Serial Recap: The Meaning of Bowe Bergdahl

The second season of the Serial podcast is now in the books, but the troubles for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, and the national debate over who he is, and what kind of fate he deserves, grinds on.

The final episode, released Thursday, reveals host and journalist Sarah Koenig mulling over the question at the heart of the Bergdahl controversy for so many who served: Did U.S. soldiers die searching for him in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan?

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was the U.S. military’s top intelligence official in Afghanistan at the time of Bergdahl’s disappearance in June 2009, unequivocally tells Koenig that soldiers died during the search, but he was unable to provide any specifics.

But retired Command Sgt. Maj. Ken Wolf, the top enlisted soldier in Bergdahl’s battalion — who played such a key role in Episode Six of the series — says no way. Wolf would only agree to appear on the program if he could say one thing to the families who lost a loved one during the unit’s deployment. He wanted to let them know “their sons did not die looking for PFC Bergdahl.”

“All you’ve got to do is look at a map and look at the time frame,” Wolf said, since the soldiers he lost during that deployment didn’t die until about two months after Bergdahl walked off his post. “No one in the Army is ever going to say we stopped looking for you, OK? But here’s the deal: It’s been 45-plus days. At this point, we know where he’s at. He’s in Pakistan.” And a conventional U.S. Army unit is not going to walk into Pakistan for any reason, even to find a lost soldier.

Does that mean the Army stopped looking? Not exactly. Other soldiers in Bergdahl’s unit say that whenever they left the wire on other missions, it was implicit that the search for Bergdahl was part of it. But after the first few weeks, it was rarely — if ever — the reason for a mission.

Now that he has had a few years to digest everything that happened in Afghanistan, Zach Barrow, one of the soldiers in Bergdahl’s unit, told Koenig his thinking has changed in regards to his former fellow soldier.

“Maybe we’re holding on to all this stuff and wanting to punish this kid,” he said. “We were all in a bad situation and bad stuff happened. Yes, [Bergdahl] added to the bad situation but I don’t think maybe as much,” as he once thought.

Another member of his unit, Austin Lanford, said “I hated it over there, I wanted to leave extremely bad sometimes. That could’ve been me.”

In the end, now-retired Lt. Col. Paul Edgar, part of the team originally assigned to look for Bergdahl, offers what might be the best coda for the second season of Serial, and for the national debate over the troubled soldier’s fate.

“When you sign up for war as a society, you sign up for this,” Edgar said. “You sign up for disillusioned youth, you sign up for all the things that attend war. So there’s a level of responsibility here, whether it’s Bowe and his particulars, or the baggage of war that goes along with every single [incident] that we signed up for as a society. And to take all of that and to pin it, politically and otherwise, on this 20-year old is in my opinion very, very wrong.”

As for Bergdahl himself, we only hear him toward the end of the episode. He describes one night where he slipped out of the house where his captors kept him, and stared at the night sky.

“It was a sky full of stars, and I was just sitting there,” Bergdahl said. “After so many months of being in that room, the vast space above me, it was thrilling in the sense that things went so far beyond me. It was the relief of knowing that this stupidity doesn’t go any further than this little planet, or that little country, or that little house, or whatever it is. If there’s something as big as that, then it’s almost like you don’t have to be scared.”
Photo credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images