Ira Glass

Previously, on Serial...

Sarah Koenig

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

If I were a soldier with some pride, with principles, and I had to come up with a reason for walking off into Afghanistan, for causing a crisis on so many levels, I might engineer something like Bowe's explanation—that I was sacrificing myself for the team because I thought they were in danger. It's a way to save face, to say, my intentions were noble and good.

Over the months of reporting this story, I have wondered about this—whether Bowe was really telling the truth about why he left his platoon, or if he was telling the version he could live with. Mark and I have also debated this, of course. Once when we were talking, Mark took the microphone and started to interview me.

Remember the kuchi tent? The Taliban said they first captured Bowe when he wandered into a kuchi tent or near a kuchi tent, which wasn't part of Bowe's telling at all. It made me think if Bowe had walked into a kuchi tent, maybe he wasn't really headed to FOB Sharana to tell someone about leadership problems. Maybe he was just trying to run away, and looking for help.

Mark and I had that conversation back in September. I've since moved on from the kuchi tent. I don't think it's verifiable, or that much of a discrepancy with Bowe's version of what happened, actually. So I let it go. But all this is to say I can understand why some of the people Bowe served with, when I first talked to them, they didn't buy Bowe's story. They thought maybe he concocted it in hindsight.

When I put it to one of Bowe's platoon mates, Shane Cross, he said, quote, "He had some years to work on that," unquote.

There's a litany of reasons why someone could be skeptical of Bowe's explanation. First, his premise: that leadership was dangerously bad. For the most part, the soldiers we talked to didn't agree. In fact, most of them said they actually loved some of their leaders, thought they were great. And Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker, the battalion commander Bowe responded to so negatively—again, overall, they didn't think he was putting them in situations that were crazy risky or that they couldn't handle.

Then, the notion that Bowe would have to do something so dramatic to be listened to—also not true, they said.

Sarah Koenig

That's Mark McCrorie. There's an open-door policy that allows you to approach any officer at all with a problem—doesn't have to be in your chain of command. Though whether an officer would have taken Bowe seriously, I have to say, is doubtful, and Bowe knew that.

A big one I heard from quite a few people was that Bowe either was in cahoots with local Afghans or even wanting to contact the Taliban. Here's Daryl Hansen and Jon Thurman.

Sarah Koenig

A lot of people pointed out that Bowe hung out with the Afghan police, who were also stationed at the outpost at Mest. He had tea with them, ate meals with them. Other people did, too.

Sarah Koenig

But some people said Bowe was there more often, seemed more interested in them than other people did. Josh Korder said that Bowe was once late for a guard shift, and he had to go looking for him. And he found him having tea with the Afghans.

Then, the day Bowe went missing, Josh says he heard that two of the ANP guys were also unaccounted for. Two Afghan police were missing as well.

Sarah Koenig

Maybe Bowe had made a deal with these ANP guys, and someone betrayed him or sold him out to the Taliban. I tried to check this intel. I called the former governor of Paktika Province in Afghanistan, a guy who'd worked pretty closely with the leaders in Bowe's battalion, but he wouldn't talk to me on a cell phone. He did invite me to visit in person, which was very nice, but not immediately helpful.

I did not see anything about the missing cops in the WikiLeaks reports or in General Dahl's investigation. The executive officer of Bowe's battalion told me he'd heard this rumor, too, about some missing Afghans, but he did not know if anything came of it.

Sami Yousafzai, the Afghan reporter, asked around about it as well. He told us there was a report of some missing Afghan police, but it was later discredited.

Mark had heard this rumor, too. He asked Bowe about it.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe said the reason he hung out with the ANP sometimes was because that was part of the mission: build a rapport in case they ever ended up in a firefight together. He was trying to do COIN. He says that's also why he tried to learn a little Pashto, which some soldiers also said made them suspicious.

The evidence people point to most often, though, to support the idea that Bowe was simply deserting, that he had no higher purpose, was that he had talked about doing exactly that: taking off. Several people told General Dahl they'd heard Bowe say things about walking into the mountains of Pakistan or heading to India. He told one person something like this even before he deployed, while he was still in Alaska. Here's Chris Ingalls, probably Bowe's closest friend in the platoon.

Sarah Koenig

Shane Cross said he'd had a conversation with Bowe the night before he left the OP. It was evening. Some of the guys were sitting around in the shade of a truck, just talking. And the topic came up, how would you fake your death?

Sarah Koenig

Austin Lanford was there, too. And this was the first time he'd ever talked to Bowe, the night before he left the OP. And Austin remembers the conversation about the same way Shane does.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe also asked about a weapon. He was issued a SAW, a big heavy machine gun. Shane carried a pistol, an M9.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe didn't take a gun with him when he left. Looking back on it now, though, Shane says it's like if an ice cream truck drove by, and somebody said, "Hey, I'd like some ice cream." And then the next thing you know, the person's gone. You're gonna figure they went after the ice cream truck.

For his part, Austin was reluctant to tell me about this conversation, because, obviously, he knows how it sounds.

Sarah Koenig

In other words, wanderlusty comments like this, maybe they didn't seem all that strange. So many people told me fear plus stress plus boredom plus war zone means...

