Previously, on Serial. We're like, man, is he like CIA or what? He looked at us and then he jumped behind our bike. We thought he's drunk.
They were just for the mission to do it. And it quickly became very apparent to us that the Taliban knew... This is fucking bullshit. He's in Pakistan.
From This American Life in W.B.E. Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Kanek.
Right after Beau Bergdalfers went missing from his outpost in Afghanistan, word came down that the higher-ups wanted someone from Bose Platoon, second Platoon Blackfoot Company, to record a message to Beau that they play on local radio. They wanted it to be a voice-boe would recognize. So they chose a guy Beau was friends with, a guy from Louisiana. And he has a very thick Louisiana accent.
So... so basically, he went up there and I guess they didn't like it. So they came down and they got me. That's Josh Quarter, originally from Pennsylvania.
He didn't want to make a message to Beau. He says he felt a little disloyal to his platoon, calling out to the guy who was causing them such turmoil. But they told me, they brought me up there too, officers brought me up there, and they put a piece of paper in front of me, which is a script, and said, read this. What was a script?
It was like, it was kind of cheesy too. It was like, hey Beau, this is Josh. We really miss you. We just want you to come back.
We hope you're safe. We hope everything's going okay. So come back Beau. I kept thinking later on that for the entire five years maybe they played the same thing.
I was like, wonder how long my voice has been going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Thailand Beau would come home. Safe to say, Beau never heard the message. Also safe to say, Beau was trying really hard to come home.
His first year in captivity starts with an escape and ends with an escape, like shitty bookends to a terrible year. In between the escapes, Beau was learning necessary, twisted lessons of survival. How to smile when you're in agony. But if you ask for something, such as water, you're likely to get less of it, or less of something else, such as food.
If you're severely dehydrated, you can't really drink your own urine, because it turns into a salty brown sludge. That filth and stink are your best weapons. The more disgusting you are, the lesser captors want to come near you, which means you can squirrel things away in your bedclothes. The smaller and meeker you can make yourself, the more likely the Taliban are to let you alone.
And as painful as it is to be forgotten, ultimately, that's what you want. But the script and I could probably give you is, if you took a literal, not even an animal picture, someone taking a closet showing the door and just said, right? Molosanghin Zadron was a commander in charge of keeping Beau prisoner up until 2013 when Sanghin was killed in a drone strike. Back in Afghanistan, the storm of searching rescue operations for Beau had slowed and then dwindled.
They'd keep their eyes and ears out, of course, but at a certain point, the military had to call it. While Beau was in the worst place he could be, if anyone was going to rescue him, locked in a room across the border and pack a stand. It seemed like a very strong possibility that he was a Taliban sympathizer. I'll put it that way.
And it seemed that he, um, the unrated version is like, what a fucking asshole, you know? That was Mark Beall's first casual assessment of Beau when he heard the early reports that Beau had walked off. And it was a lot of people's assessment. It was understandable based on the information dripping out of the time.
An early propaganda video, reports that Beau had converted to Islam. Yeah, and then there was, I also remember there was the thing of him like, that there had been some kind of reporting that he was riding on a horse. I remember that too. I'm just looking at one from the Daily Mail, and it says, one of his captors said that he converted to his mom and was going under the name of Bella and was quote, very relaxed in our company, unquote.
It has, it has also been claimed that Berdall was so trusted by his kidnappers that they let him sleep without restraints and go bird and rabbit hunting with an old British rifle. Oh, you know what? That reminds me. I heard another one that he played soccer.
Information like this, I learned that intelligence analysts refer to it as stray voltage. By that they mean it's almost certainly untrue. But still added up to people judging from the outside, it didn't look good. Mark said it made him feel like maybe Beau wasn't someone he should be caring about, which is the opposite feeling you usually get when you hear about a POW.
But then after Beau came back and was in Germany recovering, Mark talked to someone in the intel world who knew what was going on. I actually remember somebody telling me, uh, oh yeah, he's doing a ton of intel debriefing. And I was like, oh, that's weird. I thought he was some kind of like, Taliban guy.
