Serial Season 2: Bowe Bergdahl

[SteelCurtain]

So now that Season 2 is finished, has anyone's opinion changed?

What do you think about this issue? Should he be further punished?

It's certainly a lot more complicated than I thought. I'm still digesting this last episode with it's typical Serial flavor of not really coming to any concrete conclusions.

[Clueless Morgan]

Oh good, I've been waiting for it to end so I can binge it will report back when done...

[SteelCurtain]

That means I have to wait a whole 11 hours...

[thesummerqueen]

I think he should be punished for walking off. I don't know what that punishment should be, because he was clearly punished quite enough for five years, but he should be penalized somehow.

I think the narrator was right though - punishment and blame are two different things, and I think the system failed the fuck out of him. But on the other side, dude has some serious aggrandizement issues.

[SteelCurtain]

I think he should be punished for walking off. I don't know what that punishment should be, because he was clearly punished quite enough for five years, but he should be penalized somehow.

I think the narrator was right though - punishment and blame are two different things, and I think the system failed the fuck out of him. But on the other side, dude has some serious aggrandizement issues.

I agree. I don't think he shouldn't be courts martialed. I just don't know that any kind of justice is being served by sending him to prison for any length of time.

The thing is, the Army failed so much in this. The wartime mantra of loosening enlistment restrictions during a "time of war" is dumb. The side effects of training effectively little boys to be killing machines is that aggrandizement. These kids are taught to de-humanize their enemies, in order for there to be no hesitation when it is time to kill. This is necessary in combat, but in this situation of urban warfare, it is traumatizing as fuck for these kids' brains when not everyone in the battle space is your enemy, like it was in most previous wars. So you put Bowe out there, a person who has already shown a serious mental episode under pressure, and a person that made no secrets about how he wanted to be this Platonic version of the ultimate soldier into this muddy situation where there seem to be conflicting right answers, and the outcome is a person who thinks they can take the welfare of the entire Army into their own hands by manufacturing a Dust 1.

I think he made a terrible, stupid, fucking selfish decision. I also think there were some not unimportant factors that put him in a place where he could make that decision.

I also think the Rose Garden ceremony was a colossal fuck up of the highest magnitude.

[thesummerqueen]

It sounded like that aggrandizement was already there. I don't know if you saw the discussion that went down some weeks ago on my wall - it sounded like he 1) came out of a social setting that set him back as far as functioning like a 'normal' human and 2) he already displayed some tendencies that should have gotten counseling in younger years.

I don't know. I definitely 'blame' the military and our military loving culture for a lot of this, but I don't want him to get off for having delusions of grandeur.

[SteelCurtain]

The problem is that those delusions of grandeur are par for the course, it is taught to these kids. They are all special, all part of the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen. They are brothers, occupying a country for which they are given astonishingly little cultural training. The culture is that every person is a "Haji" or a "raghead" and the military culture and bravado is cultivated with care.

I worked with a lot of US Marines when I was in the Amphib Navy. As a junior officer on an Amphibious ship, often we'd take Marines and their vehicles directly from Iraq back to San Diego. One of my shore tour duties was to run PTSD groups for these guys and girls. I sent countless pleas up the Marine Chain of Command for these people to be de-militarized in some way when they come back from theater. It is insane (but completely understandable) some of the jokes they tell and some of the attitudes they carry about their experiences.

I say all this to say that if you did an in depth background story on nearly every junior enlisted or NCO soldier in the Army, you will find stories just like Bowe's. I think his snap threshold was much lower, and that was what we saw during the Coast Guard boot camp---and the exact reason he shouldn't have been allowed to enlist in the first place.

I don't think there's any way for Bowe Bergdahl to "get off" at this point. Should he be charged with desertion for leaving his post? Maybe. But---time served, right? I just don't think any justice will be served by sending the guy to prison.