American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Dellacorva once said of Bergdahl that the part of his psyche that made him different was also what had kept him intact, alive, and resilient in captivity. His parents agreed with her assessment. What men like Cody Full had seen as Bergdahl’s greatest flaws had become his greatest strengths. And yet, over the course of his legal hearings, his attorneys had presented his psychological history as critical mitigating evidence. The Coast Guard had identified his defects, and the Army took him anyway. Soldiers in his own unit had noted them, and in at least one instance, when Sergeant Greg Leatherman tried to air his concerns about Bergdahl’s mental status, his superiors turned a deaf ear.

  Each time the issue was raised in court, Bergdahl’s mind was put on display for public dissection. Reporters transcribed what they heard about his inner torments, his early reading difficulties, his pained relationship with his family, and his private disclosures to a defense psychologist about his innermost thoughts of self-mutilation. It was an inhuman public flaying. But it also helped Bergdahl’s case.

  At sentencing, the defense called on Dr. Charles Morgan, a Yale University professor, forensic psychologist, former CIA medical officer, and SERE specialist (who had deployed to Afghanistan with the Army in 2011), to explain the nuances of Bergdahl’s disordered thinking. By the end of his testimony on November 1, 2017, Morgan would spend more time on the stand than any other defense witness. After nineteen hours of evaluation, Morgan diagnosed Bergdahl with schizotypal personality disorder, the same condition that a board of Army psychologists had independently diagnosed three years earlier. The disorder is rare, afflicting fewer than 5 percent of Americans, and it can present in ways that would strike most people as mere eccentricity—just Bowe being Bowe. Unlike schizophrenics, schizotypals do not suffer from total breaks with reality, but are often preoccupied and lost in their own thoughts. They rarely have intimate relationships, and tend to build rich fantasy lives to compensate; overactive imaginations fuel big ideas about life, the universe, and unseen forces determining outcomes that others cannot see. The disorder is commonly shared by first-degree family members. There is no known treatment.

  According to Morgan, the rare disorder was compounded by the stress of Bergdahl’s lesser conditions of PTSD and social anxiety. In his youth, his fraught relationship with his father had been a source of disabling anxiety and fear—Bergdahl told Morgan stories of his dad putting his fist through walls and smacking him for disobedience. Bowe began sleepwalking and having stress-induced nightmares, signs of emotional distress in children. In his adolescence, his father’s anger, even over little things like forgetting the name of a power tool, could trigger paralyzing anxiety and tunnel vision. Morgan concluded that Bergdahl had suffered from PTSD even before enlisting in the Army.

  The tricky thing about the condition, Morgan cautioned, is that he had no way of knowing whether Bowe was recounting a record of facts or a record of feelings. Had his father been abusive, or was Bowe oversensitive? Morgan said that the distinction was beside the point. One’s perception defines one’s reality. This is particularly true in children, and Morgan cited cases in which two children of the same parents growing up in the same house emerge with entirely different psychological outcomes: “One is fine. One is not.”

  Morgan explained that Bergdahl tested as highly intelligent, well above average. But with schizotypals, intellectual assets often don’t translate to insight or emotional processing. Fishing in Alaska, he confessed to Morgan, had disturbed him because he hadn’t expected to kill any fish. Arriving in Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, he was shocked by the realization that people in France spoke French.

  Pleading guilty to the second more severe charge of misbehavior, Bergdahl told Nance that he had had no intention of triggering search-and-recovery missions. “I had no thoughts that anyone would actually come look for me. Now it seems obvious.”

  In many ways, Bergdahl came to the Army the same person he had been as an adolescent: the teenager who had told his mother and roommates that he did not need to sleep on a mattress. In Morgan’s testimony, it all added up: Fragmented thinking, amplified by post-traumatic anxiety and charged with impulsiveness, had brought everyone to the courtroom that day.