And they were like, no, no, no, no. He's like, he's not, and this was during the period when all the press reporting was about, you know, how like mentally damaged he was and how he was gradually, you know, react with it into the world. And everyone was like cautioning, like, you know, don't expect him to pop up on TV anytime soon because he'd severely traumatized. And then I was also hearing that like privately he was, I mean, maybe all that stuff was true and I'm sure it is.
But at the same time he was doing a lot of intel debriefing. So I was like, wait, he's doing intel debrief. That doesn't sound like a traitor. When I finally heard Bo talk about his time with the Taliban, I thought, no, he does not sound like a traitor.
As brutal as Bo's first year in captivity was, at least he had plans. His single-minded purpose was to get out. As best as Bo can recall, the first escape, if you don't have the one where he ran 20 or 30 feet before he got tackled, happened the first week he was in Taliban custody. Taliban fighters, by the way, have confirmed that Bo did escape once briefly, early on, and then again for a longer time, roughly a year later.
That first week, Bo says he was being held at a house of some kind. His feet were tied with ropes. A chain was wrapped in several loops around his wrists. He said he noticed that the previous morning, a car had arrived with water, and as soon as it did, everyone went inside another room for tea.
So when the car came again with the water, Bo says he saw his chance. He managed to manipulate the slack in the chain so that he could slip it over his knuckles. He untied his feet. The wooden doors of the room he was in were latched from the outside with a thick wire, so he had to stick his hand through the crack to undo it.
So I'm like, how? I mean, good grief. If anyone was standing outside, like they would have fully seen me fiddling with the damn wire, basically trying to open the door. But no one does see.
He runs outside, turns right, and then realizes he's in some kind of shallow valley or plateau. He sees three houses about 200 yards off. He starts running. He's shoeless.
He says there's mostly jagged rocks underfoot. But he sprints as best he can. At the first house, he sees some kids. I see me and they run through the house.
I see a woman come running out of the gate. She like, he's meeting that one footed, like, stutter stop thing, and she like, runs back into the house. He keeps going. He sees a group of men standing around.
The men also see him. So Bo runs towards some trees, passes the second house, comes to the third, decides to climb onto the roof. And I get to the top of the roof. There's like a mud puddle there.
And I'm staying low. I basically just slide onto the roof, which happens to be covered in mud. And I rolled a few times to try and cover myself even more mud. And it almost worked.
But the men find him up there. Lead him back down. I could try an interesting moment. I don't know if we'll do this.
But I get to the ground, right? I guess the old lady from the house, like some old woman from the house, you know, and all these young guys are talking loudly. You know, I'm covering mud. And this old woman comes up to me and she tries to like start, like, just like kind of wipe the mud off my face.
And one of the young guys grabs her by the arms and just like kind of chucks her behind him. She like yelled at him and they like, leave me off. Start to finish the escape lasted maybe 10 or 15 minutes, Bo says. But the aftermath was severe.
They brought Bo back to where they'd been holding him. And once evening came, Bo says they beat him with a rubber hose. The first it was one guy who spoke in English. He twirled and twirled a hose and then whacked it against Bo's feet.
Or if Bo covered his feet with his hands, he'd whack his hands. He doesn't know exactly how long that lasted, but it was a long while he says. The next morning, a whole group of men came in with a guy who seemed to be an elder and they all took turns hitting Bo with the hose until the older man called them off and took his own turn. And then that evening, both things it was evening, he's not sure, says he was blindfolded this whole time.
They moved him. Like, oh, he saw where we were or someone might have seen him. So we got to move on. I guess.
And then in a new place, how are you imprisoned or how did they continue? In a new place, they put me on a Afghan bed and changed my feet to the ends of the bed and changed my hands to the tops of the bed. So that was basically spread eagle on the bed and blindfolded in that style. I spent basically the majority of the next three months.
