Serial S02 - Ep. 1: DUSTWUN

Speaker 1 We all take good care of the things that matter. Our homes, our pets, our cars.
Are you doing the same for your brain?

Speaker 1 Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 1 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change. Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 1 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment. Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

Speaker 2 These first two episodes of serial season two are free.

Speaker 2 But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy.

Speaker 2 You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

Speaker 2 About a year and a half ago, clips from this video appeared on every major news broadcast.

Speaker 2 It showed the rescue of a guy named Bo Bergdahl. He was the U.S.
soldier who was captured by the Taliban and held captive for just shy of five years.

Speaker 2 The Taliban made the video. The first thing you see is a couple of guys in traditional Afghan clothes.
They've got scarves on their heads or covering their faces, and they're holding machine guns.

Speaker 2 They're standing next to a silver pickup truck. The front hood is up.
In the back seat of the truck, the door is open.

Speaker 2 A bareheaded figure is sitting with his knees up against the seat in front of him. The camera closes in, and you see this pale young man.
And that's Bergdahl. His head is shaved.

Speaker 2 He looks sort of like a cult leader from a 70s movie. He can't keep his eyes open properly.
They're bothering him. He keeps blinking and rubbing them.

Speaker 2 A wider shot shows that the scrubby, rocky hills all around the truck are dotted with other guys, Taliban, holding rifles or rocket-propelled grenades.

Speaker 2 One or two of the guys lean in to where Bergdahl is sitting and they're talking to him. He's looking at their faces.

Speaker 2 One guy says something in Pashto, which is translated on screen as, don't come back to Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 What I've heard since is that the guy said, do not come back to Afghanistan. You will not get out alive.

Speaker 2 Black spots appear in the cloudy sky, and you see that they're planes or helicopters. One gets closer and closer.
It's a black hawk. Then you see Bergdahl again.

Speaker 2 He's out of the truck now, looking up at the sky. His clothes are too big, billowy.
Then, at about six minutes in, right after some cows wander onto the scene,

Speaker 2 the helicopter lands, dust flies. Bergdahl walks forward, flanked by two men, while three men from the helicopter, the U.S.
Special Operations Team, jog toward him.

Speaker 2 The two sides meet in the middle of the clearing, shake hands, like team captains right before the starting whistle.

Speaker 2 Bergdahl steps forward. The Americans put their hands on him, pull him towards the Blackhawk while they're walking backwards.
They don't want to turn their backs on the Taliban just yet.

Speaker 2 Bergdahl is walking stiffly, lumbering almost. At the helicopter, they pat him down one more time, and then he's on board, they're up and away.
Takes less than two minutes.

Speaker 2 And it's done. The video cuts off.

Speaker 2 From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's serial. One story told week by week.
I'm Sarah Koenig.

Speaker 5 Good evening, everyone. Ordinarily, the release of an American serviceman after five years in wartime captivity would be a cause for universal celebration, joy, plain and simple.

Speaker 2 Pentagon sources tell NBC that Bergdahl vanished under mysterious circumstances. There have been rumors he left his base unarmed after turning against the war.
Sergeant Beau Berdahl, hero or deserter?

Speaker 6 Parents of some fallen soldiers say their sons would be alive if Bergdahl had not gone missing from his post.

Speaker 7 In the old days, deserters were shot.

Speaker 9 The very last thing is

Speaker 9 just

Speaker 9 I'm a prisoner. I want to go home.

Speaker 9 Bring me home, please.

Speaker 9 Bring me home.

Speaker 2 Bo Bergdahl was rescued on May 31st, 2014. If you followed this story in the news, maybe you expected the usual things would follow.
A big welcome home, and then his story would come out.

Speaker 2 We'd learn what happened to him, how he ended up with the Taliban.

Speaker 2 And it did start out that way. President Obama announced Bergdahl's return in the Rose Garden of the White House, with Bergdahl's parents, Bob and Jani, by his side.

Speaker 11 This morning, I called Bob and Janny Bergdahl and told them that after nearly five years in captivity, their son Bo is coming home.

Speaker 2 Bergdahl's hometown of Haley, Idaho, which for five years had Bring Bo home posters and yellow ribbons all over the place, they planned this big celebration for him.

Speaker 2 But then so suddenly, the whole story flipped.

Speaker 2 Within days, within hours of his rescue, in fact, people began saying that we shouldn't be celebrating him because Bo Bergdahl deliberately walked off his post into hostile territory.

Speaker 2 That's how he got captured. Some of his former platoon mates called him a deserter.
Others were saying he was a traitor even, who might have collaborated with the Taliban.

Speaker 2 Some Some people took offense that in the Rose Garden event, Bob Bergdahl, who had grown a long beard in his son's absence, had spoken some phrases in Arabic and Pashto.

Speaker 2 The celebration in Haley was canceled.

Speaker 2 Congressional leaders condemned the trade the president made to get Bergdahl back, the release of five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay, saying the trade was not only ill-conceived, but illegal.

Speaker 2 The Army launched a big investigation into what exactly happened. Why did Bergdahl leave his post?

