Twenty
minutes after Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his remote Army
outpost in Afghanistan in the middle of a summer night, carrying little
more than vacuum-packed chicken, knives, water and a compass, he began
to realize just how dire his predicament was.
“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head,’ ” Sergant Bergdahl said.
“Suddenly,
it really starts to sink in that I really did something bad,” he
continued. “Or, not bad, but I really did something serious.”
Sergeant
Bergdahl recounted his experience publicly for the first time in the
premiere episode of the second season of the podcast “Serial,”
which was released at 6 a.m. Thursday. In interviews with the
screenwriter Mark Boal, he explained in his own words why he had left
his base in June 2009, an action that prompted a manhunt involving
thousands of troops and led him to spend nearly five years in brutal
captivity under the Taliban.
His odyssey ended in May 2014, when the Obama administration swapped him for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a deal that was heavily criticized by Republicans.
The
prisoner exchange soon set off a charged political debate over whether
Sergeant Bergdahl was a traitor who had endangered his comrades or a
confused soldier who had wanted to warn senior commanders about
leadership problems in his platoon. Senator John McCain, Republican of
Arizona and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said two months ago that Sergeant Bergdahl was “clearly a deserter.” And on Thursday, House Republicans made public a report portraying the trade as reckless and illegal.
Sergeant Bergdahl is awaiting a ruling on whether his case will go before a court-martial.
By
agreeing to let “Serial” use his interviews with Mr. Boal, who was
conducting research for a movie he plans to make, Sergeant Bergdahl will
have a chance to make his case to a wide audience.
“As
you can imagine, he’s been the subject of a lot of sound-bite
coverage,” Mr. Boal, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and producer,
said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “He has a definite point of
view about hit-and-run TV reporting, and so this was the opposite of
that.”
The
high-profile topic is a significant departure from the show’s
celebrated first season, in which the narrator, Sarah Koenig, plucked a
story about a murder in a Baltimore suburb out of obscurity. She spent
many hours interviewing Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the crime in
2000.
“Serial”
was downloaded more than 100 million times and earned a Peabody Award.
It was widely viewed as an influence in a Maryland court’s decision to grant Mr. Syed a hearing to introduce new evidence, an important step toward potentially getting a new trial.
In
the first episode of the new season, Ms. Koenig said that as Sergeant
Bergdahl stood, scared, in the open Afghan terrain, he briefly
contemplated returning to his outpost, but decided against it.
“After
all, the guys there are watching for people coming toward them, and
they’re manning big machine guns,” she said. “He might get shot.”
Instead,
Sergeant Bergdahl told Mr. Boal, he altered his initial plan, which was
to trek 18 miles to a larger military base to raise concerns about
problems in his unit. Now, he said, he would also track Taliban
insurgents placing improvised explosive devices in the road and deliver
that information to his superiors.
“When
I got back to the F.O.B., you know, they could say, ‘You left your
position,’ ” he said, referring to his forward operating base. “But I
could say: ‘Well, I also got this information. So, what are you going to
do?’ ” That would have been a “bonus point,” he added, to mitigate “the
hurricane of wrath that was going to hit me.”
As
the new season begins, Sergeant Bergdahl’s case has reached a critical
juncture: At Fort Bragg, N.C., Gen. Robert B. Abrams is expected to
decide soon what charges he should face.
Army
prosecutors initially accused him of desertion (a potential five-year
sentence) and endangering troops who searched for him (a potential life
sentence). But the Army’s investigator, Lt. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, testified
at a preliminary hearing in September that prison time would be
“inappropriate” and that Sergeant Bergdahl was truthful and sincere —
while also suggesting he was delusional. The hearing’s presiding
officer, too, has recommended that he not be subject to jail time or punitive discharge, according to defense lawyers.
On
the first podcast, Sergeant Bergdahl explained his departure from his
base just as General Dahl said he had during the investigation: He
wanted to create a crisis in order to get an audience with high-level
commanders, so he could describe what he saw as leadership problems that
could endanger troops.