Three months, Bo was chained, spread eagle to a bed, and blindfolded. He was allowed to get up twice a day to use the toilet, he says. That's it. In a statement, Bo wrote, and was released as part of his legal case.
He said that because of the heat and sweat, his body got sore and raw where it was in contact with the bed. His eyes burned from the pressure of the blindfold. He could never wipe the salt from them. He developed open wounds on his ankles, an infection which seemed to spread to his forehead.
They beat the bottoms of his feet and other parts of his body with a copper cable. Bo says there came a day when he tried to walk and his guard so he could not walk. His legs were shaking from weakness. After that, they rearranged one of his arms, secured it down by his side and set him over his head, which allowed him to sit up.
The room had dirt walls and a dirt floor above his head. Every three or four weeks he could shower and wash his clothes. By the time six months hit, Bo had diarrhea. He would have diarrhea for roughly three and a half years.
No toilet paper or regular access to water. Most of the time his food was scant and came unpredictably. In the broadest strokes, his captivity consisted of twin torments, isolation and sickness. Or as Bo's principal military debriefer described it, there were roughly three phases to Bo's captivity.
Phase one, torture, phase two, abuse, phase three, neglect. The conversations between Bo and Mark started just a few months after Bo came back. Bo talks a lot about how he's numb or distant or disconnected, which actually has the benefit of helping him talk about what happened. Still, the details about the worst episodes are sometimes hard to say and hard for Mark to take in.
As a story, it's really overwhelming. I can comprehend it in little bits and pieces. Like the isolated stuff as it goes along these details that you're getting into. Each one of them makes sense.
They're not that hard to imagine because you're good at describing it. But then when you accumulate them all together and you think about this stretch of time and you think about just day in and day out, that's when it becomes incomprehensibly dark. I understand why the guys, the seer guys and the psychologists were so surprised that you weren't a total vegetable. Because I think that that would have been enough to basically put 95% of people in a turn them into potatoes.
Bo was being held by the Hakannis, a group run by a very powerful Pashtun family allied with the Taliban. They're based in North Waziristan, which is in Pakistan's tribal region, bordering Afghanistan. The Hakannis had agreed to hold Bo for the Taliban, and the guy in charge of Bo's physical person was Mullisangi. But Bo says he only saw Sanghi maybe half a dozen times over the years.
In all, Bo says he was kept in maybe eight different locations, different compounds, different rooms, made of mud or cement. Bo says especially at the beginning the Taliban questioned him. But he said they weren't what you might normally think of as an interrogation. The questions were strange and sometimes incoherent.
Question like, you know, how do they get their prostitutes? We know that you guys bring prostitutes on base and they're trying to find every dirty little secret. Oh, you know, you guys, well, you will kind of help hold you dirty. We know you won't drink.
You know, what about drugs? We'll ask you anything. This hodgepodge of perfectly reasonable questions. How did the drones work?
And then a kind of crazy talk. Is it true all American women are prostitutes that they sleep with animals? It makes you wonder whether they're just trying to rile Bo up or whether their understanding of our world is as paltry as our understanding of theirs. What if you ask your son?
Yeah. Then they get it. So either way, they pretty much assume you're lying. Which is maybe why they didn't really press him too hard on any of this stuff.
Hiring King Taliban told us through reporter Sam Yousafzai that, yeah, Bo didn't give them any useful intelligence or cooperation. Besides, Bo said the Taliban get most of their information, information they consider more trustworthy, from Afghan interpreters who work with US forces. Suppose value wasn't in what he knew. It was in the sheer fact of him.
A US soldier that belonged to them. You might have seen some of these videos on the internet. Bo said they made probably a dozen of them that were never released, but a small handful were. Bo said the Taliban spent a lot of time making them.
They're morale boosting. Plus he says the Taliban love to embarrass the United States any way they can. But you can't make too many videos or release too many because every time you do, you're exposing yourself. Details about the staging or someone's accent or production values or the decor might give your location away.