Speaker 2 Even now, other soldiers are so enraged by what Bergdahl did that for his own protection, he's got to have a security detail with him when he leaves his base in San Antonio.

Speaker 2 Finally, the army charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence.

Speaker 2 And through all of this, Bo Bergdahl himself was like a ghost, a blank. We never heard from him.
He wasn't talking on TV. He wasn't quoted in the newspaper.
So it seemed like that was that.

Speaker 2 His story was only going to live in that kind of antiseptic upstairs realm of pissed off politicians and military experts and cable TV commentators.

Speaker 2 But last spring, I found out that Bo Bergdahl had been talking to someone for almost a year. He'd been talking to a filmmaker named Mark Boll.

Speaker 2 Naturally, I have a very large sense of humor. That's Bo.

Speaker 2 There's good times and good places where it you.

Speaker 12 Right, you're pretty careful with it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 12 Like I've noticed even with me, like you don't you don't crack many jokes. No.

Speaker 12 But you can, you know. I mean, I might not laugh, but you can try.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 If I see an opportunity, I might do it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, give it a try. If you see an opening, let's see what you got.

Speaker 2 Mark Ball is a screenwriter and producer. You've probably heard of his movies, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark 30.

Speaker 2 Mark wanted to make a movie about Bo's story. So a couple of months after Bo came back to the U.S., Mark managed to contact him, and they started talking about everything.

Speaker 2 About the Taliban and motorcycles and the existence of God and how good spicy salsa is and how memory works and what a soldier should and shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 Mark recorded the calls, not for broadcast or anything, which is why you sometimes hear Mark making himself a snack.

Speaker 14 Yeah, there was one.

Speaker 14 Yeah, there was one bike I saw out.

Speaker 2 Or the swoosh of Mark sending an email or his dog scuffling around. Hold on one sec.
Can you

Speaker 4 hold on one second?

Speaker 2 It's It's roughly 25 hours of recorded conversations, a lot of it rangy and raw. Their rapport is sort of unexpected.

Speaker 2 Mark swears a lot, he can be blunt, while Bo, the soldier, comes off as the softer one. His go-to expletive is good grief.

Speaker 2 These tapes are not like regular interviews because Mark isn't so much after the facts of what happened, though he wants those too, but more he's after the why of what happened.

Speaker 2 trying to get inside Bo's head to understand how Bo sees the world. And Bo is never monosyllabic or recalcitrant in these conversations.
He's trying hard to explain himself.

Speaker 2 You can hear that Bo is thinking through something, his so-far extraordinary life, basically, and what's become of it.

Speaker 2 Which is understandable, considering that any one piece of this story could keep a person's mind churning.

Speaker 2 Right now, Bo is waiting to see if the army is going to drop the charges against him or take them all the way to court-martial, to a trial, or something in between.

Speaker 2 And then there's the stunning fact that Bo was held by the Taliban for almost five years. I just want to pause on that for a second.
Five years alone.

Speaker 2 That's longer than any American has ever been held by the Taliban. Longer than any American has survived being held by the Taliban.
He can't speak Pashto.

Speaker 2 The people handling him, for the most part, didn't speak English. So for five years, Bo couldn't really talk to anyone.

Speaker 2 And then here he is in these calls with Mark, and he's describing things vividly that seem indescribable.

Speaker 12 At one point, they told me that they kind of had you in a really dark room almost sounded like a basement, like where there was no light.

Speaker 12 It's like, well, you know, someone asks you, well, why does it hurt? Does your body hurt? Yes, your body hurts, but it's more than that. It's like this mental, like

Speaker 12 you're almost confused. You know, there's times when I'd wake up and it's just so dark,

Speaker 12 like, I would wake up not even remembering, like, what I was.

Speaker 12 You know how you get that feeling when that word is on the tip of your tongue?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 That happened to me only. It was, like, what am I?

Speaker 4 Like, I couldn't I couldn't see my hands. I couldn't do anything.
The only thing I could do was, like, touch my face. And even that wasn't, like,

Speaker 4 you know registering right yeah you know to the point where you just want to scream and you can't like I can't scream I can't risk that so it's like you're standing there screaming in your mind in this room you're standing like in this blackened dirt room that's tiny and just on the other side of that flimsy little door wooden door that you could probably easily rip off the hinges is the entire world out there.

Speaker 4 It is everything that you're missing. It is everybody.
Everyone is out there. You know, that breath that you're trying to breathe, that

Speaker 4 release that you're trying to get, everything is beyond that door. And I mean,

Speaker 4 I hate doors

Speaker 4 now.

Speaker 2 On the other side of the door was relief, of course, but also all the various people and systems that had kicked into action after Bo went missing.

Speaker 2 Bo's parents and his friends back in Idaho, the military, intelligence analysts, diplomats, and secret meetings with the Taliban, debriefers at Guantanamo Bay, the State Department, the White House.

Speaker 2 At some point, after I'd been reporting out all these various threads of Bo's story, interviewing lots of people at length about Bo and about what he did and the consequences of what he did, this children's book I used to read to my kids popped into my head.