  The question was how any of this was supposed to make the men who had sacrificed their lives looking for him feel about their realities. When Mark Allen came home to Tampa in August 2009, he was in a vegetative state. The urgent care he had received in Afghanistan and in Germany had saved his life, but the emergency craniotomy that removed both frontal lobes of his brain had left him with little hope for recovery. Despite numerous strokes and seizures, and 90 percent paralysis, he could still feel pain, which, due to constant muscle spasms that stressed and deformed his joints, was chronic and severe. When he was discharged from the VA hospital in 2011, he had regained consciousness, but his condition was essentially unchanged. He sleeps at night, his doctors said, but when his eyes are open during the day, he “has no awareness of his environment or response to commands.”

  Shannon Allen’s testimony contradicted that of his doctors in this regard. When Mark was with her and their young daughter, he made eye contact, smiled, cried, and even laughed, she said. When they were married in 2006, he had been outgoing, boisterous, and happy-go-lucky. By 2017, he had regained some movement in his right hand and could now make a thumbs-up sign. Not that there was much cause for optimism. After some twenty operations, Allen was wheelchair bound for life. An intrathecal pump delivered painkillers directly into his spine. Shannon and nurses took turns feeding, washing, and dressing him: “Instead of a wife, I am a caregiver,” she said on the witness stand.

  Bergdahl sat motionless during her testimony. Shannon choked up with tears only once, when prosecutors played a video showing her and Mark’s morning routine in their home in Florida, where he sleeps in an ICU-grade hospital bed. Each day, he is rolled into a body sling attached to a pulley system that lifts his one hundred seventy pounds into one of two wheelchairs. A percussion vest prevents fluid from collecting in his lungs. A feeding tube sustains him. Shannon crushes pills for his eighty-odd prescriptions and uses a suction machine to clean his mouth. Before Bergdahl’s trial, an emergency tracheotomy had put him in the ICU for three weeks, but now he was back home, Shannon said, “where he’s safe.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN JIMMY HATCH TOOK the stand, a therapy dog sat at his feet, licking his shoes as Hatch shared new details of his final raid, including how, before Remco was shot, the dog had attacked several young Afghan children, whom Hatch then picked up and moved to safety. All of it was done as part of a mission “to rescue an American.” That was a stipulation that numerous Pentagon and intelligence officials, including Hagel, Sedney, and Dach refuted; they maintain that there is no credible evidence that a rescue mission was ever approved. But the mission orders were classified, and Hatch only knew what he had been told, and the defense made no objections.

  The Army called on Evan Buetow to describe the impacts of the DUSTWUN on his platoon. More than three years after spreading the rumor through the media that Bergdahl had gone looking for the Taliban, Buetow took a deep breath as he sat down and looked at Bergdahl for the first time in eight years. The ten days he spent living in the bunker built in the graveyard were sheer hell, he said. There were bones of dead Afghans sticking out of the ground all around him and dung beetles crawling everywhere. He came down with dysentery and was stricken for days, drained of all energy and worried he might not survive.

  “Those living conditions are something I think about everyday,” he said. “It makes me appreciate everything I have in my life now.”

  Despite that misery, Buetow said it was the context that still haunts him, the fact that “my guy was gone.” With that, he broke down crying on the witness stand, cradled his head in his hands, and took a few minutes to regain his composure. Later that night in a bar near Fort Bragg, Buetow said he felt lig
hter after testifying, as if a weight had been lifted off him.

  During Bergdahl’s sentencing, the topic of collaboration with the enemy never came up, because the Army had no credible evidence for it. Despite the media’s narratives, the facts told a starkly different story. The letters that Bergdahl had written from captivity in 2012 and 2013 were prime examples. With help from Hamid Karzai and his brother, Qayum Karzai, the International Committee for the Red Cross arranged a channel through which Bergdahl could send a rare written message home. In a neat hybrid of cursive and print, Bergdahl wrote about the weather, the coming spring, and his faith in God. He told his family that he missed them every day and that he believed everything happens for a reason. The letters contained many of his familiar quirks, but there was more to it than idiosyncratic grammar and peculiar wording. Like James Stockdale and dozens of other American POWs preceding him, Sergeant Bergdahl had devised his own system of coded communications in his letters:

  “And as I stand, my pack on, the question is, where to go? For the world is fully there.” Those are the words of a man who was exploring the South Artic [sic] Mountains of Canada.