Bo says they'd sometimes make a number of videos during the same shoot, changing the backdrop or his clothes or his hair or his beard to pretend the videos have been taken at different times in different locations. The guy who made Bo's videos spoke English, seemed western educated, he had a slight British accent. He'd come into Bo's room, always with the same irritating greeting. And so did you have to work on your answers?
After that they wrote everything down. One would expect that they would just be treated as my country's army has treated their Muslim prisoners. In background, in both Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, and many other secret prisons that were hidden around the world. So if I bear with this, I was continuously treated as a human being, thickening.
In this video, Bo's wearing a camouflage jacket, helmet, and sunglasses. He looks really weird. He said the sunglasses were so you couldn't see his eyes reading the paper, and also maybe because the Taliban think sunglasses look cool, which agreed. I had nobody to pride me on my clothes and take pictures of me naked.
I had no dogs barking at me and biting me because that country has done all of the Muslim prisoners in the jail's language. When he made that video, Bo says the bed he was chained to, Sread Eagle, was just off to his left. The videos hit this name a lot, how well he's being treated, compared to how the US treats Taliban prisoners. How well would our team treat you?
He says, how are Mujahideen treating you? They're treating me better than I've been treated as a guest in a regular household in America. The videos also hit other common Taliban talking points, one of which is that the US government is lying to the American public about how many American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. You may explain that there's only a few hundreds, big, so far.
Well, is this true or is it more violent? I believe that that's told of Americans and Afghanistan is higher than what the government allows the world to know. The Army has moral guidelines for how a soldier is supposed to behave if he or she is captured by the enemy. It's called the Code of Conduct.
It says, among other things, if I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. And when questioned, besides name rank and serial number, quote, I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.
I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies are harmful to their cause, unquote. Soldiers I talked to from Bo's, Italian, told me the fact that Bo appears in these videos at all, that he's answering their questions, repeating their talking points. That right there is an obvious violation of the Code of Conduct. They said even if someone has a gun to your head, and by the way, Bo says there were guys with guns on these video shoots, you don't participate in the enemy's propaganda campaign.
Well, that's actually an interpretation of the code that military officials do not agree with. That is not the standard the Army is asking soldiers to live up to. You are not expected to die refusing to make a video. In the first and second Gulf Wars, American POW showed up in propaganda videos too, and the military didn't blame them for it.
They understand that as a prisoner you're going to be compelled to do things you don't want to do. And also, while the US military isn't going to encourage you to be in a video if you're captured, there is an upside to being filmed. Your government has proof you're alive. In a military hearing on Bo's case, Terence Russell, the guy who debriefed Bo, said in these videos, Bo did what he had to do, and that as the videos go on, you can see him getting better at resisting, at minimizing the propaganda value.
In the very first video, the Taliban released mid-July 2009, about three weeks after Bo disappeared, Bo was sitting in front of a table with some green liquid in a big mug. Mark asked Bo when it was. It's in this video that Bo explains how he was captured. How can we use this?
It was captured outside of this stuff. What were you doing? I was behind the patrol. I was laying behind the patrol when I was captured.
This was widely reported back in the US that Bo said he was caught while lagging behind on a patrol. And again, a bunch of the soldiers I talked to mention this, that when they heard it and made them mad, because it's such obvious nonsense, you have soldiers do not lag behind on patrols in Afghanistan and then just disappear without anyone noticing. It's not a thing. So when they heard it was in the video, some of them saw it as evidence that Bo was lying about what happened.
But was lying. He says, of course, he was lying. He says he knew that Americans listening would know it was baloney. That was the point.
Was it all rehearsed or staged? Yeah. So none of it was you, the real you. I mean, would you...
No, it was a desperate me trying to figure out. The guys guarding Bo don't speak English, which makes sense. Why would they? But also that same hiring king Taliban told us they don't necessarily want someone like Bo near anyone who speaks English, because they might say something inadvertently and it could help them with an escape.