But
the sergeant also said he had wanted to demonstrate that he was a
stellar soldier. “I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying to prove
to the world, to anybody who used to know me, that I was capable of
being that person,” he said, adding that in some sense he wanted to
emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the espionage movie character.
Sergeant
Bergdahl’s chief defense lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, said Wednesday: “We
have asked from the beginning that everyone withhold judgment on
Sergeant Bergdahl’s case until they know the facts. The ‘Serial’
podcast, like the preliminary hearing conducted in September, is a step
in the right direction.”
The
program’s producers were reluctant to discuss future episodes or to say
how many there would be. “Do we have a ‘Jinx’ moment or something like
that?” Julie Snyder, an executive producer, said, referring to the
dramatic conclusion of the HBO documentary series “The Jinx,” in which
the real estate scion Robert A. Durst may have confessed to murder. “No, we’re not holding back on something that the world needs to know.”
The
producers declined to comment on whether they had General Dahl’s
investigative report, which the Army refuses to release despite efforts
by Mr. Fidell and some news organizations, including The New York Times,
to make it public.
Mr.
Boal, the writer of “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” said he
had begun speaking to Sergeant Bergdahl a few months after the sergeant
returned to the United States. Mr. Boal planned to make a movie about
him.
Sergeant
Bergdahl was initially skeptical of Mr. Boal’s Hollywood connection and
was not familiar with his movie work, Mr. Boal said. But after speaking
for a couple of months, the two grew more comfortable with each other,
and Mr. Boal began recording their conversations for “research
purposes.” He recorded 25 hours.
“There was never any intention for the tapes being public,” Mr. Boal said.
This year, though, Mr. Boal and Hugo Lindgren, the president of Page 1,
a movie and television production company, realized they had a trove of
great material in the tapes. Mr. Lindgren, a former editor at The
Times, was looking for advice and took them to Ms. Snyder so she could
offer an “honest opinion if this stuff was good as audio,” he said.
Mr. Lindgren said he did not anticipate that the tapes would become part of the “Serial” podcast.
Ms.
Snyder and Ms. Koenig had already begun reporting for a second season.
But that story was going to take time — they declined to discuss what it
was about — so they listened to the tapes and were intrigued. Ms.
Koenig said she was initially a “very uneducated consumer of this story.
But when I went back and read all the reporting, I was like, ‘Oh my
God.’ ”
Once
they were able to get a handle on their own reporting needs, they
became confident that the Bergdahl story would work for the second
season.
Mr.
Boal asked Sergeant Bergdahl for permission; he agreed after listening
to the first season of “Serial” at Mr. Boal’s request.
Sergeant
Bergdahl was interested, Mr. Boal said, that he could tell his side of
the story over multiple episodes. (Ms. Koenig said the season would be
“eight to 10-ish” installments but cautioned that this could change.)
Listeners
familiar with “Serial” will find that its catchy theme song has been
modified (“We wanted to change it because the theme the first year
really belonged to that story,” Ms. Snyder said), and that MailChimp, a
sponsor last season that was made semi-famous by its quirky ad
insertion, will return, along with a few others. “We didn’t make much ad
revenue off the last season,” Ms. Snyder said.
She
said future episodes would be about more than just Sergeant Bergdahl
and would also shed light on unanswered questions like whether his
Taliban captors quickly spirited him over the border into the Pakistani
frontier, where they had a haven.
“Exactly
how long did the search last? What were the consequences of the search?
Was this all a search in the name of Bowe? Was this top cover for stuff
that they wanted to be doing, but they already knew Bowe was in
Pakistan anyway?” she said. “All of that is super interesting, and we
definitely are heading down that path.”
Correction: December 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of sponsors that “Serial” had in its first season. The podcast had multiple sponsors; MailChimp was not the sole one.
end quote from:
'Serial' Season 2 Lets Bowe Bergdahl Tell His Side of Afghan Story
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of sponsors that “Serial” had in its first season. The podcast had multiple sponsors; MailChimp was not the sole one.
end quote from:
'Serial' Season 2 Lets Bowe Bergdahl Tell His Side of Afghan Story
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