  There are no South Arctic Mountains of Canada, a fact unlikely to draw attention from Taliban censors. According to Russell, “I stand, my pack” was an intentional word scramble clue. Pack I Stand: Pakistan. I am in Pakistan, near rugged mountains, like the Canadian Rockies. Look there. Find me.

  He used the system again in a second, shorter letter in 2013, in which he got to the point more quickly:

  To: Family and Friends,

  Taking care and well. Months into 2013, winter over and warm weather here. Letter from dad came today. Missed thanksgiving, wonder who is winning the race now. good hunting to you and our friends, wonder how the weather was Southland and how big the herds are now.

  Bergdahl was not asking about the size of cattle south of the Wood River Valley; he was talking about the other kinds of hunters he knew from Sun Valley and Mississippi: the JSOC teams he hoped were looking for him.

  A JPRA report confirmed that Bergdahl saw the letters as an opportunity to convey hidden messages. Far from collaborating with his captors, he risked his life by inserting these oblique clues. Years later, Bergdahl told Russell that his captors had given him scripts for these letters written in English with the same talking points that he had been told to recite on video: that the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan, that the war was being fought in the interests of American corporations, and that he was expendable to the U.S. government. But in between, he had tried to sneak in any message he could.

  * * *

  —

  FOLLOWING SHANNON ALLEN’S TESTIMONY, Bergdahl himself took the stand. As he chose to deliver an unsworn statement, he was not subject to cross-examination. But he wanted to explain what he had done and what he had lived through. He began by reading an apology from a piece of paper trembling in his hands.

  “It was never my intention for anyone to be hurt,” he said. “I made a horrible mistake. As my mom used to tell me, ‘Saying sorry isn’t enough.’ My words can’t take away the pain that people have been through. Offering condolences isn’t enough. People went through things that they never should have. I was trying to help, and the fact that I did not breaks my heart.”

  In his closing statements, the Army’s lead prosecutor, Major Justin Oshana, challenged Bergdahl’s choice of words. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “It was a crime.” He challenged Morgan’s assessment, too, noting that Bergdahl had made careful, systematic plans. Oshana framed the case as a study in contrasts, between Bergdahl’s selfish negligence and the honor of those who worked together to find him. The harm he caused, Oshana said, was greater than the pain he had experienced.

  “Sergeant Bergdahl does not have a monopoly on suffering,” he said. “All suffering in this case stems from his choices.” For punishment, Oshana and the government sought fourteen years of confinement, reduction in rank, and a punitive discharge. One of the Army’s final witnesses was a warden at the military prison where Bergdahl would be sent. They were ready for him. This, Oshana said, “is what justice requires.”

  Captain Nina Banks, the youngest of Bergdahl’s attorneys, was a surprise choice to deliver his closing defense. Normally one of the fastest talkers on the team, Banks now spoke slowly and deliberately. She began by echoing Oshana’s words. “What justice requires,” Banks said, is a sentence “tailored to the facts of the case.” She described Bergdahl as a young man who had needed but never received psychological care. Eight years after the incident, the man in court that day was not the twenty-three-year-old private who, oblivious to his own mental condition, but wanting to do the right thing, had committed the wrong actions.

  The courage and sacrifice displayed by Hatch, Allen, Morita, and the rest were undeniable, but did not negate the fact that Bergdahl’s motive was free of malice. The Army wanted retributive punishment, Banks said, but “an eye for an eye is not appropriate.” And even if it were, “Sergeant Bergdahl has been punished enough,” said Banks, who then walked Nance through the inhumanity that Bergdahl had lived through: the illness and filth, the neglect that had his bones protruding through his skin, the isolation so complete that even his voice had atrophied.