Even if they couldn't really talk to him, Bo says they interacted with him. They messed with him. They'd throw things at him or point an AK-47 at him. Just kidding.
Once they tried to make him smoke a cigarette with a little firecracker in it, when he handed it back, he yelled bang at one of the guards. After that, the guy gave him less food. Bo learned not to sleep in the daytime because it left him open to these guys. They might take any opportunity.
Picture it being shaved by the Taliban with a straight razor. He's handcuffed. Even then, when he couldn't be more vulnerable, they'd have a laugh at his expense. Okay.
I see. Yeah. Yeah. Sammy used to have the Afghan reporter interviewed some people who had dealings with Bo while he was in captivity.
A big shot who came by and talked about in his cell, a guy who cooked for him, a friend of one of the guards, someone from Olesanghins, Entourage. What Sammy took away from these interviews was that keeping Bergdahl was number one stressful. You have to keep him away from everybody, not only from drones, you have to keep him away from Al Qaeda, Arabs and bandits, because if something happened, you know, then you are responsible. You will be beaten, even arrested by so that's why.
These guards are watching the only US soldier who's ever been taken prisoner in this war. Other groups might want to steal him from them. Sammy said the guards had heard talk that some Arabs and masks had almost made it to the house where they were holding Bo and that Melissa and Gien had captured and executed. Some people he thought were being paid by the US for information on Bo.
So even though it's a prestigious job, it still sucks. Yeah. I see. Still, still like mentally, a lot of pressure and...
And boring, exactly. And boring. That's the other thing Sammy heard in these interviews, how tedious it was for them, which is probably where the stupid and sometimes sadistic jokes come in. These guys are mostly young men.
They're stuck inside a compound or some other prison location, while their pals are maybe out and about enjoying themselves. You know, having pun, dancing, a ton or something, but here, you know, you're bored. Nobody is allowed to come to visit. Because of this guy, we are in trouble.
We cannot go around. We cannot go to the city. We cannot make a phone call because there was nothing. So even part of the guards, you know, they were not really happy.
Right. But still, since they were the orders, then I'm sure the Melissa and Gien was promising them a lot of things. Yeah. This is big chicken and you will have more money and everything.
Sammy talked to a friend at one of the guards who told him that to amuse themselves, they think up things to do to Bo, or how to get rid of Bo. They had a long hypothetical discussion about circumcising him. They talked about selling him, or maybe calling in a phony tip to the Americans that they had Osama bin Laden. So they'd be arrayed and they could be done with it.
In other words, they're young guys shooting the shit, following orders. Bo's keepers would make him watch execution videos of the headings or suicide bombers. Both at the very first day they got him. They showed him a video of Mujahideen executing prisoners.
He talks to Mark a lot about these videos, in part because he's still affected by them. Certain details lodged in his head. In one, a man is about to be headed. He looks terrified.
He's silent and a rooster is crowing. For Bo, the videos were obviously disturbing on their face, but they were also a grizzly warning that this could happen to him at any time. Every group I went to, they all had their own videos to show me. And were they showing at you like this is shit that we've done or just off at other people we know are dumb?
The majority of them was, this is what other people have done. A few of them have been, this is what our people have done. And there was one guy who was, what were they used for that? Oh, he was in the interim, while he hadn't seen you?
Yeah, well, yeah, he was the people he was killing. During all this time, Bo is scheming and plotting, gathering information that he hopes will get him out, and that he can deliver back to the U.S., which by the way he does. Terence Russell at the military hearing said he and other debriefers, intelligence debriefers, seer psychologists, FBI agents, all found Bo eager to download whatever intel he could, and quote, remarked on the quality of information Sergeant Bergdahl was providing, unquote. Also, they praised his recall.
