American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Serial interviewed a staggering number of sources covering the full range of perspectives. Koenig gained fresh insights from key players involved in the DUSTWUN, including Mike Flynn, who, without citing any evidence, told her that he had zero doubt that men had died searching for Bergdahl. From Flynn—who had seen the same intelligence that Furlong and Wilson had and who knew that by July 14, 2009, the intelligence community had consensus that Bergdahl was already in North Waziristan—the reply smacked of politics. Koenig didn’t buy it, and she was tenacious about getting answers. The challenge was that the facts depended on the perspectives and perceptions of the men involved.

  At the end of the show’s first episode, Command Sergeant Major Kenneth Wolfe, the battalion’s ranking NCO, effectively let Koenig in on the secret that the Army had been covering up from the start. The DUSTWUN had been miserable for Wolfe’s young soldiers, and he worked to keep up morale any way he knew how. He told jokes, gave out tobacco, and reminded them that no matter why Bergdahl had walked off, looking for him was the “good and honorable” thing to do. And yet, in the back of his mind, Wolfe told Koenig, he knew it was all pointless, because Bergdahl was already over the border.

  Soldiers like Sergeant Johnny Rice had figured out the ruse from the start. Others, like Cornelison, accepted the Army logic of their catch-22; even if Bergdahl was no longer in Afghanistan, they would damn sure do their best to find him there. Koenig refused to believe that the Army would knowingly engage in such deception, because, she said, “that’s just wrong.” But as the former Blackfoot Company officer explained it, that’s exactly what had happened.

  Specific terms, like “personnel recovery” and “Bergdahl,” were used as cheat codes by mission planners for months. In some cases, the officer said, the scheme reflected the Army’s own internal bureaucratic machinations: “Type this code, get the asset, and my boss will be happy.” Just as Rice had seen the logic behind the madness, the former officer didn’t blame mission planners who found opportunities in the crisis. “It’s not lying,” he said. “That’s just the way it works.”

  According to one former Pentagon official, the strategic decision had been made early on by upper echelon officers, who then kept the dynamic alive as long as possible. “It was common knowledge that commanders in the field used the search for Bergdahl as a justification for more aggressive tactics to achieve stability in the area,” the former official said. “Everyone knew it was going on.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  GUILTY

  In May 2016, Donald Trump was invited to deliver the keynote address at the annual Rolling Thunder rally, the same speaking slot that had been reserved for Bob Bergdahl four years earlier. Trump delivered his speech in front of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where, each year from 2010 to 2014, hundreds of POW activists calling themselves “Bowe’s Army” had gathered in his support. But in 2016, outside of Idaho, where Pocatello bikers never stopped supporting the former prisoner and his family, Bergdahl was something that the vast majority of patriotic bikers decided they would rather forget about.

  Trump should have been an awkward fit to address the country’s largest POW rally. He himself had deferred military service multiple times, and he had gone after McCain just days after declaring his candidacy. “He is not a war hero,” said Trump. “He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

  Rolling Thunder kept Trump’s invitation under wraps until the day of the event, a decision that led to a smaller crowd and a complaint from Trump, who said that he had expected crowds similar to those that had greeted Martin Luther King Jr. when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in the same spot in April 1963. Trump’s address was a brief version of his usual routine and a rare instance with no mention of Bergdahl. At one point, when he called Obama “grossly incompetent,” a lone voice rang out from the crowd: “Obama’s a traitor!”

  That summer, Bergdahl’s attorneys noted the incredible volume of vitriol directed at their client on the internet, much of it casting him as Obama’s treasonous accomplice. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, social media brimmed with #Bergdahl posts and memes from what appeared to be an inexhaustible army of grassroots activists. Trafficking in paranoia, some used the menacing graphics of traditional negative campaign ads while presenting the prisoner swap as proof of Obama’s secret plot for Muslim domination, Obama’s Muslim subversion of American Christendom, and Obama’s Rose Garden activation of Bob Bergdahl as a sleeper agent of Islamic terror.

  American politics had always been a sporting arena in which half-truths and spin were common maneuvers for seasoned operatives. But Trump didn’t play by the old rules, and as his rise consumed the country’s attention, his fixation on Bergdahl provided an early sound check for his campaign’s feedback loop of social media amplification: the paid trolls, engineered bots, and other cyber innovations that would define the political moment in the United States and much of Europe. Businesses in Bergdahl’s hometown began receiving harassing comments from random Facebook users with no connections to Hailey or to Idaho, and in some cases, with no friends at all. No one could explain it. But in 2016, as Trump’s hypnotic fugues carried him to the Republican nomination, inexplicable phenomena were becoming the norm.

  Trump told his crowds that thirty years earlier Bergdahl would have been shot. In fact, the Army hadn’t sentenced a deserter to death since 1945, and in that case there had been no disputing the charges. In Private Eddie Slovik’s own words, he deserted his infantry unit in the midst of battle in the Hürtgen Forest in Germany because he was afraid to die. “I was so scared, nerves and trembling,” he wrote in a letter to General Eisenhower pleading clemency. “I couldn’t move. I stayed there in my foxhole till it was quiet and I was able to move. I then walked into town.”

