Yeah, I wanted that adventure, I wanted that action, I wanted that moment of adrenaline, I wanted that moment of... Previously, on Serial. We all felt like, why are we up here? Yeah, you can't keep going.
Going out and shaking hands and... Oh yeah, that's a classic, I love it. And this is the one where I said, and I don't want to see more of this fucking Lawrence of a radio shit. And I said out loud, and then it...
Let's do this. First thing that comes out about telling Commander is malted what you couldn't shave. There was a manipulation game going on. The whole entire army is just Pussies.
Everyone's a Pussies. G-A-D-I-A, C-I-A, F-B-I. A false assumption that America doesn't leave Americans behind. Your statement is 380 pages?
Excuse me, can I talk to somebody? I need to report a missing person. From this American Life in W.B.E.C. Chicago, it's Serial.
One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Canig. 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 Bose 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 the story, I have wondered about this, whether Bose 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. Well, I guess I meant just in a more narrow sense, do you think he's lying?
Um... I mean, I'm just asking... I feel like... I guess I...
The Gucci tent still bothers me. The Gucci tent still bothers me. Remember the Gucci tent? The Taliban said they first captured Bose when he wandered into a Gucci tent, or near a Gucci tent, which wasn't part of Bose telling it all.
It made me think if Bose had walked into a Gucci tent, maybe he wasn't really headed to Fob-Shirana to tell someone about leadership problems. Maybe he was just trying to run away, looking for help. Mark and I had that conversation back in September. I've since moved on from the Gucci tent.
I don't think it's verifiable or that much of a discrepancy with Bose'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 Bose served with when I first talked to them. They didn't buy Bose's story.
They thought maybe he concocted it in hindsight. When I put it to one of Bose platoon mates, Jane 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 Bose'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, but they were great. And Lieutenant Colonel Clint Baker, the battalion commander Bose 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 Bose would have to do something so dramatic to be listened to. Also not true, they said. Which is so utterly outlandish, it's insulting. Wait, why is that outlandish?
Oh man, because of where they were, and a couple of days prior they were on Fox-Rona, which is huge, and has all sorts of officers, any one of whom he could have gone and talked to. That's Mark McCrory. There's an open door policy that allows you to approach any officer at all with a problem. It doesn't have to be in your chain of command.
Though, whether an officer would have taken Bose seriously, I have to say, is doubtful, and Bose knew that. A big one I heard from quite a few people was that Bose either was in cahoots with local Afghans or even wanting to contact the Taliban. Here's Daryl Hansen, John Thurman. I mean, for him just to walk out where he did, he wasn't afraid of them.
He had to have had some kind of compassion for him and didn't like us for him to walk away. Again, I have to go back to the question, where are you going to go? Because there's no other option you've either got our side or the Taliban side. A lot of people pointed out that Bose 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. It was great. It was great food. But some people said Bose was there more often, seemed more interested in them than other people did.
Josh Korder said that Bose was one's 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 Bose went missing, Josh as he heard that two of the A.N.P. guys were also unaccounted for. Two Afghan police were missing as well.
So that seemed very logical to me. That all seemed kind of makes sense because, okay, well now he may have two guides, or he has two people he is looking to meet up with. Maybe Bose had made a deal with these A.N.P. guys, and someone betrayed him or sold him out to the Taliban.
I tried to check this intel. I called the former governor of Pactica Province in Afghanistan, a guy who'd worked very closely with the leaders in Bose Battalion, but he wouldn't talk to me on his cell phone. He didn't 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 Gaul's investigation.
The executive officer of Bose Battalion told me he'd heard this rumor too about some missing Afghans, but he did not know if anything came of it. Sami Yusafzai, 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. Market heard this rumor too.
He asked about it. Then the idea was you had some A.N.P. guys that were going to help you out or no, or local police? No, very high control.
Bose said the reason he hung out with the A.N.P. sometimes was because that was part of the mission, a builder report 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 Bose 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 Bose 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 Bose's closest friend in the platoon.
I mean, I'm talking about the mountains and how great they look and imagining just walking out there. I remember all that stuff. I mean, I was right there when he was talking about it. Shane Cross said he'd had a conversation with Bose 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? I don't know.
