. Since then, he had built himself back up with a self-designed regimen of mental, physical, and spiritual training. That failure in New Jersey was a private matter he didn’t discuss with anyone, and with each new day of training he pushed it deeper into a locked compartment in his mind until Seaman Recruit Bergdahl, the one who couldn’t hack it in the Coast Guard, no longer existed. Drill Sergeant Olivera had seen the results at Fort Benning. Bowe’s success in infantry school at Sand Hill told him that he was right to trust himself and his instincts, and that his family and everyone else who doubted him were wrong. He was a natural soldier, a warrior-monk uniquely suited for this life and bound for even greater things.

  Bergdahl had also become impatient with the pace of his military career. He felt that his advanced soldier skills were being squandered pulling guard shifts in a regular infantry unit. After Fort Benning, Fort Irwin, and Fort Richardson, he was eager to attend Special Forces selection. He would easily pass it, of course, and then move into the yearlong Special Forces training at Fort Bragg known as the Q Course. The Green Beret he would earn after Q Course was the next step on the climb he envisioned for himself. Army Special Forces were good, but they were not the most elite. The SEALs back in Mississippi may have blacklisted him from BUD/S, but he could also try out for Delta Force or pass selection for Task Force Orange or another black ops unit. For now, he was stuck in the regular infantry, wasting his time. He’d gone out on patrols and earned the “mark of a man,” as Army recruiting posters described the Combat Infantryman’s Badge (CIB), for the firefight near Omna. It was a fraction of what a typical infantryman in Afghanistan did over the course of a yearlong deployment, and he had complained in earlier messages to his parents and in bitch sessions with the guys in the platoon that he was ready for more action.

  But in those same emails home, he was also repulsed by what he had seen. The war he had been sold was a lie, he thought, a con spun from the desire in the American heart to spread freedom and liberate the tyrannized peoples of the world. De oppresso liber—to free the oppressed—that was the Special Forces motto, written on the metal crests every Green Beret wore above his left eye. That had been Bergdahl’s hope too, and he had a role to play in the epic he had written in his imagination and signed up for at the recruiting office. But then he saw his deployment for what it really was: not just lame but perverse. Here, it was normal for soldiers to mock and ridicule the Afghans they had been sent to help, and his own battalion commander had desecrated a graveyard to make himself look tough. Here, the U.S. military provided cash, weapons, and support to corrupt strongmen. This wasn’t the war story Bergdahl had written for himself, so he decided to write his own.

  “I had to do something,” he confessed to Dahl in the Army office building more than five years later in Texas. “Happily with my ignorance, from a young man’s mind and my imagination, I came up with a fantastic plan.”

  The plan wasn’t complicated. He had run the simulations in his mind, visualizing and scrutinizing every step and potential outcome until he knew it would work. Along with wilderness survival and knife fighting, he told Dahl, running simulations was one of his most prized skills. He would leave OP Mest at night, when most of the men were asleep or on guard shift. He knew the gaps in security and would slip off near the blind spot in front of OP4, climb the hill through the graveyard, drop down the other side, and run through the moon dust to FOB Sharana. It was about eighteen miles, roughly the same distance from his parents’ house in Croy Creek Canyon to Strega. He’d been on tougher solo treks at the same altitude in Idaho, and since arriving in-country, he’d kept in shape at FOB Sharana by running laps for miles along the fence line by the airfield. Distance and terrain weren’t going to be a problem.

  The Army would say he was missing. But he had studied the maps and would have his compass and would not get lost. Before daybreak, he would find a place to hide, and when night fell again he would finish the run to Sharana’s front gate. He planned for every possible risk he could imagine. He’d bought his disguise, and he had three hundred dollars in cash, split between afghanis and U.S. dollars. If a Kuchi nomad spotted him in the desert, he would buy the man’s silence. Bergdahl had never worn a disguise to blend into a population of nomadic herdsmen, and he had never paid a bribe, but he knew from books and movies that these tactics would work.

