Sarah Koenig

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

[Man speaking Pashto]

It showed the rescue of a guy named Bowe Bergdahl. He was the US soldier who was captured by the Taliban and held captive for just shy of five years. 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.

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

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.

[Chanting]

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. One guy says something in Pashto, which is translated on screen as "Don't come back to Afghanistan." What I've heard since is that the guy said, "Do not come back to Afghanistan. You will not get out alive."

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. And then you see Bergdahl again. He's out of the truck now, looking up at the sky. His clothes are too big, billowy.

[Sound of helicopter]

Then, at about six minutes in, right after some cows wander onto the scene, the helicopter lands, dust flies. Bergdahl walks forward, flanked by two men, while three men from the helicopter—the US Special Operations team—jog toward him. The two sides meet in the middle of the clearing, shake hands—like team captains right before the starting whistle.

Bergdahl steps forward. The Americans put their hands on him, pull him towards the Black Hawk while they're walking backwards. They don't want to turn their backs on the Taliban just yet. 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. And it's done. The video cuts off.

From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.

Sarah Koenig

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

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.

President Obama

This morning, I called Bob and Jani Bergdahl and told them that after nearly five years in captivity, their son, Bowe, is coming home.

Sarah Koenig

Bergdahl's hometown of Hailey, Idaho—which for five years had Bring Bowe Home posters and yellow ribbons all over the place—they planned this big celebration for him. But then, so suddenly, the whole story flipped.

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

The celebration in Hailey was canceled. 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. The army launched a big investigation into what exactly happened—why did Bergdahl leave his post? 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.

Finally, the army charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence. And through all of this, Bowe 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. 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.

But last spring, I found out that Bowe Bergdahl had been talking to someone, for almost a year. He had been talking to a filmmaker named Mark Boal.

Sarah Koenig

That's Bowe.

Sarah Koenig

Mark Boal is a screenwriter and producer. You've probably heard of his movies: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty. Mark wanted to make a movie about Bowe's story. So a couple of months after Bowe came back to the U.S., Mark managed to contact him. And they started talking, about everything. 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.

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

Sarah Koenig

... or the swoosh of Mark sending an email, or his dog scuffling around.

Sarah Koenig

It's roughly 25 hours of recorded conversations, a lot of it rangy and raw. Their rapport is sort of unexpected. Mark swears a lot. He can be blunt. While Bowe, the soldier, comes off as the softer one. His go-to expletive is "good grief."

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, trying to get inside Bowe's head to understand how Bowe sees the world.

And Bowe is never monosyllabic or recalcitrant in these conversations. He's trying hard to explain himself. You can hear that Bowe is thinking through something: his so-far extraordinary life, basically, and what's become of it. Which is understandable, considering that any one piece of this story could keep a person's mind churning. Right now, Bowe 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.

And then there's the stunning fact that Bowe was held by the Taliban for almost five years. I just want to pause on that for a second. Five years. Alone. 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. The people handling him, for the most part, didn't speak English. So for five years, Bowe couldn't really talk to anyone. And then, here he is, in these calls with Mark, and he's describing things, vividly, that seem indescribable.

Sarah Koenig

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

At some point, after I'd been reporting out all these various threads of Bowe's story, interviewing lots of people at length about Bowe 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. It's called Zoom. There are no words. It's just pictures. And it starts with these pointy red shapes.

And then, next page, you realize those shapes are a rooster's comb. 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. And then, zoom further, you realize that all of it—the rooster, the kids, the farmhouse—are toys being played with by another child, 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.

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 Bowe Bergdahl is like. 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. 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.

Sarah Koenig

It was filmmaker Mark Boal and his tape that got me interested in all this. We were talking the other day on the phone about what got him interested in Bowe.

Sarah Koenig

For this story, we've teamed up with Mark and his production company, Page One. They'd come to us saying, Hey, we've been doing all this reporting on the story, and we've also got this tape. 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. They shared their research with us and also put us in touch with many of their sources, especially soldiers.