Sarah Koenig

Another platoon mate, Jason Fry, told me he wrote letters to a friend when he was in Afghanistan. And he got them back years later. And when he went through them, he thought, What was I thinking? Who was I? Here's Mark McCrorie.

General Dahl considered all the evidence pointing to the idea that Bowe was deserting permanently. He heard about the weird comments, about the intel. And he concluded Bowe was telling the truth. Bowe's, quote, "stated motive was well-meaning in his mind," Dahl wrote. "Ironically, the basis for his stated motive was incorrect," unquote.

Mark spent about a year thinking it through. And he also ended up believing Bowe, for lots of reasons—partly just for practical reasons. For instance, Bowe was such a careful planner. He was an outdoor kid who'd grown up in the mountains. If he intended to just disappear or permanently desert, why wouldn't he bring more food, more water?

Bowe sent his computer and some other stuff home in a box before he left the OP, which some people see as evidence he was leaving for good. Mark sees it as the opposite.

Sarah Koenig

But details like this—that's ultimately not what convinced Mark. He's logged something like 25 hours of taped conversations with Bowe, and many more hours of conversations not on tape.

Sarah Koenig

So how does it make sense if you're Bowe Bergdahl? When Bowe finally sat down for an interview with General Dahl, he didn't just go back pre-deployment to explain what happened once he got to Afghanistan. He went all the way back—to home, to Idaho, to his childhood there.

He'd done a lot of thinking while he was locked up in that cage with the Taliban.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe sorted through his upbringing and found it wanting.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe grew up on 40 acres, down a dirt road in a valley, outside the small town of Hailey. His father worked at UPS, and his mother homeschooled him and his older sister. Bowe had a hard time with the school work. He couldn't read very well then. He couldn't take in what was on the page. And so he wasn't good at his work, or he wouldn't do it. And he says he'd get punished for that, and for other things, in a way that he says felt unpredictable to him.

Bowe says he was scared all the time of getting in trouble, and that he didn't have the greatest relationship with his parents. His dad is a strong personality.

Sarah Koenig

It's just...complicated. Bowe's solution was the same one teenagers have used for centuries. Get out of the house.

Sarah Koenig

When he was about 15, Bowe fell in with a family that was pretty different from the one he'd grown up with. Someone he met through his job convinced him to take fencing classes at a little performing arts school in Ketchum, the next town over from Hailey.

Kim Harrison—she's the one from episode five who told the story about contacting Interpol—Kim was helping run the school. Her son also took fencing classes there. And her daughter Kayla took ballet. Soon, Bowe was around all the time.

Sarah Koenig

That's Kayla. A few people told me, if you want to know about Bowe, talk to Kayla. She understands him. Kayla says with her, Bowe was watchful and serious and very sweet.

Sarah Koenig

The Harrisons opened up a tea place in Ketchum, which is a ski town. The tea bar was called Strega, and they served food and had a little boutique and held movie nights or hosted performances. It was a hangout, basically. Kayla and her brother worked there. They were both homeschooled, too. And Bowe worked there.

Sarah Koenig

I have heard her mom say this. In fact, all the friends I spoke to from that circle say the same thing: that he wanted to protect people. Ketchum was kind of far from Bowe's house. So Bowe began staying at the Harrisons' for stretches. For a while, he even slept at Strega.

Kim says, especially when he was younger, it was like Bowe was studying their family to see how they operated—how they got along, how they argued, what action would lead to reaction. Other people wandered into Strega, began working there, and also became part of the family. There was Chad and Nick. All these people love Bowe. They talk about how unusual he is, how smart, how playful, how creative, and how totally annoying he could be. He might argue with you unrelentingly just to see how far he could push. Or he'd tape his mouth shut for a couple days to see what would happen.

Bowe was a teenager who'd never been to school. And now, with the Strega crowd, he was testing out ideas, testing out behaviors. And maybe more than most people, he worked on improving himself, as if he were in training. His friends said it was sometimes a little overboard. He might punch trees or bricks to toughen up his hands. He wanted to get better at things, at reading or dancing or writing. He wrote stories. Mostly, though, he was trying to figure himself out.

Sarah Koenig

Nick was about five years older than Bowe. He also worked at Strega. He and Bowe would talk and talk, for hours sometimes. Nick says it wasn't so much that Bowe was searching for something concrete, like a profession. He was wrestling with the big existential questions.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe wasn't gonna take anyone else's word for it, about what was right, what was moral. He was gonna forge his own code. And Kayla says the one he ended up adopting for himself, it was strict, and it was uncompromising.

Sarah Koenig

During his late teens, early 20s, Bowe would work for a while in Idaho, and then take off somewhere for a job or a trip, then come back, then go off again. Kim, Kayla's mom, says Bowe had a hunger, and an urgency about him—to see the world, to gain experience. He wanted adventure. He loved boats. He loved water. He went off salmon fishing in Alaska, but he didn't like that too much.

He went down south to work at a military training camp, a place where special-forces guys would go for a week, an experience that taught Bowe he'd rather be doing what they were doing than what he was doing.