  Slovik hadn’t come from much. Before the war, he was a juvenile delinquent in Detroit who saw better chances for himself in the Army. The draft board told him the only reason they took him was that his rap sheet had cleaned up after marriage, and the Army was desperate for soldiers. Slovik’s court-martial was held on Armistice Day, November 11, 1944, on the second floor of an occupied Nazi building in Röetgen, Germany, just a few miles from the Hürtgen Forest, where every combat officer in his division was being shot at in a raging battle. After less than two hours of jury deliberations, the Army ordered Slovik “shot to death with musketry.” Eisenhower’s approval of the sentence surprised many subordinate officers, including even the division commander who had filed charges for it. Eleven privates and one sergeant were selected from each of the three battalions in Slovik’s regiment and given their orders: Kill the deserter.

  Despite pep talks from officers and a chaplain, some of the soldier executioners had doubts. “I hope I don’t have to live the rest of my life thinking it was my bullet that killed him,” said one man. “It’s bad enough we have to kill these goddam krauts, much less one of our own,” mused another. Others were eager. “I got no sympathy for that sonofabitch,” another said. “He deserted us, didn’t he? He didn’t give a damn how many of us got the hell shot out of us; why should we care about him? I’ll shoot his goddam heart out. If only one shot hits him, you’ll know it’s mine.”

  A few days after Trump was elected president, Gerald Sutton considered how he would feel if Obama pardoned Bergdahl. Along with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence soldier who was then serving thirty-five years for leaking government secrets, Bergdahl’s name had been added to an informal list of potentials. Sutton lived near Coe in Michigan, and when they spent time together the conversation inevitably returned to their brief friendships with the Army’s most-hated soldier. By the time Trump’s rainy inaugural arrived, Sutton felt that the media had turned his legitimate gripe with Army censorship into a political circus. He’d seen enough and figured Bergdahl had too. He was ready to forgive. Coe had been as angry as any of them. But he also believed that Bergdahl had been pun
ished enough.

  “I think he was just a dude that made a really, really messed-up decision. He paid for it. He paid for it dearly,” Coe said. But ultimately, “You gotta forgive people. I’m a Christian. God forgave all of us. It’d be pretty arrogant of me not to forgive.”

  * * *

  —

  SUTTON AND COE were the outliers. As an institution and a community, the Army demanded justice, and as Bergdahl’s trial neared, the prosecution built its case around three men who it alleged had been wounded, maimed, and nearly killed as a result of Bergdahl’s actions: Chief Petty Officer Jimmy Hatch, Specialist Jonathan Morita, and Master Sergeant Mark Allen, all now medically retired.

  Allen was a national guardsman assigned with a small group of Americans as embedded tactical trainers (ETT), living with and leading Afghan soldiers. On July 8, 2009, Allen’s ETT team was sent into a remote area of Paktika to track down information on the missing soldier when Allen was shot in the head. He was now brain damaged, wheelchair bound, and barely functional. The prosecution wanted him or his wife, Shannon, on the stand as victims of Bergdahl’s decisions. Shannon thought Bergdahl was a traitor, the reason her husband was broken. The prosecution and defense sparred over whether she could testify in his place.

  Captain John Marx, who had led Allen’s mission that day, said it was messed up from the start; they hadn’t been given updated maps or intelligence before they were thrown into the fray. Marx was an Air Force intelligence officer with no combat experience assigned to an Army billet in an Army mission because of personnel shortages. He reported in to FOB Kushamond, south of Mest. There was no intel brief delivered before the team set out toward Dila, a town where American troops had engaged Taliban soldiers every year since at least 2006. There was only a vague order: investigate two towns. Their only intel, that one town was friendly, was out of date. The five other American soldiers in the unit had infantry training, but only one had combat experience. They lacked basic items: maps, secure comms, enough water for both themselves and the fifty Afghan National Army soldiers they led. By midnight they were critically low on water, radioing Kushamond for resupply before stepping off to the second village, but were denied. They had to call in their location several times because no one kept track of where they were. Kushamond’s intelligence officers had no idea they were even in the area. That night, an Army after-action report claimed the soldiers let their guard down, most of them falling asleep. They woke up to orders to go back to the same village they’d visited the day before. This time, the intelligence officers at Kushamond warned them to expect more than one hundred fifty Taliban. It infuriated one of the team members, Staff Sergeant Jason Walters, to hear that threat assessment—it would have been nice to know that yesterday, he thought. The team’s long-range radio ran out of batteries and they found themselves in a firefight.

  Three Americans were wounded—Allen, Morita, and Specialist Charles Benson. Throughout the firefight, Walters had asked for air support, first requesting close air support (CAS), then demanding it, and finally begging for it, or any other help from higher—a medevac, a quick reaction force, an exfiltration team. Nothing got through to Kushamond; the radio operators inside the wire kept telling them that their water supply would be delivered shortly. An investigation into Allen’s injuries faulted the leadership that sent the ETT team out despite their inexperience, lack of communications equipment, and unfamiliarity with the enemy, terrain, and weather.

