The first episode of this series is free, but to hear the whole thing, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're already a time subscriber, just link to your account and you're done. About a year and a half ago, clips from this video appeared on every major news broadcast.
They showed the rescue of a guy named Beau 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 that 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.
One or two of the guys lean into 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. But 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.
Then you see Bergdahl again. He's out of the truck now looking up at the sky. His clothes are too big, billowy. 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 in W.B.E.Z. Chicago, it's serial.
One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Canig. Good evening, everyone. Early at the release of American servicemen after five years, in a wartime captivity would be caused for universal celebration, joy, plain and simple.
Pentagon sources tell NBC that Bergdahl vanished under mysterious circumstances. There have been rumors he left his base unarmed after turning against the war. He'll start in both bird off, hero or deserted. And soldiers are engaged in a political smear campaign by raising questions.
Parents of some fallen soldiers say their sons would be alive if Bergdahl had not gone missing from his post. In the old days, the service was shot. The very last thing is just, I'm a prisoner. I want to go home.
Bring me home. Please. Give me home. Bergdahl was rescued on May 31, 2014.
If you follow this story in the news, maybe you expected the usual things would follow. A big welcome home and then a story would come out. We learned 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 Janney, by his side. This morning, I called Bob and Janney Bergdahl and told them that after nearly five years in captivity, their son, Bo, is coming home. Bergdahl's hometown of Haley, Idaho, which for five years had bringbo 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 Bo 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 Haley 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, Bo 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 Bob Bergdahl had been talking to someone for almost a year.
He'd been talking to a filmmaker named Mark Bull. Not Joey, yeah. That's well. Right, you're pretty careful with it.
Yeah, exactly. Like I've noticed him with me, like you don't crack many jokes. No. But you can, you know, I mean, I might not laugh, but you can try.
Yeah, give it a try. If you see an opening, let's see what you got. Mark Bull is a screenwriter and producer. You've probably heard of his movies.
The Hurt Locker is zero dark 30. Mark wanted to make a movie about Bo's story. So a couple of months after Bo came back to the US, Mark managed to contact him and they started talking about everything about the Taliban and motorcycles and 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.
Yeah, they were right. Yeah, they were right. Or the swoosh of Mark sending an email or his dog scuffling around. Hold on one second.
Can you? It's roughly 25 hours of recorded conversations, a lot of it rangy and raw. The rapport is sort of unexpected. Mark swears a lot.
He can be blunt. While Bo, 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 fact of what happened, though he wants those two.
But more he's after the why of what happened, trying to get inside Bo's head to understand how Bo sees the world. And Bo is never monosyllabic or recalcitrant in these conversations. He's trying hard to explain himself. You can hear that Bo 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 the story could keep a person's mind churning. Right now Bo 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 Bo 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 Paschau.
The people handling him for the most part didn't speak English. So for five years, Bo can really talk to anyone. And then here he is, and he calls with Mark, and he's describing things vividly that seem indescribable. At one point they told me that they kind of had you in a really dark room, almost sounded like a basement, like where there was no light.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Bo went missing. Bo's parents and his friends back in Idaho, the military, intelligence analysts, diplomats, and 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 Bo's story, interviewing lots of people at length about Bo 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 roosters' 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 Bo Bergdell 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, 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. It was filmmaker Mark Bull 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 Bo. He has this like, and yet it's not that simple because he says it's good for really, not just really good reasons.
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. Bo Bergdell 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, Bo 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 do you do it?
Why do you leave his platoon? That's where Mark started to. Well, give me the 30 second version first. This is from Mark's first tape phone call with Bo.
You know what that's one. What is? Dust One stands for duty status whereabouts unknown. It's the Army's version of man overboard.
Bo says what he was trying to do was to cause a dust one, which already sets him apart. Because it means Bo 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 walk about. Instead, slow simmering and methodical, Bo formulated a plan. He would create a crisis, a dust one, in order to call attention to another crisis.
Bo says he had serious concerns, concerns that began back in basic training in which persisted throughout his deployment in Afghanistan regarding bad leadership within his unit. This is a big point of conflict, maybe the big point of conflict in Bo's story. The question generally of Bo's true motives for leading his post. 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 Bo 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 Bo himself. So for now, I'm going to jump over that and just give you the bare bones of what Bo 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. Of course, don't worry. Bo's solution is the dust one. At the time, Bo was at a tiny outpost known as OP-MEST.
MEST was named in the town right across the road from the OP. A few thousand people lived there. MEST was in Pateka Province in eastern Afghanistan, right near the Pakistan border. Next to the town, the soldiers set up a 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 Chirana, Fob-Shirana, where there's relative comfort. Bed's internet, Burger King, basketball courts. The other road leads to the Pakistan border.
The earth air is this fine, fine dirt. The soldiers I talked to called it Moon Dust. The one time I saw MEST, and this would have been a couple days before Bird Dog disappeared, I looked at it and I got chills that, wow, that place sucks. 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. It was four trucks surrounded by sea wire, crammed up in a little runoff ditch. So I gave me the willies just to see in the place. OP-MEST is probably the worst place, humanly imaginable.