  He knew the radio call would go out when they noticed he was gone. He had learned the term at one of his first rotations at Mest, when they were digging out the first guard tower bunkers. One bunker, which they later abandoned, was in a terrible location, out of sight from the rest of the unit but in clear view of the village and the Taliban fighters who overnighted there. During radio checks, soldiers in the isolated, exposed, and ultimately pointless bunker would identify themselves as “OP DUSTWUN.”

  Bergdahl, new to country, had asked his sergeant what DUSTWUN meant. It’s the code for when a soldier goes missing, Sergeant Louis told him, like an Amber Alert for a war zone. A DUSTWUN was no localized event. The call would go from Mest to Sharana to every FOB and OP across Eastern Afghanistan, lighting up the vast network of American installations and triggering a massive reaction, not only within the Army, but in the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force too. Every node in the military matrix would go on high alert.

  Bergdahl didn’t press Sergeant Louis for more details. He grokked the scope of the thing immediately. A DUSTWUN was a rare thing in the military—a “flash” signal that went straight to the top, bypassed blockages in the chain of command, and could not be ignored, suppressed, or covered up. It reminded Bergdahl of a familiar idea, similar to what he had struggled to explain to friends in Idaho years ago and then rediscovered again in the character of John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which he had brought with him to Afghanistan. With the DUSTWUN, he could bring the great and terrible gears of the machine grinding to a halt.

  He would show up to the FOB unarmed and unharmed, an instant Army legend. They might think he was crazy, but they would respect what he had done and hear his concerns. “I’m not saying anything until I see a general,” he would say to the FOBBITs at the gate. The Army would have no choice but to investigate how he slipped off the OP without anyone noticing. A general would come see him, and Bergdahl would explain everything—that Baker needed a full psychological evaluation, that the Task Force Geronimo chain of command was rotten through and through. They would purge the unit. Any officer or NCO unable to carry out their responsibilities and meet the leadership standard set by Drill Sergeant Olivera would be relieved of duty.

  He assumed there would be a price to pay. They would probably throw him in prison. He didn’t think they would charge him with desertion. Deserters run away from danger, not into it. They might strip his rank with another Article 15, he thought, but as a private first class he didn’t have much rank to lose. He might live or he might die, but he would act, and such were the sacrifices that warriors had made throughout history. He wasn’t too concerned about the personal costs. Any punishment the Army dealt was better than looking down at the blood-clotted moon dust and the mangled pieces of what used to be Sutton or Coe, knowing he could have done something.

  The day afte
r he shipped his things home, he sent an email from Sharana to a group of friends in Idaho with the subject line: “who is John Galt?”—the mantra of Rand’s book. “It is not the being of value who fails the system. It is the system that has failed the man,” Bergdahl wrote, and then declared:

  For man should not stoop to fit the system, but the system should be made and remade, to fit the man who holds value as worth. I will serve no bandit, nor liar, for i know John Galt, and understand. This life is too short to serve those who compromise value, and its ethics. I am done compromising.

  ACT II.

  LOST

  SIX

  DUSTWUN

  June 30 couldn’t come soon enough for 2nd Platoon. The men just wanted to make it back to Sharana, where they could finally shower, rest, and relax. Third Platoon would rotate in to replace them at OP Mest and then the miserable and isolated base would be turned over to the Afghans to run on their own. The two units switched off every three or four days, according to a schedule designed by battalion headquarters to be patternless and unpredictable. Under ideal conditions, driving fast on Route Audi—the Army named routes in the area after cars, among them Audi, Dodge, and Viper—without stopping to check culverts for hidden bombs, it was possible to make it from OP Mest to the gates of FOB Sharana in less than an hour. But conditions were never ideal; Route Audi was a magnet for Taliban bombs, and the fourteen-ton MRAPs were too big and heavy to maneuver with any speed along the mountain switchbacks and dry riverbed wadis that Lieutenant Billings preferred as alternate routes. On the afternoon of June 29, Billings canceled the next morning’s foot patrol from Mest and directed his men to focus on packing up and clearing out.