  The defense maintained that the chain of causality between Bergdahl’s act and Allen and Morita’s injuries was tenuous, composed of countless intervening decisions and events, and therefore impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The ETT mission, they noted, had already been planned before the DUSTWUN, not as a result of it. And, the emotional outrage that any jury of veterans would feel in the face of such horrific suffering would interfere with the cold logic of the law. After all, the summer of 2009 had been filled with bad decisions, and while prosecutors had cast Bergdahl as the first domino in an unambiguous chain reaction, the defense argued that it was more akin to the butterfly effect of chaos theory, in which a butterfly flapping its wings in California can trigger a typhoon weeks later in Thailand. No one blames the butterfly.

  On June 30, 2017, Nance delivered his final ruling on the issue: The relevance of these men’s injuries depended on whether or not Bergdahl was guilty of the second charge against him. If he was innocent, then the charges were immaterial. But if was guilty, then regardless of his motives or the intervening factors, he would be held fully responsible.

  Nance had an unlikely résumé for a judge. As an artillery officer, he had seen combat in Iraq, joining patrols and kicking down doors before returning home and rising through the JAG Corps. With his arrival to Bergdahl’s case, Nance had now presided over two of the most infamous, and dissimilar, criminal cases to come out of Afghanistan. In 2013, he had conducted the trial of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who, the previous year, had slipped off his base in Kandahar twice in one night, walking into two nearby villages and murdering sixteen unarmed civilians in their homes, in front of their families. With Nance on the bench, a military jury sentenced Bales to life in prison without parole. Nance had earned a reputation as a no-nonsense jurist with a blistering work ethic who could efficiently process criminal cases with minimum drama. JAGs arguing before him were held to high standards. Those who performed well, he mentored; those who didn’t, he let know with blunt dressings down.

  But Nance also relished intellectual sparring sessions with young JAGs over legal exactitudes. He had a wry sense of humor and would often remind both sides that the case required teamwork and civility. According to attorneys who knew him best, Nance loved what he did and had an abiding faith in the fairness and process of the law.

  Bergdahl had been offered the choice at arraignment of being judged by a military jury or by Nance alone. At Fort Bragg, the jury pool would be drawn from the 82nd Airborne and the 18th Airborne corps, some of the Army’s most hardcore combat divisions. On September 27, 2017, Bergdahl decided to take his chances with Nance alone.

  As pretrial motions dragged into their second year, FORSCOM called in huge numbers of support staff for public affairs officers (PAO) at Fort Bragg. Units were flown in from Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington State to manage the media, regardless of how little there was to manage. This maximalist approach led to absurd staging scenes; fewer than ten reporters and photographers would meet at 6:00 a.m. to be loaded onto an idling motorcade of school buses and passenger vans capable of carrying more than one hundred people. One officer estimated that over the course of Bergdahl’s twenty-five hearings, these PAO teams cost the Army tens of millions of dollars.

  By the fall of 2017, with both sides still wrangling over classified evidence, Nance was pushing them to wrap it up and prepare for trial. There would always be more questions that the defense wanted explained but that the Army was either unwilling or unable to answer, such as why Bergdahl had received a mysterious eleven-year extension of his enlistment papers. Then, in mid-October, as the trial date loomed, the defense announced a stunning reversal: Sergeant Bergdahl had decided to plead guilty.

  * * *

  —

  BOWE’S PARENTS AND CLOSEST friends offered to be in North Carolina for his plea. Most had already made trips to see him in Texas since his return. But after his decision to throw himself on the mercy of the court, Bergdahl and his attorneys asked his parents and friends not to come. Their appearance would only trigger another media frenzy. He needed to face his consequences alone.

  At the October 16 hearing, Nance asked Bergdahl to explain in his own words why he believed he was guilty of each charge. Sitting up in his characteristic perpendicular posture and speaking in a clear and affectless baritone, Bergdahl said that he had intended to shirk his responsibilities on the morning he left.

  “I understand I had a duty to defend OP Mest and Task Force Yukon,” he sa
id. “I knew it was against the law.”

  Nance took him through his plea step by step, a rigid question-and-answer meant to ensure that he understood the gravity of his decision and actually believed that he was guilty per the precise language of the charge: “Desertion with intent to avoid hazardous duty or shirk important service.” Only once, when Nance asked whether he had seen his duties at OP Mest as “important,” did their conversation crack the barrier of formality. Part of the platoon’s mission at Mest had involved manning a traffic checkpoint to look for cars carrying Taliban fighters or explosives, a task which, since the Taliban could simply cross the road a quarter mile away, had struck Bergdahl as “a bit of a joke.”

  “Did you believe that your plan was more important?” Nance asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. “That was the choice.”

  Before his guilty plea, Bergdahl’s attorneys had been planning to move forward with a motion to declare him as lacking the mental competency to understand what the Army had required of him. It was a form of an insanity plea. But as Rosenblatt stood to introduce the motion in late September, Bergdahl tugged at his sleeve and spoke softly but urgently in his ear. Nance called for a recess, and when both sides returned, Rosenblatt explained that the defense had decided not to pursue that argument. For the first time in nearly three years, Bergdahl had publicly taken charge of his own legal team. There were many things he was willing to admit about himself, but insanity was not among them.