That's John Thurman. John was in the same company as Bo. Known as Blackfoot Company, different platoon. Like other soldiers I talked to, John remembered MEST mostly for what it lacked.
Trees, plumbing, electricity, water, shade. But OP-MEST was built on the side of a hill, and on top of the hill there was a cemetery. And it's a granite. This place is spooky from the get-go.
And the quality of life was extremely low. Everybody pretty much got some sort of GI illness while we were out there just because we couldn't keep things clean enough. We didn't have the resources. But what was the dirty, just dust and...
Dust flies? Dust flies, the... Flies definitely the open toilets, the burn pit. A burn pit which we call the Pit of Hell.
This is Shane Cross, who was a friend of Bo's at the time, same platoon. The Pit of Hell was this large, whole day dug, and they threw the trash in there and burn it. We called the Pit of Hell because we started it and it never went out and it just burned continuously all through the night and days. Different from...
Did you have to burn your shit for lack of a better word? Yes, burn good old... That seems like that would be the Pit of Hell more than this, like the regular garbage deal. You did that right next to the Pit of Hell, so it was all connected.
We took an empty Tesco, which Tesco is like a large basket, you filled a dirt, like 8 feet tall kind of thing. We took an empty one of those and made a little room and you had the little bucket that everyone should in. Then we'll mix that with some fuel and someone's job is to stand there with a stick and stir it as it burned. No.
As you're stirring it, sometimes if you had a melrodia, a large wooden stick, like a one by one, you know, it would... Your stick eventually burns down too and so you're getting closer and closer. Who was the job would it be to do the stirring? Did you have to draw straws for the stirring?
Or did you just take turns? Two hundred of privates, NCOs that always pick one of us and usually you could rely on them picking the private they don't like. Bose 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 US called one of them root Audi and the other root Dodge, were used as supply routes for Taliban fighters and their weapons and IEDs and improvised explosive devices.
They were the big threat in Afghanistan. Bose platoon leaders said there was an IED hotspot about a thousand meters out along root Audi. The Afghan National Police had their own little outpost for the rep of the Hill there as well. The American soldiers had strung all this concertino 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 mess 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. Bose platoon would go to the OP for three or four or five days at a stretch, sometimes doing patrols into mess or the other nearby town, Malok, or pulling around the clock guard duty, either from the trucks or from the hilltop up near the cemetery, where they dug out a small foxhole bunker.
There were long, long stretches of boring, of wondering what the hell they were doing there. All the soldiers I talked to said they just hated being at mist. The OP was about 20 miles southwest of Fob-Shirana. So Bose's idea was that he'd sneak away from mist, which Bose 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 Shirana in maybe 24 hours or so. Here's Bose again. TCP, and a few days later after cuss one up he reappeared that CIA has alerted. Which means that when he reappears, it'll be such a big deal, it'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. Weren't you afraid they were going to throw you in with a jail or whatever? And then how long did you figure you'd stay in there? Nasi-Mento and Ko were guys in Bose platoon.
So, Gussie moved, dude. Well, yeah, that's not mutually exclusive. Bo makes preparations. Back at the Fob for a spell, he goes to the Shirana 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. They're a shop run by the locals at the Fob. They call it the Haji Shop.
They sell DVDs and clothes. Bo buys a local outfit, a sort of robe. Yeah, Oliver. He also took out $300 from his bank account in US and F.
Gany money, just in case he'd need to bribe someone. At the end of June, 2009, Bose 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 Bo'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, Bo 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 wrong-headedness 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 Bo 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.
It was kind of cruel. Like a super soldier, you mean? A character or whatever, a character. Yeah.
You know what that? Why not just wait and see if you got the opportunity to prove that like on a mission, you know, because you hadn't even been there that long. Like why not wait a couple months and see if you got a chance to prove yourself in a, you know, some kind of tactical engagement. Because it was a combination of what?
Right, right, right. And I just, I was going to say two words with one son. On the morning of June 30th, 2009, Bo 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.
Bo was supposed to take over from Austin Landford. But Landford comes to the end of his shift, no Bo. 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 Bo's little tent, which is right near the MRAP, to wake him up for duty.
Then Landford goes back up in the truck, still no Bo. So I went back down and then opened his tent and he wasn't in there. So I was like, okay, well, he probably went to the bathroom or something. Landford shouts to a guy headed to the toilet, says, see if Burgdoll's in there.
Guy comes back, nope. Then Landford remembers that Bo had a reputation for sometimes hanging out with the Afghan National Police guys, who also had an outpost up on the hill. So that was my next thought was he might be up there. So I radioed up to the OP, said, hey, it's Burgdoll there.
They said, no, Burgdoll's not up here. Someone alerts Shane Cross since he's buddies with Bo, and now Shane starts looking. So I got up and I said, yeah, I'll get him. I looked around and poked around from a little bit, and some of the other trucks were a few people were awake and tried asking them, hey, where's Bo?