We don't have anything to do with their movie, but Mark and Page One are our partners for Season Two. You might hear Mark and me talking from time to time during the course of the season so we can compare notes. Bowe Bergdahl is currently an active-duty soldier. He's got a clerical job at his base in San Antonio, Texas, where he's waiting out his legal situation. Again, Bowe isn't talking to the press. But he did give us permission to use the taped phone calls with Mark.

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

Sarah Koenig

This is from Mark's first taped phone call with Bowe.

Sarah Koenig

DUSTWUN stands for duty status whereabouts unknown. It's the army's version of "man overboard."

Sarah Koenig

Bowe says what he was trying to do was to cause a DUSTWUN, which already sets him apart, because it means Bowe doesn't fit into any of the AWOL or desertion scenarios we're used to hearing. 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 walkabout.

Instead, slow-simmering and methodical, Bowe formulated a plan. He would create a crisis, a DUSTWUN, in order to call attention to another crisis. Bowe 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.

Sarah Koenig

This is a big point of conflict, maybe the big point of conflict in Bowe's story: the question, generally, of Bowe's true motives for leaving his post; and, specifically, whether his description of what was happening around him is accurate or believable. 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.

Or the truth could be something else entirely. And I'm definitely going to get into that—precisely what Bowe says he was seeing during his deployment and how he reacted to it. But all that will make more sense once you know more about Bowe himself.

So for now, I'm going to jump over that and just give you the bare bones of what Bowe says happened. 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.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe's solution is the DUSTWUN. At the time, Bowe 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. Mest was in Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan, right near the Pakistan border.

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. One of the roads leads back to the battalion's big forward-operating base at Sharana, FOB Sharana, where there's relative comfort: beds, internet, Burger King, basketball courts.

The other road leads to the Pakistan border. The earth there is this fine, fine dirt. The soldiers I talked to called it "moon dust."

Sarah Koenig

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.

Sarah Koenig

That's Jon Thurman. Jon was in the same company as Bowe, known as Blackfoot Company—different platoon. Like other soldiers I talked to, Jon remembered Mest mostly for what it lacked: trees, plumbing, electricity, water, shade.

Sarah Koenig

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

Sarah Koenig

Bowe's 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. 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. They were the big threat in Afghanistan.

Bowe's platoon leader said there was an IED hotspot about 1,000 meters out along Route Audi. 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. 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.

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

Bowe'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'd dug out a small foxhole bunker. There were long, long stretches of boring, of wondering what the hell they were doing there.

All of the soldiers I talked to said they just hated being at Mest. The OP was about 20 miles southwest of FOB Sharana. So Bowe's idea was that he'd sneak away from Mest—which Bowe refers to as a TCP, for traffic control point—and run all the way back to the FOB. He says he figured he could make it to Sharana in maybe 24 hours or so. Here's Bowe again.

Sarah Koenig

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. 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.

Sarah Koenig

Nascimento and Coe were guys in Bowe's platoon.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe 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. 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 called it the haji shop. They sell DVDs and clothes. Bowe buys a local outfit, a sort of robe.

Sarah Koenig

He also took out $300 from his bank account in U.S. and Afghani money, just in case he'd need to bribe someone. At the end of June, 2009, Bowe's platoon was on its very last rotation at OP Mest. 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.

In any case, this would be Bowe'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. Physically, Bowe 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.

When he talks about it now, he'll sometimes acknowledge the wrongheadedness of it—that he overestimated his ability, that he wasn't aware of the other ways he could have registered concerns about leadership. But there was this other idea Bowe 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.

Sarah Koenig

On the morning of June 30th, 2009, Bowe 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. Bowe was supposed to take over from Austin Lanford. But Lanford comes to the end of his shift: no Bowe. So he gets down from the big truck—which he's not technically supposed to do until he's relieved, but whatever. He steps down and shakes Bowe'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 Bowe.