Speaker 2 It's called Zoom. There are no words, it's just pictures.
And it starts with these pointy red shapes. Then next page, you realize those shapes are a rooster's comb.

Speaker 2 Next page, you zoom out, you see the rooster is standing on a fence with two little kids watching him. Next page, zoom out again, they're in a farmhouse.

Speaker 2 And then zoom further, you realize that all of it, the rooster, the kids, the farmhouse, are toys being played with by another child.

Speaker 2 And that that whole scene is actually an ad in a magazine, and the magazine is in the lap of someone napping on a deck chair, and so on.

Speaker 2 Out and out it zooms, the aperture of the thing getting wider and wider until the original image is so far away, it's unseeable. That's what the story of Bo Bergdahl is like.

Speaker 2 This one idiosyncratic guy makes a radical decision at the age of 23 to walk away into Afghanistan. And the consequences of that decision, they spin out wider and wider.

Speaker 2 And at every turn, you're surprised. The picture changes.
To get the full picture, you need to go very, very small into one person's life. And also very, very big into the war in Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 Nobody even really knows who he is. And nobody knows why he did it.
It was filmmaker Mark Bull and his tape that got me interested in all this.

Speaker 2 We were talking the other day on the phone about what got him interested in Bo.

Speaker 2 He has this, like, he's the mystery. You know, he poses this really mysterious dilemma because he did something that's,

Speaker 2 from a military perspective, from a lot of people's perspective, is unforgivable. He commits a cardinal sin in

Speaker 2 walking off and leaving his post.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 4 And yet, it's not that simple because he says that he did it for really,

Speaker 4 not just really good reasons, like the most important, profound reasons you could possibly think of.

Speaker 4 So how do you judge somebody like that? How do you judge him?

Speaker 2 For this story, we've teamed up with Mark and his production company, PageOne. They'd come to us saying, hey, we've been doing all this reporting on the story and we've also got this tape.

Speaker 2 Do you think you might want to listen? And yes, we did. And we were kind of blown away, and so we began working with them.

Speaker 2 They shared their research with us and also put us in touch with many of their sources, especially soldiers.

Speaker 2 We don't have anything to do with their movie, but Mark and Paige1 are our partners for season two.

Speaker 2 You might hear Mark and me talking from time to time during the course of this season, so we can compare notes. Bo Bergdahl is currently an active duty soldier.

Speaker 2 He's got a clerical job at his base in San Antonio, Texas, where he's waiting out his legal situation.

Speaker 2 Again, Bo isn't talking to the press, but he did give us permission permission to use the taped phone calls with Mark.

Speaker 2 So, let's start at the beginning. Why'd he do it? Why'd Bo leave his platoon? That's where Mark started too.

Speaker 2 Like, I can tell you

Speaker 2 the story.

Speaker 8 Well, give me

Speaker 16 the

Speaker 17 30-second version first.

Speaker 2 This is from Mark's first taped phone call with Bo.

Speaker 2 30-second version.

Speaker 2 You know what best one is, right?

Speaker 2 What What is?

Speaker 2 Dust one.

Speaker 2 The radio signal. Dust one stands for Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown.
It's the Army's version of Man Overboard.

Speaker 2 Dust One is the radio signal that's put out over the radio when a soldier goes missing in a combat field. Okay.

Speaker 2 Or a soldier is taken captive. Right.

Speaker 2 Bo says what he was trying to do was to cause a dust one, which already sets him apart. Because it means Bo doesn't fit into any of the AWOL or desertion scenarios we're used to hearing.

Speaker 2 He wasn't cavorting. He wasn't drunk or goofing off.
He didn't drop his weapon and flee in the middle of a firefight. He didn't decide in a burst of panic or confusion to go walk about.

Speaker 2 Instead, slow-simmering and methodical, Bo formulated a plan. He would create a crisis, a dust one, in order to call attention to another crisis.

Speaker 2 Bo says he had serious concerns, concerns that began back in basic training and which persisted throughout his deployment in Afghanistan, regarding bad leadership within his unit.

Speaker 2 And what I was seeing from my first unit all the way up into Afghanistan, all I was seeing was

Speaker 2 basically leadership failure to the point that the lives of the guys standing next to me were literally, from what I could see, in danger of something seriously going wrong and somebody being killed.

Speaker 2 This is a big point of conflict, maybe the big point of conflict in Bose's story.

Speaker 2 The question generally of Bose's true motives for leaving his post, and specifically whether his description of what was happening around him is accurate or believable.

Speaker 2 Because of course, this explanation could be a story he invented. You could argue that he did have five years to come up with it.
Or he could be expressing the genuine beliefs of a whistleblower.

Speaker 2 Or the truth could be something else entirely. And I'm definitely going to get into that, precisely what Bo says he was seeing during his deployment and how he reacted to it.

Speaker 2 But all that will make more sense once you know more about Bo himself. So for now, I'm going to jump over that and just give you the bare bones of what Bo says happened.