Sarah Koenig

So he left. He went to Florida to complete a charter boat course. At some point, he left for France to join the French Foreign Legion, which Kim says she knows he did arrive in France. She's just not completely sure what happened after that. Bowe didn't really talk much about it.

Sarah Koenig

He trained on his bike—Nick said Bowe wore a lot of Spandex in those days—for a cycling trip down the West Coast, which, like the Foreign Legion, didn't pan out. A few days in, he got hit by an RV. And he was OK, but his bike was ruined. So he came back to Ketchum and started in on the next idea.

Eventually, the next idea became the military, which wasn't a huge surprise to his friends. Bowe's brother-in-law was in the navy. And Bowe had that strong protector quality—a romantic version of it, to be sure. He wanted to be invisible, Kayla said, someone who'd be unnoticed in the shadows, looking out for the innocent, and swooping in when they needed him.

And they knew Bowe wanted to put himself in situations that would require courage and grit, that would test his mettle, so that he could come out the other side and know what kind of man he was. So they understood it, which is not the same as thinking it was a good idea.

Sarah Koenig

That's Kim, who, it should be noted, is a pacifist to begin with.

Sarah Koenig

For all the above reasons—his romantic expectations, his rigid code of conduct, his judgmentalness—she worried he wouldn't be able to just suck it up, join the crowd, follow orders.

Sarah Koenig

So he did. He joined the coast guard. In January of 2006, Bowe went to Cape May, New Jersey, and started training. He was 19. It lasted only a few weeks.

Sarah Koenig

One day, out of the blue, Bowe shows up at Strega, the tea bar. He's back. They're all thrilled to see him, and also confused. What happened? Why are you back? He told them something about a psych discharge, which he said he pretty much faked. But Kim and the others, they didn't really believe him.

According to General Dahl's investigation, what happened is that on Bowe's third week of training, he was found on the floor with blood on his hands and face. It wasn't serious. It was a nosebleed. Bowe says now he doesn't remember how he ended up on the floor, but that he was told later he was in a fetal position and shaking and crying.

He was taken to the hospital. He told the intake people there he felt overwhelmed. He spent the next day there, where a psychiatrist assessed him and, according to Dahl's report, quote, "observed that PFC Bergdahl's mental status is significant for situational anxiety," unquote. And he recommended discharging him, noting he would need to receive stress management counseling and have, quote, "clearance by a psychiatrist prior to reenlistment," unquote.

So Bowe gets disqualified for continued service in the coast guard because of a diagnosis of adjustment disorder with depression. And he goes back to Idaho.

Sarah Koenig

Because of the way that Bowe had been what's called separated from the coast guard, there was a code in his military record indicating he'd need a waiver if he ever wanted to reenlist. In other words, the army would have to waive its usual standards to let Bowe in.

And May 2008, when Bowe signed up, happened to be a good time to get a waiver. There'd been a surge in Iraq. There'd be another one coming in Afghanistan. The army was hurting for recruits, easing up on restrictions, such as criminal records, that might have disqualified people in the past.

To give you a sense, in 2001, about 4 percent of army recruits got waivers. By 2007, it was 20 percent. 2008, the year Bowe enlisted, it was about 17 percent.

Because his coast guard discharge was labeled uncharacterized, it seems pretty much all Bowe had to do to get a waiver was write a paragraph explaining to the Boise recruiter why he'd been separated from the coast guard.

So he said he'd had a hard time adapting to change, didn't feel prepared to be on his own, had some family stuff going on—all true. The statement, which was typed up by the recruiter as he was speaking with Bowe, says, quote, "I have matured and know that I am prepared to go into the army. Please do not allow my past record to prevent me from coming into the army," unquote.

A week later, Bowe also showed the recruiter his DoD medical history form. But apparently it didn't include any mention of his panic attack or his hospitalization or the doctor's note saying he needed clearance by a psychiatrist prior to reenlistment.

And Bowe didn't mention this note to the army recruiter, either. He says he didn't even know about it. So evidently, that note was never seen by the army. It's not clear, in fact, if anyone ever took notice of it apart from the doctor who wrote it.

So, spring of 2008, Bowe is accepted into the army. This time, he hadn't told anyone in advance.

Sarah Koenig

Setting aside the question of whether it was a good idea for Bowe to join the army, should the army have let Bowe in? Next time, on Serial, which, actually, we will release tomorrow. I know—you weren't expecting that. It's part two of this episode.

Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas, and me, in partnership with Mark Boal, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research by Kevin Garnett, fact checking by Michelle Harris, copyediting by Anaheed Alani. Emily Condon is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Myers, and Mark Phillips. The show is mixed by Kate Bilinski.

Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Other Serial staff: Seth Lind, Elise Bergerson, and Kimberly Henderson.

Special thanks this week to Joey Palacios, Capt. Nicole Eldridge, Heather Hansen and Ben Mannion. And a big thank you to Jonathan Menjivar and Robyn Semien—our great colleagues at This American Life, for helping us out so much this week and last week. Thanks you guys so much.

Our website is serialpodcast.org, where this week, you can find a chart about army recruits and waivers, which gives a really good picture of the surges in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 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—