Sarah Koenig

Lanford shouts to a guy headed to the toilet, says, "See if Bergdahl's in there." Guy comes back, "Nope." Then Lanford remembers that Bowe had a reputation for sometimes hanging out with the Afghan National Police guys, who also had an outpost up on the hill.

Sarah Koenig

Someone alerts Shane Cross, since he's buddies with Bowe. And now Shane starts looking.

Sarah Koenig

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

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

At the other end of that message is Captain Silvino S. Silvino, who tells him, look again ... there's got to be a mistake. Billings writes back: not a mistake. Silvino sets the DUSTWUN in motion, just as Bowe had planned. The news starts circulating at the OP, obviously, then back at the FOB, up the chain of command, and then all over Afghanistan.

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

Sarah Koenig

That's Mark McCrorie.

Sarah Koenig

Of course, mixed in with the facts, there was just a ton of conjecture. For instance, there's actually no evidence Bowe left a note. And Bowe himself says he didn't leave one. So it's not clear to me where that detail came from.

Other people said Bowe had been acting too cozy with the Afghan National Police guys.

Sarah Koenig

That's Josh Korder. Here's Daryl Hansen. His guesses were expansive.

Sarah Koenig

Some of these guys, they'd seen so many strange and terrible things on deployments. But this was unheard of. 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 Jon and Jason and Mark and Zach and Austin and Shane and Daryl. They remember Bowe differently. They remember what happened after he left differently. They have different feelings about it. They do not speak with one voice. But, to a man, they said they were gobsmacked when they heard someone was missing.

Sarah Koenig

One of Bowe's friends told me that he was always a meticulous packer. This trip, from Mest to Sharana, was no exception. Bowe's got his wallet and his camera—he always had his camera on him—two small knives that clip onto his belt, plus his utility knife. He's got a notebook—inside are a few poems and journal entries—plus a newspaper clipping about a guy who'd set a record for sailing: 1,000 days or something. Bowe loves boats.

For water, he'd filled the bladder from his camelback—about three liters. He'd grabbed a pack of nuts from his trail mix and some vacuum-packed chicken meat from an MRE. (It stands for meal ready to eat, the soldier's field ration.) 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.

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

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. And that's when it hits him, when he suddenly feels the magnitude of what he's done.

Sarah Koenig

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.

When I picture him standing there, I imagine a free-floating astronaut, no comforting tether attaching him to the mothership. The thought crosses Bowe's mind, should he just go back to the OP? 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.

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

In hopes of mitigating the momentous trouble he now realizes he's in, Bowe figures he'll try arrive back at the FOB with some extra thing, a gift in the form of valuable intel. He knew that on the road from FOB Sharana to OP Mest there were sometimes IEDs. Bowe had heard someplace that the guys who were planting the IEDs were doing it at night. 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.

Sarah Koenig

Up until this point, Bowe says he had been walking in open terrain, between the road and a swell of hills. 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. 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. 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.

Sarah Koenig

By the time the sun was up, Bowe was in open desert with no cover.

That's me, calling the Taliban.

Sarah Koenig

The Taliban's version of Bowe's capture? Next time, on Serial.

Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivvis, and me, in partnership with Mark Boal, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira Glass is our editorial adviser. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research by Kevin Garnett. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, copy editing by Anaheed Alani. Editing help this week from Joel Lovell, Chana Joffe-Walt, and Nancy Updike.

Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, with additional music from Mark Phillips and Fritz Myers, and the show is mixed by Kate Billinski. Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Other Serial staff: Seth Lind, Emily Condon, Elise Bergerson, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks to Steve Sigmund, Chad Hunt, Carl Burton, Rich Orris, Matt Dorfman, and Sara Barrett.

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. This week we've got a 3D map, where you can fly over OP Mest and FOB Sharana. It is very cool. Again, that's serialpodcast.org. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.

Ira Glass

Coming up on the next episode of Serial ...