Speaker 2 And that is, he was so alarmed by what he considered crappy and potentially dangerous leadership that he needed to act. He needed to let his command know at the highest levels.

Speaker 2 Now, as a private first class, nobody is going to listen to me.

Speaker 14 Of course.

Speaker 14 Nobody is going to take me serious if I say an investigation needs to be put underway, that this person needs to be psychologically evaluated. Right.

Speaker 2 Bo's solution is the dust one.

Speaker 2 At the time, Bo was at a tiny outpost known as OP Mest. Mest was the name of the town right across the road from the OP.
A few thousand people lived there.

Speaker 2 Mest was in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, right near the Pakistan border.

Speaker 2 Next to the town, the soldiers set up a sort of campsite, a scrubby, rocky clearing about the size of a football field. A couple of supply roads come together right there.

Speaker 2 One of the roads leads back to the battalion's big forward operating base at Sharana, Fab Sharana, where there's relative comfort. Beds, internet, Burger King, basketball courts.

Speaker 2 The other road leads to the Pakistan border. The earth there is this fine, fine dirt.
The soldiers I talked to called it moondust.

Speaker 19 The one time I saw mest, and this would have been a couple days before Bird Daw disappeared, I looked at and I got chills that, wow, that place sucks.

Speaker 2 That's a guy named Ben Evans. He never even went to OP Mest, but driving by it was enough to take in the bleakness.

Speaker 19 It was four trucks surrounded by seawire, crammed up in a little runoff ditch.

Speaker 18 So it gave me the willies just seeing the place.

Speaker 21 OP Mest is probably the worst place humanly imaginable.

Speaker 2 That's John Thurman. John was in the same company as Bo, known as Blackfoot Company, different platoon.
Like other soldiers I talked to, John remembered Mest mostly for what it lacked.

Speaker 2 Trees, plumbing, electricity, water, shade.

Speaker 21 But OP Mest was built on the side of a hill, and on top of the hill, there was a cemetery. And so granted, this place is spooky from the get-go.

Speaker 21 And the quality of life was extremely low.

Speaker 21 Everybody pretty much got some sort of GI illness while we were out there just because we couldn't keep things clean enough. We didn't have the resources.

Speaker 2 what was the dirty, just

Speaker 2 dust and

Speaker 21 dust, flies, the flies, yeah. Flies, definitely, the open toilets, the burn pit.

Speaker 3 A burn pit which we called the pit of hell.

Speaker 2 This is Shane Cross, who was a friend of Beau's at the time, same platoon. The pit of hell was this large hole they dug, and they throw the trash in there and burn it.

Speaker 3 We call it the pit of hell because we started it and never went out and just burned continuously all through the night and days.

Speaker 2 Different from, did you have to burn your

Speaker 2 shit, for lack of a better word?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 3 Good old.

Speaker 2 That seems like that would be the pit of hell more than this, like the regular garbage.

Speaker 3 You did that right next to the pit of hell, so it was all connected.

Speaker 3 They took an empty Hesco,

Speaker 3 which Hesco is like a large basket that you filled with dirt.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, eight feet tall kind of thing. Took an empty one of those and had made a little

Speaker 4 room.

Speaker 3 And you had the little bucket that everyone shit in, and then blow up, mix that with some fuel. And it was someone's job to stand there with a stick and stir it as it burned.
No.

Speaker 3 As you're stirring it, sometimes if you didn't have a metal rod, you had a large wooden stick, like a one-by-one, you know, it would your stick eventually burns down too.

Speaker 3 And so you're getting closer and closer as you're stirring.

Speaker 2 Whose job would it be to do the stirring? Like, did you have to draw straws for the stirring?

Speaker 4 Or did you just take turns?

Speaker 3 Between the privates, the NCOs that always pick one of us. And

Speaker 3 usually you can rely on them picking the private they don't like.

Speaker 2 Bose company, Blackfoot Company, had set up the OP in the first place. It was supposed to help the Afghans keep the insurgents in check because the two roads there, the U.S.

Speaker 2 called one of them Route Audi and the other Route Dodge, were used as supply routes for Taliban fighters and their weapons and IEDs, improvised explosive devices.

Speaker 2 They were the big threat in Afghanistan. Bose platoon leader said there was an IED hotspot about a thousand meters out along Route Audi.

Speaker 2 The Afghan National Police had their own little outpost further up the hill there as well. The American soldiers had strung all this concertina wire around the place.

Speaker 2 And their job was really just to be there in the middle of nowhere, making their presence felt, keeping a lookout for suspicious vehicles, watching the rooftops of MEST for snipers.

Speaker 2 Some of the guys I talked to said that occasionally someone would shoot at them and they'd shoot back, but none of them said there was much action there.

Speaker 2 They didn't discover anyone transporting weapons or bombs. Mostly it was just fruit vendors or farmers or families passing through.

Speaker 2 Bo's platoon would go to the OP for three or four or five days at a stretch, sometimes doing patrols into Mest or the other nearby town, Malak, or pulling around-the-clock guard duty, either from the trucks or from the hilltop up near the cemetery, where they dug out a small foxhole bunker.