  Billings was a career soldier, a by-the-book officer, and a prior-service NCO. His men liked him, and his commanders trusted him to get the misfit 2nd Platoon back on track. Billings considered every step outside the wire a potential combat operation. He was conditioned to look out for his men’s well-being before his own, and he did not send out patrols every day. If the weather wasn’t right or if the men were tired from the grueling work of building up the fortifications at the OP during the day, he would call it off. The village of Yahya Khel, a known enemy safe haven and home to the Afghan government’s district center in a mud-walled compound off the main bazaar, was less than three miles away, but Billings had not yet sent his men there on patrol.

  Inside the wire, Billings expected the men to stick to the buddy system they had all learned in basic training. If his soldiers wanted to visit the Afghan detachments at the top of the hill, as Bergdahl and Coe did most nights, they would only do so with another member of their squad, and they would stay close, never more than six feet of space between them at any time. The contained, Americans-only section of the hillside base was the one area where Billings was lax. The men were always within his line of sight or earshot, and soldiers were free to walk alone to the latrines or the burn pit, where garbage smoldered at all hours.

  That night, Bergdahl pulled guard duty as he always did. He stood in the turret of Billings’s truck, and with his night vision goggles he scanned the darkness of the Paktika countryside. Behind him the men rested—the guys he trusted and liked, and the guys he didn’t. There were Full and Gerleve from Texas, Coe and Sutton from Michigan, and the private first class who smelled bad but was so loyal and kind everyone liked him anyway. That night, Billings reported in to his immediate superior as he did every night: “Green One Up,” he wrote to Captain Silvino Silvino, company commander at the Blackfoot Tactical Operations Center (TOC) at FOB Sharana: All personnel and equipment were present. Captain Silvino passed the personnel and equipment reports from his four platoons to Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker, who compiled them with reports from his four companies and passed those on to his superior, Colonel Michael Howard at FOB Salerno. It was a basic function of the chain of command and a key part of the leader’s task list—a combination inventory and attendance roster reported every morning and every night until the compiled statistics reached the senior officer in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

  Bergdahl returned to his shelter from his guard shift around 2130 hours. He organized a kit of essentials by the light of his headlamp. Water: a CamelBak bladder filled with enough water to last him a day or two. Food: some nuts from a bag of trail mix and a sealed packet of chicken meat from an MRE. Tools: knives and his compass; his digital camera and journal; and for inspiration some old torn-out journal entries, a couple of poems, and a newspaper clipping about a man who set a world record for sailing around the world alone. Bergdahl knew that three or four soldiers, at most, would be awake, along with a roving sergeant of the guard who supervised their rotations. The times and manning of the guard shifts varied by the day, scribbled out in marker on a piece of waterproof Rite in the Rain notebook paper. Every hour, the soldier on guard in Billings’s truck would check the FBCB2—the Blue Force Tracker, a networked GPS, map, and text messaging system that commanders used to track and communicate with all of their units in real time.

  His things in order, Bergdahl shut off his headlamp and waited. The guys would assume he was in his tent for the rest of the night. He would slip off by OP4 and walk to the top of the hill, where the Afghan guards didn’t have night vision goggles. No one would be looking for him until dawn.

  * * *

  —

  COE WAS IN HIS bivouac sack and sleeping bag when Cross shook him awake.

  “Hey, you seen Bergdahl?” Cross whispered.

  Coe knew instantly. “He’s gone,” he said. “He’s fucking gone.”

  He told Cross to go check the latrine, and he radioed up to the guard tower at OP1, closer to the Afghan detachment. Maybe Bergdahl went for some predawn chai, he told himself. But in his gut, Coe already knew his friend had done something insane. Neither he nor Cross wanted to break this news to leadership, so they played a round of rock-paper-scissors to decide. Coe lost and woke up his sergeants with the update and his recollections of Bergdahl’s bizarre vows.