Bo said he was trying all the time to store in his memory mental pictures of every detail he could. For this mission, he pretty much starts from zero when he's chained down and blindfolded. When he can't see, he listens, tries to discern the daily patterns of the people who kept him, when they slept, when they ate, how their families work, who's related to whom. He didn't know if it would be useful to him or to someone else back home, but in case.
As he gets moved around from house to house and allowed marginally more freedom to see and to stand, he sponges up new bits of information. He ends up staying a while at a house done by a guy he thinks was named a day. By this time, Bo was so filthy, he smelled so bad. He said the young women and little boys resented having to deal with him.
They might spill his food on purpose. Once a boy beat him over the head with his own chain, the asbestos boat could tell it was because he'd been humming. But Bo started to suss out information. Oh, okay.
All in English? Oh, so like somebody had given it to them, like some like NGO or somebody? Yeah, that was their school unit. So maybe that was the name of the place he was in, North Waziristan.
Now he'd just have to figure out exactly where North Waziristan was. Everywhere he was held, he said, except for one place in the mountains. He was pretty sure he wasn't too far from what he assumed was an American base. He could hear artillery, he could see helicopters losing altitude to land.
He could hear the scream of plane engines. In fact, what he was hearing was almost certainly a Pakistani base, but Bo couldn't know that. The best he could figure, he was still in Afghanistan, very near the border. Bo had no special training in how to survive any of this, how to deal with abuse, how to gather intel, how to resist while making it look like you're cooperating.
As an army private, he'd had what's called A-level sear training, the most basic level of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training. And what it consisted of at the time of Bo's deployment, according to Bo's senior debriefer, was quote, here's the code of conduct, unquote. So he's just puzzling it out as he goes, trying things and then trying them again. Day's house is a sort of mud hut, Bo attempts to dig himself out something like five times.
To get rid of the dirt he'd lose from the wall, he'd mix it with his own urine or feces, and then smear it back on the wall. The pebbles and rocks were harder to dispose of. At the same house there was a dog, a pretty aggressive dog that the little boys and men especially were scared of. Bo said the women sometimes gave it leftovers, so it's nicer to them.
Bo knew if he tried to escape, he couldn't have the dog freaking out and barking, so he started sneaking a bit of food out to it when he was led to the latrine, which was right near where the dog slept. In that way, Bo made peace with the dog, who eventually began sleeping in the room where Bo was, which is captures that was totally weird. Incidentally, someone who analyzed Intel in Bo's case told me one of the rumors they heard along the way was that Bo had a puppy, possibly a German shepherd puppy, which the analysts took to be silliness. But maybe the sometimes vicious guard dog was the so-called puppy.
Over the months, Bo managed to gather small items, which he turned into tools, and by the end of that first year, taken together, they'd become his escape kit. He had a length of PVC tube, maybe eight inches long. He'd been able to keep with him since the very first house, in one of the rooms he shoved into the wall and peed down it, so his urine wouldn't just be in the room. The pipe will reappear later as part of a crossbar.
He found a nail in a mud wall. He could make holes with it, scrape away dirt with it, clean the fingernails with it. And when the time came, he'd spend weeks rubbing the head of it on a rock until it was just the right shape to get the old, tiny shackles off his wrists. He stored the nail in the sole of his shoe.
But probably the biggest score was the key. The men and boys had come into his room. One of the boys was holding a bunch of keys on a string, and he dropped them. And when he did, one of the keys got away.
It fell right near the mat where Bo slept, so Bo slid in underneath. He said nobody seemed to notice it was missing. It wasn't the key to the padlocks he needed to open, but Bo says the locks were these cheaply made Chinese locks, and that by wiggling the key just so he could hit the sweet spot and pop them open. Bo had tried many mini escapes.
He'd gotten as far as a courtyard up to a wall. But they were forays, really. His biggest best chance came when he was at a remote place in the mountains. This was the farthest he ever was from a populated area.
It's basically a Taliban prison. Bo calls it the mountain fortress. In the mountain fortress, Bo was kept in a second-story room, which was padlocked. But there was a window without bars on it.