And I said, I don't know, I don't know. And after I checked in with my trucks, I started to get concerned. And that's when I, back I woke up PL. And I told him what had happened.
I knew he was gone. Who was the PL? Lieutenant Billings. 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 typed out a message to his company commander back at Toronto 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 dust on in motion, just as Beauhead planned. The news starts circulating at the OP, obviously, then back at the FOB, up the chain of command, and then all over Afghanistan.
Both fellow soldiers immediately tried to piece together what had happened. Here's Austin Landford, the guy who Beau was supposed to relieve from guard duty. I knew in my mind that nobody came in and took him. Because they would have either been seen, they wouldn't have been able to get through the Constantino wire.
He would have fought back. Like, I didn't imagine him being taken as an option. And he left behind all his sensitive items and a nice neat little pot. That's Mark McCrory.
A serial numbered gear that would be a problem. His laser for his weapon, his night optics, stuff like that. A big problem if it went missing. He left it in a nice neat little pile with a note.
Of course mixed in with the facts, there was just a ton of conjecture. For instance, there's actually no evidence Beau left a note, and Beau himself says he didn't leave one. So it's not clear to me where that detail came from. Other people said Beau had been acting too cozy with the Afghan National Police guys.
The way that he'd been talking to the locals and the way that he'd been showing up late to guard shifts, because he was busy talking to the locals. That's Josh Quarter. Here's Daryl Hansen. His guesses were expansive.
We're like, man, is he like CIA or what? I mean, is he like this crazy like mole? Right. So like what was the discussion?
Yeah, like what were you guys thinking? We didn't have to, we were just thinking like, I mean, those are the things like it was either like, this guy's a complete lunatic or is he like CIA? Like we were trying to like, we couldn't figure it out, you know? 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 John and Jason and Mark and Zack and Austin and Shane and Daryl. They remember Bo 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. And that was like, this has got to be a drill. Like holy crap, like this is just like what?
Like what? You know, what? It's just the craziest thing that could ever happen. Because it was so ludicrous at the time to think about it.
Like what do you mean? Because nobody walks off. Nobody walks off a fob or a, you know, not even a fob, a combat outpost. Where are you going to go?
And then it's not like you can go hide out, you know, at the mall or something. I mean, there is no where but Taliban. One of Bo's friends told me that he was always a meticulous packer. This trip from mess to Sharana was no exception.
Bo's got his wallet and his camera. He always got his camera on him. Two small knives that clip onto his belt plus his utility knife. He's got a notebook inside or a few columns in journal entries plus a newspaper clipping about a guy who'd set a record for sailing a thousand days or something.
Bo loves boats. For water, he filled a bladder from his Camelback about three leaders. He'd grab the pack of nuts from his trail mix and some vacuum packed chicken meat from an MRE that stands for meal ready to eat, the soldiers' field ration. And he had his compass.
His Afghan clothing he'd shoved into his pocket. He figured he wouldn't eat it until the sun rose. Sometime after midnight on June 30th, Bo 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. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Not really. 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 Bo'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, Bo figures he's just got a 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, Bo figures he'll try to arrive back at the fob with some extra thing, a gift, in the form of valuable intel. He knew that on the road from Fobshrana to OP, there were some kind of IDs.
Bo had heard someplace that the guys who were planting the IDs were doing it at night. So he decides he'll make like a special forces guy and try to catch someone planting an ID or about to plant an ID. He'll look for flashlights bobbing up and down, listen for the crackle of radios. Up until this point, Bo says he'd been walking an 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 that 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 straighten himself out and gotten out of the hills, he'd lost valuable time.
By the time the sun was up, Bo was an open desert with no cover. And what happened, some dudes drove up and just snagged you or what? Yeah, he was walking on. But they said you fought like crazy.
So did they basically just tie your hands and toss you on the back of one of the bikes or something or what? Hello? Hello? This is Sarah.
That's me calling the Taliban. Hello? Is that Mooji Kinkaraman? Mooji Kinkaraman?
Mooji Kinkaraman? Mooji Kinkaraman? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You wanted to put on a credit to Julia?
Yes, thank you very much. How are you doing? The Taliban's version of Bo's Capture? Next time on Serial.
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This week we've got a 3D map where you can fly over OP-Mest and Fob-Shirana. It is very cool. Again, that's SerialPodcast.org. This is Sarah Koenig, host of the Serial Podcast.
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You can do it through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. Coming up on the next episode of Serial. And what are we going to do with him?
Are we going to kill him, to be hit him? I mean, literally, we were charging into these towns, just running out of our trucks. OK, now we're going to fly you into this Bedwind Village, and you're going to check all the women's faces to make sure that they're not hiding him in women's clothing. The team went in and looked up and saw the ceiling lined with C4.
He's asking about Kabul, or asking about police. And we told him that we are police. What's the name? My name is Voberko.
Holy...