Speaker 2 There were long, long stretches of boring, of wondering what the hell they were doing there.

Speaker 2 All the soldiers I talked to said they just hated being at Mest.

Speaker 2 The OP was about 20 miles miles southwest of Fob Shirana. So Bo's idea was that he'd sneak away from Mest, which Bo refers to as the TCP for traffic control point,

Speaker 2 and run all the way back to the FOB. He says he figured he could make it to Shirana in maybe 24 hours or so.
Here's Bo again.

Speaker 4 A man disappears from a TCP, and a few days later, after Tust 1 is called up, he reappears at a FOB.

Speaker 4 Suddenly, because of the Test One, everybody is alerted. CIA is alerted.
The Navy is alerted. The Marines are alerted.
Air Force is alerted. Not just Army.

Speaker 2 Which means that when he reappears, it'll be such a big deal. There'll be such a commotion.
Everyone will want to know why he left and why he's back.

Speaker 2 And so he'll be able to get an audience with whomever he wants, a general even. And they won't be able to ignore his complaints.

Speaker 13 Weren't you afraid they were going to throw you in

Speaker 13 the jail or whatever?

Speaker 13 That's actually what I, you know, that's what I figured they'd do.

Speaker 13 And how long did you figure you'd stay in there?

Speaker 13 Well, I figured I'd stay in there until people

Speaker 13 got the situation cleared up. You know, I I was fully confident that when somebody actually took a look at the situation and when people started investigating the situation,

Speaker 13 that people would understand that I was right. You know, what was going on was a danger to the lives of the men in that company.

Speaker 13 The idea was: I'd rather be sitting in Leavenworth than standing over the body of, you know,

Speaker 13 Naciomento or

Speaker 13 Coe or somebody like that,

Speaker 13 and understanding that if somebody had done something, they'd still be alive.

Speaker 2 Naciamento and Co. were guys in Bo's platoon.

Speaker 10 So gutsy move, dude.

Speaker 10 Gutsy, but still stupid.

Speaker 23 Well, yeah, they're not that's not mutually exclusive.

Speaker 2 Bo makes preparations. Back at the fob for a spell, he goes to the Sharana post office and sends some of his things back to Idaho.
Some books, his new laptop, his Kindle, a journal.

Speaker 2 In the likely event that he gets in trouble, he doesn't want his personal stuff seized by the Army. There's a shop run by the locals at the FOB.
They call it the Haji Shop. They sell DVDs and clothes.

Speaker 2 Bo buys a local local outfit, a sort of robe.

Speaker 2 Because I knew there was a possibility of me being out in the open in the daytime.

Speaker 2 So obviously a big white guy in a uniform walking through the desert by himself is going to attract a lot of attention.

Speaker 2 However, a person with a traditional, like with a local dress on and a local headscarf wrapped around his head, that's not going to draw as much attention.

Speaker 2 He also took out $300 from his bank account in U.S. and Afghani money, money, just in case he'd need to bribe someone.

Speaker 2 At the end of June, 2009, Bo's platoon was on its very last rotation at OP Mest.

Speaker 2 The company was getting ready to hand the place over to the Afghans, which really just means they were going to take their trucks and leave.

Speaker 2 In any case, this would be Bo's last chance to execute his plan. And this plan, it's risky, obviously.
It's difficult and it's dangerous. But technically, it's not impossible to do it.

Speaker 2 Physically, Bo was capable. He was a good runner.
He'd run similar distances before, plus, he was used to running in high altitudes in Idaho. He did well in the heat.

Speaker 2 When he talks about it now, he'll sometimes acknowledge the wrong-headedness of it, that he overestated his ability, that he wasn't aware of the other ways he could have registered concerns about leadership.

Speaker 2 But there was this other idea Bo was testing out. Yes, he says he wanted to bring attention to the plight of his platoon, but he also admits that his plan was part crucible.

Speaker 2 I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying

Speaker 2 Right. Like

Speaker 2 I don't know, Jason Bourne. Right.

Speaker 20 A character in a book or whatever, a character.

Speaker 8 Yeah. So I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing.

Speaker 8 I could be what it is.

Speaker 8 All those guys out there who go to the movies and watch those movies, they all want to be that. But I wanted to prove that I was that.

Speaker 13 Why not just wait and see if you got the opportunity to prove that like on a mission, you know, because you hadn't even been there that long.

Speaker 4 Like, why not wait? I haven't been there very long.

Speaker 13 Why not wait a couple months and see if you get a chance to prove yourself in a, you know, some kind of tactical engagement?

Speaker 4 Because it was a combination of situations. The situation that I was in was an extremely bad situation.
I saw things falling apart as far as my command was

Speaker 4 concerned.

Speaker 4 So it wasn't that I just decided, hey, I'm going to do this to prove that I could do it.

Speaker 4 I was trying to find a solution to the problem at hand. Right.
And I just tied into it this idea.

Speaker 4 Right. Kind of like two words with one stone.

Speaker 13 I was just going to say two words with one stone.