  They checked Bergdahl’s hooch and found his weapons and sensitive items lined up in a neat row on his cot, as if ready for inspection. His machine gun was there—clean, with infrared sight and daytime optics still attached. Next to it were his night vision goggles, wrapped neatly in a T-shirt, snug in their pouch. The light of dawn was cresting over the Shinkay Hills to the east as Coe and the others woke up Lieutenant Billings. He was groggy; he’d been asleep for less than an hour after pulling his own guard shift. Billings was still new to the platoon, and he was always expecting the guys to pull some pranks. He thought it was a joke, but when he looked at his men gathered around, no one was smiling.

  An image of Bergdahl flashed in his mind. He had just seen him and waved to him the night before. This must be a mistake. He told the men to go through the entire OP and systematically check every place someone could hide—check the latrines and the burn pit, make sure he’s not stuck under or inside a vehicle. He sent a team up to the bunker at OP1 to check with the Afghans, and then he went to talk to the Afghan commander himself. It was a fruitless search. Bergdahl wasn’t in the latrine, he wasn’t with the Afghans, he wasn’t passed out in a half-filled Hesco. There was no trace of him.

  Billings was in shock. This was not a prank, or a drill, or a scenario in a war game at NTC. He had to report the situation to Silvino at Sharana, but he didn’t know what to say. He climbed into the passenger seat of his MRAP, where the Blue Force Tracker’s display blinked back at him. Sergeant First Class Hein stood by the door, watching as Billings pecked at the rubberized, waterproof keyboard. Six months earlier, one of Hein’s young soldiers had been killed in a car accident on his way home for Christmas. That had been bad enough. Losing a private here, with nothing but Taliban villages in every direction, was unthinkable.

  Staring at the draft of his message on the Blue Force Tracker, Billings paused. He couldn’t fathom what he was about to report. Bergdahl never s
tood out as a problem. He was quiet, but he was also a fitness stud, a hard worker, and if anything, Billings thought, one of the platoon’s most reliable soldiers.

  “Alright, I’m getting ready to send this message,” he said to Hein. “Is there anything else I need to say?”

  Hein shook his head. “Go ahead and send it, sir. You should have sent it ten minutes ago.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE YEARS SINCE his disappearing act, several versions of Bergdahl’s walkabout and capture have been presented as fact in government reports, in the news media, on the internet, and in the military’s rumor mill. The Eclipse Group, a private intelligence firm under contract to the Department of Defense, reported to their bosses at ISAF Headquarters that Bergdahl, despite his lifelong straightedge reputation, was either high on hashish or looking to score some when he was lured by rogue Afghan policemen away from the base; they justified spreading this purported information on the grounds that it devalued the hostage and would make it easier to negotiate a trade. Blackfoot Company veterans heard similar rumors. Some Taliban fighters would claim that they raided the OP, found Bergdahl squatting in the latrines, and kidnapped him there. The first official Taliban story released to Western media on July 2 was that Bergdahl had been captured while drunk and lagging behind a patrol.

  In his sworn statement more than five years later, Bergdahl said that he exited OP Mest unassisted shortly after midnight. He walked over a plastic crate that the Afghan soldiers used as a makeshift bridge over the razor wire separating the two sections of the base and that 2nd Platoon had neglected to remove overnight. From there, he walked into a shallow gully that he knew was a blind spot for the guards in the bunker at OP4. If his comrades were inattentive, as Bergdahl assumed they would be, the blind spot was even bigger. He passed through it unnoticed and worked his way to the top of the hill, where some of the Afghan soldiers heard him. He saw their flashlight beams pierce the dark, and he knew there was no turning back. He hadn’t brought a radio. Trigger-happy Afghans sat in the guard towers smoking charras, jumping at shadows, sometimes burning though whole magazines of ammo firing at stray dogs that came to the OP looking for scraps. They might mistake him in the dark for an enemy sapper. Trying to sneak back on base was now more dangerous than pressing on.