This place was so old. And he seemed so pathetic by that point. He says his guards weren't taking extra precautions. Bo had the nail, the key, the PVC pipe, plus a wooden stake that was in the room.
He had an empty leader bottle of Mountain Dew, a hat, a blanket, his sandals. He went for it. The rope was made from the two chains he'd now liberated, each about six feet long, he says, plus his bedding. It ended up being quite a bit longer than he needed.
The drop to the ground was only about 15 feet, but Bo didn't know that. PVC pipe in the last stake is a crossbar to help me to climb out. There's a reason maybe you haven't heard other American POW escape stories. It's because there hasn't been a successful one since the Vietnam War.
Again, the code of conduct says you're supposed to attempt it, but the army understands, especially since Vietnam, that the odds are usually and overwhelmingly against you. If you're a POW and you assess the situation and you decide, it's highly unlikely I can make it out that window without being shot. It's highly unlikely that even if I do make it out, I'll be able to blend in with the local population. And it's highly likely that if the enemy finds me, they will torture or kill me.
So no, I'm not going to try to go out that window. That is right and fine. No one will fault you for it. To me, more than anything, this moment in the mountain fortress puts all the talk about Bo being a sympathizer to rest.
Bo did not sympathize with the Taliban. He loathed the Taliban. So much so that even when he's sick, when he doesn't have any food, when he's already been punished for escaping the first time, he knows what that's like. And still, he goes out the window.
At the bottom, he makes a bag out of his blanket, puts his water bottle in it, slings it over his shoulder, and starts walking. Most as apart from being rescued, it was maybe the best moment of his five years. It's high desert terrain, cold at night, hot in the day, rocky. There are bushes and trees that both look like Joshua trees, and something piney, not a lot of cover.
But his immediate objective is not to hide, though he'll have to do a lot of hide in, obviously. But right now, he's trying to get as far away as he can from the fortress. He wants to spread the search party as thinly as possible. He heads what he hopes is southeast, intending to go into Pakistan.
He figures he's got a better shot at encountering someone non-hostile to him in Pakistan. But the terrain is so difficult. He's in these short, steep, mazey mountains. You get over one, there's immediately another one.
And they're all about the same height, so it's not like you can reach a peak and get your bearings. See the twinkle of a friendly fob in the distance. He climbs and descends, sometimes scooting on his butt. All the while, he's listening for water to replenish his water bottle.
He reaches a valley and it's populated. He keeps having to veer this way or that, skirt a fence or a house or a sheepherter's tent. Bow lands on a dry riverbed on his left side. He said the word oof actually came out of his mouth, just like in a cartoon.
Loud enough so that some dogs started barking their heads off. You're adrenaline must have just been pumping so hard this whole time. He's done something terrible to his left leg and his left arm. And the pain of that starts to wash over him, and then just stay.
It's getting later, it's going to be light soon. So Bow uses this small length of bar that had been used to hold his feet together. And he uses it to claw the earth at the base of a tree and make a hole. It's mulchy and then just rocks underneath, but it's good enough.
He piles the dirt around the hole to make a berm and then sticks branches into the berm so it blends into the landscape better. And then he gets into the hole and pulls his blanket over himself. So that was his first night of freedom. In all, Bow says this escape lasted about nine days.
In interviews with Sammy and in other media reports, the Taliban admit this escape happened, though their versions vary in terms of how it happened and how long it lasted. Generally, they say two to three days. Bow's debriefers settled on 8.5 days. Once morning hits, Bow has to stay put in the hole.
He can't move around in the day. And where he is, it's populated and it's rural, so people walk everywhere. There are footpaths crisscrossing all over the place. Over the coming week while he's hiding in holes or trenches during the day, Bow says there were so many close calls.
Sheep that came close and spooked, women out gathering something or other from the bushes, men, you can tell they were men with guns, you can hear the clack of the metal. There was a scare with a flashlight. The time when he heard the familiar beeping of those Motorola type walkie talkies that Taliban used. A time when little girls wandered off the road and up the hill where he was hiding.