Speaker 2 On the morning of June 30th, 2009, Bo had been scheduled to take over guard duty. The soldiers would keep watch from the turret of one of the MRAPs, which is a big armored truck.

Speaker 2 Bo is supposed to take over from Austin Lanford, but Lanford comes to the end of his shift, no Bo.

Speaker 2 So he gets down from the big truck, which he's not technically supposed to do until he's relieved, but whatever.

Speaker 2 He steps down and shakes Bo's little tent, which is right near the MRAP, to wake him up for duty. Then Lanford goes back up in the truck, still no Bo.

Speaker 16 So I went back down and then opened his tent and he wasn't in there. So I was like, okay, well, he probably went to the bathroom or something.

Speaker 2 Lanford shouts to a guy headed to the toilet, says, see if Bergdahl's in there. Guy comes back.
Nope.

Speaker 2 Then Lanford remembers that Bo had a reputation for sometimes hanging out with the Afghan National Police guys, who also had an outpost up on the hill.

Speaker 16 So that was my next

Speaker 16 thought was he might be up there.

Speaker 14 So I radioed up to the OP, said, hey, is Bergdahl there?

Speaker 16 They said, no, Bergdahl's not up here.

Speaker 2 Someone alerts Shane Cross since he's buddies with Bo. And now Shane starts looking.

Speaker 3 So I got up and I said, yeah, I'll get him. And I looked around and poked around for him a little bit.
And so I went over to the other trucks where a few people were awake.

Speaker 3 I tried to ask them, hey, where's Bo?

Speaker 3 And they all said, I don't know. I don't know.
And after I checked a few more trucks, I started to get concerned. And

Speaker 3 that's when

Speaker 3 I went back and I woke her PL.

Speaker 3 And I told him

Speaker 3 what had happened. Then I knew he was gone.

Speaker 2 Who was the PL?

Speaker 3 Lieutenant Billings.

Speaker 2 John Billings was the PL, the platoon leader. He testified at a military hearing that he thought Shane and Austin and the other guys were just messing with him.

Speaker 2 He said he thought, quote, they just want to see me get all spazzed out, freak out, you know, call higher headquarters, unquote.

Speaker 2 Instead, Billings realizes with horror that it's real, freaks out, and calls higher headquarters. He told an Army prosecutor that he felt a, quote, internal franticness, unquote.

Speaker 2 He can't find his guy. He types out a message to his company commander back at Shirana to the effect of, we're not up, meaning not 100% accounted for.
I have a missing soldier.

Speaker 2 At the other end of that message is Captain Silvino S. Silvino, who tells him, look again, there's got to be be a mistake.
Billings writes back, not a mistake.

Speaker 2 Silvino sets the dust one in motion, just as Bo had planned.

Speaker 2 The news starts circulating at the OP, obviously, then back at the FOB, up the chain of command, and then all over Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 Bo's fellow soldiers immediately tried to piece together what had happened. Here's Austin Lanford, the guy who Bo was supposed to relieve from guard duty.

Speaker 16 I knew in my mind that

Speaker 16 nobody came in and took him.

Speaker 16 Because they would have either been seen, they wouldn't have been able to get through the Constantina wire.

Speaker 14 He would have fought back.

Speaker 16 I didn't imagine him being taken as an option.

Speaker 10 And he left behind all his sensitive items in a nice, neat little pile. Sensitive items, meaning

Speaker 10 serial-numbered gear that would be a problem, like his weapon, the laser for his weapon, the optic, you know, his night optics, stuff like that. That would be a big problem if it went missing.

Speaker 10 He left it in a nice, neat little pile with a note.

Speaker 2 Of course, mixed in with the facts, there was just a ton of conjecture. For instance, there's actually no evidence Bo left a note, and Bo himself says he didn't leave one.

Speaker 2 So it's not clear to me where that detail came from. Other people said Bo had been acting too cozy with the Afghan National Police guys.

Speaker 2 The way that he'd been talking to the locals and the way that he'd been, you know, he'd been showing up late to guard shifts

Speaker 2 because he was busy talking to the locals. That's Josh Corder.
Here's Daryl Hansen. His guesses were expansive.

Speaker 22 We're like, man, is he like CIA or what? I mean, is he like this crazy like mole?

Speaker 20 Right.

Speaker 2 So like, what was the discussion? Yeah, like, what were you guys thinking?

Speaker 4 That's what, I mean, we did, yeah, that's what we were just thinking.

Speaker 22 Like,

Speaker 22 I mean, those are the things. Like, it was either like, this guy's a complete lunatic or is he like CIA?

Speaker 22 Like, we were trying to, like, we couldn't figure it out, you know?

Speaker 2 Some of these guys, they'd seen so many strange and terrible things on deployments, but this was unheard of.

Speaker 2 I talked to Josh and Ben and another Ben and a guy I'm calling Scott, it's not his real name, and Ken and John and Jason and Mark and Zach and Austin and Shane and Daryl.

Speaker 2 They remember Bo differently. They remember what happened after he left differently.
They have different feelings about it. They do not speak with one voice.

Speaker 2 But to a man, they said they were gobsmacked when they heard someone was missing.