  “How did he keep going?” Banks said, her voice catching with emotion as she quoted what Bergdahl had said on the stand the day before: “Because I didn’t want them to win.”

  Judge Nance leaned back in his chair as he listened. Unlike General Dahl, Nance had not been subjected to orders from above to take on this case. He had been on the verge of retirement. If it weren’t for Bergdahl, he would have been there already, in a house he owned on a golf course in Georgia. But his son had persuaded him to delay his retirement, telling him that if he didn’t take on this challenge he would always regret it. As a combat veteran, Nance understood the men’s anger, the value of their sacrifice, and their demands for justice in ways most senior military judges could not. As Oshana and Banks delivered their final arguments, Nance scanned the faces in the courtroom one by one, holding eye contact with members of the public in the gallery, as if storing his memories for a later time.

  Among the written statements that Nance reviewed prior to sentencing were two letters from Bergdahl’s parents. Neither claimed their son was innocent. In fact, Bob wrote, when he first saw his son in person after six years, he told Bowe that whatever legal consequences were headed his way, they “expected him to stand at attention and take it.” They understood what he had done and why with a mixture of pride and remorse for their own idealism. “We raised up our children in the way they should go and when they are old they will not depart from it,” Jani wrote, citing the Book of Proverbs. They even named him after a fictional character, she said, “a Texas Ranger known for his ethics, courage, and kindness.” Bob had educated his son to be a missionary, a calling irreconcilable with the realities of a soldier at war. “The U.S. Army was not in my view of vocations for him. . . . He signed his enlistment papers without my consent,” Bob informed Nance. “I accept the blame and carry a great burden, having raised Bowdrie the way we did.”

  In the more than three years since their son was freed, his parents had received so many death threats in the mail that they stopped reading the letters. The envelopes sat unopened and yellowing in a Southern Idaho storage unit. And while they accepted their share of responsibility, they also believed that they had all been used as instruments of political theater. At their moment of greatest joy at his recovery, “at the miracle of his being set free, our own political party sabotaged him,” Jani wrote.

  Bob told Nance that in his time working as an asset with JPRA and the FBI, “I witnessed powerful, unlawful, political obstruction to attempts by several U.S. agencies to recover a U.S. soldier from enemy hands.” The gears of the machine, he implied, had propelled the case from the start. By calling Amber Dach as a witness, Bergdahl’s defense had made a
brief, subtle, but powerful argument about the mitigating factors of the Army’s decisions during the DUSTWUN. Dach’s unaccepted assessment—not to mention the intelligence reports that Mike Furlong had kept quiet—cast doubt over the entire established narrative of the DUSTWUN and Bergdahl’s role in it. At the top of his letter to Nance, Bob repeated the odd and telling quote from Colonel Mike Howard during their first intercontinental video teleconferences in July 2009: “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Bergdahl. For the first time in my career, I have the resources I need to do my job.”

  Two days after closing statements, on November 3, Nance convened the court to deliver his sentence. The bailiff instructed all parties to rise, and Nance shot out of his chambers like a bullet, his black robe billowing and his face set into a grimace as he mumbled, “Be seated.” Fidell and Rosenblatt leaned forward in their chairs. Only Bergdahl needed to stand, which he did slowly, his legs shaking. He was flanked by the two female attorneys on his team, Captain Banks and Captain Jennifer Norvell, each with a hand on his quaking back as Nance read his verdict:

  Reduction in rank to E-1 (Private).

  Forfeiture of his Army paycheck at $1,000 per months for ten months.

  Dishonorable Discharge.

  Bergdahl began sobbing. He was not going back behind bars. Oshana and the prosecution stared into space as they processed the magnitude of their loss. Nance adjourned the room. Bergdahl gathered himself and was hurried out first. Twenty reporters poured down the courthouse steps to their cell phones and news vans as a Black Hawk helicopter flew low and loud over the scene.