These little girls have got a sense of the tiny little thing. They come walking along. They're like they're looking for flowers or something. Yeah.
Suddenly they fear off the road. They come almost directly toward me. They pass right by his feet, keep going. They're talking to each other, immersed in whatever they're doing.
And then they come back down the hill and Bow says they pass right by his head. Tiny oblivious girls. Bow can't walk properly because his left side is hurting so badly. So he's crawling along on a combination of elbows and knees.
Or on his butt. It's not going well. On top of everything, he really has no idea where he's going. He's completely lost.
He'd learn celestial navigation as a kid, but now he can't recall how the big dipper relates to the North Star. The water he's drinking is feted, like it's seen too many sheep. He's eating grass. It says that Bow is shrinking, getting smaller and more helpless, more primitive.
His shit is completely green. And he's stuck in a hole all day. He's down to nothing, no resources. And right above him, some of the highest tech equipment in the world for seeing and finding.
Drones, American drones, guided by American eyes. And Bow and these drone pilots, they can't reach each other. Bow says he remembers one night being on top of a mountain. Looking up, this is really, it's not a nice feeling.
You're so close, just keep going. Sometimes you think about what he'd do if a friendly convoy or patrol came by, how he'd safely get their attention. If you ran out of them in his Afghan clothes, they might think he was a suicide bomber. So I figured he'd take all his clothes off.
Because a tall, skinny, naked, white guy coming at you. Something to pause over, perhaps. If anyone had come across Bow, they'd probably have taken in the following. He's in pain on his left side.
He's in gastric distress. He's starving. He's scared. And he's lost.
Did you ever think that during the course of the mistake that maybe you made a mistake, that the, you know, being out, that escaping was maybe more treacherous than just staying put? Toward the end, Bow was too debilitated to cover much ground. His hunger pangs were gone. But he was blacking out when he stood up, getting tunnel vision.
He didn't exactly stop caring about getting caught. More like he stopped having the energy to be afraid. He remembers one of the last nights watching the sun go down, and his only thought was that it was beautiful. On the last day, Bow says he had passed out on top of a mountain.
And when he came to, he started trying to make some sort of brace out of sticks for his left knee. And he heard voices and rustling bushes. And below him, he saw the search party coming up the mountain. He was caught.
Because of the drones, the men wanted to get him off the mountain as quickly as they could. They took him back to the prison. One of the older guys, both things he might have been a relative of Molosan-guin attacked him, tried to rip his hair out, his beard out, which was as he mostly succeeded in doing. But Bow says he was so out of it, he didn't really feel it.
He wasn't beaten more than that, he says, maybe because they knew looking at him, he might not survive a beating. They threw Bow in a room, let him sleep. The next morning they cleaned him up and they took him to a meeting with Molosan-guin. Whose principal message to Bow was, if you try to escape again, we'll just kill you.
I mean, did you apologize to them? For trying to escape? I probably would have. About four years, in fact.
And while he's waiting, so many people would be trying to get Bow away from San-guin. All these huge military and diplomatic forces about to kick in. Just as the United States is realizing, we need to get out of this war. And then things get really interesting.
Next time on Serial. This week, we've posted a photograph that Bow says was taken right after his big escape, right after his meeting with Molosan-guin. Again, that's serialpodcast.org. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode.
But first, serial's production of This American Life in WBEZ Chicago. Coming up on the next episode of Serial. Was it worse than Iraq? That deployment?
I mean? Yeah, it was worse. It was horrible. Yeah.
Your operations order had something to do with Govertall, then people were going to give it the stamp of approval. So go ahead, smash down some doors and ask some questions. I have some guilt. Like maybe there's something I could do, but then what if?
I don't know exactly why Bow was treated the way he was treated, but it's certainly plausible to me that the reason he was treated so horribly was because I was treated so well.