Speaker 14 And I was like, this has got to be a drill.

Speaker 23 Like, holy crap, like, is this dream?

Speaker 8 Like, I was like, what?

Speaker 22 Like, you know, what?

Speaker 23 It's just the craziest thing that could ever happen.

Speaker 10 Because it was so ludicrous at the time to think about it.

Speaker 13 Like, what do you mean?

Speaker 15 Because nobody walks off. Nobody walks off a bob or

Speaker 15 a, you know, not even a fob, a, you know, a combat outpost.

Speaker 21 Where are you going to go?

Speaker 21 I mean, it's not like you can go hide out, you know, at the mall or something. I mean, there is nowhere but Taliban.

Speaker 2 One of Bo's friends told me that he was always a meticulous packer. This trip from Mess to Sharana was no exception.
Bo's got his wallet and his camera. He always had his camera on him.

Speaker 2 Two small knives that clip onto his belt, plus his utility knife. He's got a notebook.

Speaker 2 Inside are a few poems and journal entries, plus a newspaper clipping about a guy who'd set a record for sailing, a thousand days or something. Bo loves boats.

Speaker 2 For water, he'd filled the bladder from his camelback, about three liters.

Speaker 2 He'd grabbed a pack of nuts from his trail mix and some vacuum-packed chicken meat from an MRE that stands for meal ready to eat, the soldier's field ration.

Speaker 2 And he had his compass. His Afghan clothing he'd shoved into his pocket.
He figured he wouldn't need it until the sun rose.

Speaker 2 Sometime after midnight on June 30th, Bo walks about halfway up the hill toward that second lookout.

Speaker 2 and climbs over the concertina wire in a spot where someone had thrown a plastic crate down on top of it. He skirts past the Afghan and U.S.

Speaker 2 posts on top of the hill, knowing it's a blind spot for them. It's late for one thing, so people are probably tired.

Speaker 2 And if they're looking out at all, they're looking into the distance, not directly below them. Plus, the Afghans don't have night vision gear anyway.

Speaker 2 Once he clears that hill, he heads northwest toward the town of Malak, passes a school there until finally he's out in open desert.

Speaker 2 And that's when it hits him, when he suddenly feels the magnitude of what he's done. So basically what I decided to do, the first plan was go from point A to point B.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And that was it. However, 20 minutes out,

Speaker 8 I suddenly you know, 20 minutes out, I'm going, good grease.

Speaker 8 I'm you know, over my head, this is, you know, this they're gonna when I get back to the FOP, they're gonna hit me with everything they can.

Speaker 8 I knew that was gonna happen, but suddenly, you know, it really starts to sink in that

Speaker 8 I really did something

Speaker 8 bad.

Speaker 8 Well, not bad, but I did I really did something serious.

Speaker 2 Also, he's profoundly scared. He's a world away from anything he knows, in a country whose culture is alien to him, where people want to kill him.
And he's outside the wire in the dark.

Speaker 2 When I picture him standing there, I imagine a free-floating astronaut, no comforting tether attaching him to the mothership.

Speaker 2 The thought crosses Bo's mind, should he just go back to the OP?

Speaker 2 But he's not at all sure he could sneak back in. After all, the guys there are watching for people coming toward them, and they're manning big machine guns.
He might get shot.

Speaker 2 Instead, Bo figures he's just got to clench his jaw and go for it. And here again, he makes a decision that is not the one you expect, or at least not the one I would expect.

Speaker 2 Because not only does he keep going, but he alters his plan, complicates it. makes it a little grander and more ambitious.

Speaker 2 In hopes of mitigating the momentous trouble he now realizes he's in, Bo figures he'll try to arrive back at the FOB with some extra thing, a gift, in the form of valuable intel.

Speaker 2 He knew that on the road from Fob Shrana to OP Mest, there were sometimes IDs. Bo had heard someplace that the guys who were planting the IEDs were doing it at night.

Speaker 2 So he decides he'll make like a special forces guy and try to catch someone planting an IED or about to plant an IED. He'll look for flashlights bobbing up and down, listen for the crackle of radios.

Speaker 2 The idea would have been if I had seen somebody in the darkness who looked like they were doing something suspicious, I would then slowly, quietly follow them in the night

Speaker 2 and then in the morning pick up their trail and track them to wherever it is that they're going.

Speaker 2 Then I'd get that information and so that when I got back to the fob,

Speaker 2 you know, they could say, you know, well, you know, you left your position, then I could say, well, I also got this information, so you know, what are you going to do?

Speaker 2 I have this information of this person who was doing this on this night, and they live here. And so that would be, like, justifiable.
Like,

Speaker 2 he left his post. You know, he left the TCP, but he collected intel that helped us stop somebody who was putting an IAD in the road.

Speaker 2 You know, that would have been the bonus point that would have helped me deal with the whole basically hurricane of horror, or not hurricane of horror, but hurricane of wrath that was going to hit me once I got back to the fog.

Speaker 2 Up until this point, Bo says he'd been walking in open terrain between the road and a swell of hills.

Speaker 2 His idea was to make a slight detour to shift a bit more toward the hills where some houses were, thinking he'd have a better chance there of catching someone moving around in the dark unawares.

Speaker 2 But before he knows it, he's in the hills. He says he got completely tangled in there.
forgot to check his compass for two hours, which is a rookie move.

Speaker 2 And so what was meant to be a slight detour turned into a major detour. By the time he'd straightened himself out and gotten out of the hills, he'd lost valuable time.
It's just the next morning.

Speaker 2 Well, it's, you know, where I got, you know, got myself screwed. By the time the sun was up, Bo was in open desert with no cover.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 that's what put me into the line of sight of the Taliban.

Speaker 13 And what happened?

Speaker 17 Some dudes drove up and just snagged you, or what?

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, I was just walking along. There's a road probably,

Speaker 17 I don't know, it's far off, 100 meters,

Speaker 17 maybe,

Speaker 17 in a line of motorcycles, probably about

Speaker 17 five motorcycles. It might have been a couple guys on the back of a couple of the motorcycles.
There's probably at least six or seven guys.

Speaker 17 With the AK-47s, one guy had a... It was a bigger one.
It was, it had, it didn't shoot the 7.62x30. It shot the 7.62x41.

Speaker 17 but he had one of those and they were driving along the road and I have I can't tell you what set them off I can't tell you how they spotted me I don't I don't know they just they deviated they turned off the road came towards me and maybe they were just

Speaker 17 They maybe they just saw somebody walking through the desert and they wanted to see who he was or they were seeing if they needed help or I don't know what it was, but

Speaker 17 there I was in the open

Speaker 17 open desert and I'm not about to outrun a bunch of motorcycles.

Speaker 17 So there's

Speaker 17 I couldn't do anything against six or seven guys with AK-47s and they just pulled up and

Speaker 17 that was it.

Speaker 17 But they said you fought like crazy.

Speaker 17 No, I didn't.

Speaker 17 I'm not stupid enough to try and fight off all the head with a knife. I'm not stupid enough to try and knife off a bunch of guys with AK-47s.

Speaker 17 So, did they basically just tie your hands and toss you on the back of one of the bikes or something, or what?

Speaker 17 Pretty much.

Speaker 2 Hello, this is Sarah.

Speaker 2 That's me calling the Taliban.

Speaker 2 Hello, is that Mujahid Rahman?

Speaker 24 Yes, yes, thank you very much.

Speaker 8 How are you doing?

Speaker 2 The Taliban's version of Bose Capture.

Speaker 2 Next time on Serial.

Speaker 2 Serials produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivis, and me in in partnership with Mark Boll, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Anna Perna Pictures.

Speaker 2 Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor.
Research by Kevin Garnett. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris.
Copy editing by Anaheed Alani.

Speaker 2 Editing help this week from Joel Lovell, Hana Jaffe Walt, and Nancy Updike.

Speaker 2 Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn with additional music from Mark Phillips and Fritz Meyers, and the show is mixed by Kate Belinski. Kristen Taylor is our community editor.

Speaker 2 Other serial staff, Seth Lind, Emily Condon, Elise Bergerson, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks to Steve Sigmund, Chad Hunt, Carl Burton, Rich Oris, Matt Dorfman, and Sarah Barrett.

Speaker 2 Our website is serialpodcast.org, where you can listen to all our episodes, sign up for our newsletter, read articles by the serial staff, and check out maps, videos, and more.

Speaker 2 This week, we've got a 3D map where you can fly over OP Mest and Fab Sharana. It is very cool.
Again, that's serialpodcast.org.

Speaker 25 Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families.

Speaker 25 With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications.

Speaker 25 Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely, and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place.

Speaker 25 Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.

Speaker 26 Hi, this is Eric Kim with New York Times Cooking. As a recipe developer, I spend a lot of my time trying to come up with dishes that are quick, easy, but also very special.

Speaker 26 For me, that means dishes like cochukaru salmon. It's a crispy salmon fillet with a salty, sweet glaze that bubbles up in candies.
I love cooking this because it only takes 20 minutes.

Speaker 26 You can get this recipe and so many more ideas on New York Times cooking. Visit nytcooking.com to get inspired.

Speaker 2 Cereal is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. Coming up on the the next episode of Serial.
Now, these people do,

Speaker 2 they have no hesitation. They have no problem killing you.

Speaker 24 And what are we going to do with him? Are we going to

Speaker 24 kill him, to behead him?

Speaker 12 I mean, like, literally, like, we were charging into these towns, just running out of our trucks.

Speaker 18 Okay, now we're going to fly you into this Bedouin village, and you're going to check all the women's faces to make sure that they're not hiding him in women's clothing.

Speaker 21 The team team went in and looked up and saw the ceiling lined with C4.

Speaker 27 He's asking about Kabul or asking about police.

Speaker 27 And we told him that we are police.

Speaker 4 What's your name?

Speaker 14 My name is Bo Berto.

Speaker 14 Holy,

Speaker 4 I'm 23 years old.