I'm a public cliff. He told me that he'd fake his death in Afghanistan war. That'd be the best place to do that. He used disappear.
I went to senior casualty. And he says that his goal, that he was to fake his death, would they be then get through Pakistan and India and went up with a gang over there. Austin Landford was there too. This was the first time he'd ever talked about the night before he left the OP.
And Austin remembers the conversation about the same way Shane does. Going to be a mercenary of sorts. And it was something along the lines of he was going to join a group, go up in their ranks, and then kill the leader. And then he'd be known for being a mercenary or something like that.
That's what you remember. That's what the gist I got. He said no Russian mob got big influence in India with gangs. And told me he told me about Russian that he worked the way up through the gang.
And then ended the Russian mob and become a hitman. But also asked about a weapon. He was issued a saw, a big heavy machine gun. Shane carried a pistol, an M9.
And he told me, hey, what would happen if you're not only disappeared? I told Mike, get in trouble. We were like, that's a stupid question. Like, yeah, of course.
And then he said no weapons in your fault. What if someone took it from you? I said, I'd get in trouble. He was like, oh, okay.
Oh, 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 going to 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. It's a little extreme.
And I kind of don't want to make him seem like he was crazy or, you know, not in his right mind. Because we all had weird thoughts while we were over there isolated from anybody. In other words, wander less de-commons like this. Maybe I didn't seem all that strange.
So many people told me fear plus stress plus boredom plus war zone. Means you say some really off the wall stuff. Another platoon, Jason Fry, told me he wrote letters to a friend when he was in Afghanistan. He got them back years later.
And when he went through them, he thought, what was I thinking? Who was I? Here's Mark McCory. The things that we get away with saying to each other are completely ludicrous.
I'll give you an example of the fort hood shooting was going on while we were there. And I remember we were watching it on some grainy television on the Armed Forces network in the Chow Hall. And my body looks over me and goes, we have to go back out again tonight. I'm going to make four hood look like church.
Oh, yeah, just like super dark and creepy. So dark, but you know, at the time it's, you know, the only kind of humor we understand. I mean, we're wound up pretty tight. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
General Dahl considered all the evidence pointing to the idea that Bo was deserting permanently. He heard about the weird comments about the intel. And he concluded Bo was telling the truth. Bo'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 Bo. For lots of reasons, partly just for practical reasons.
For instance, Bo was such a careful planner. He was an outdoor kid who'd grown up in the mountains. He intended to just disappear or permanently desert. Why wouldn't he bring more food, more water?
Bo's on 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. Then take it with you. If you're going to throw it in a backpack and a charger, you know, you know, he sent stuff home.
Yeah, because he thought he was going state-side because he thought he was going to have an audience with a general on and they were going to throw him in the oven. But I think it's probably true that he anticipated getting his computer back. That's why there's nothing really at the end of the day that points to the idea that this was a permanent departure. If he just didn't pack for that.
You know? That's funny. It's just that simple. But details like this, that's ultimately not what convinced Mark.
He's logged something like 25 hours of taped conversations with Bo, and many more hours of conversations, not on tape. The more I learned about Bo, and the more I learned about how his mind worked, and the more I talked to him about, not just his third of other subjects, and realizing that, yeah, of course, I would never walk off of Ace. You know, and yeah, most of his platoon never would. So if that makes sense, it is a totally whack-a-doodle conclusion to make.
But not if you're Bo Burt-Daw. Then it makes perfect sense. So how does it make sense if you're Bo Burt-Daw? When Bo 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 a childhood there. He'd done a lot of thinking while he was locked up in that cage with the Taliban. I was looking at myself, I was looking at the situation going, how did I get here? And that question took me back, because it was like, I got here because I made a choice.
But that choice was followed, you know, that choice followed, another choice which followed, and it just passed there. Bo sorted through his upbringing and found him wanting. I'll give you a bit of a backstory. I really grew up by myself in the middle.
So you just grew up like fucking around in the woods and like, stuff like that? Bo grew up on 40 acres down a dirt road in a valley outside the small town of Haley. His father worked at UPS, his mother homeschooled him, and his older sister. He had a hard time with the schoolwork.
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.
Bo 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. It's just complicated. Bo's solution was the same one teenagers have used for centuries.
Get out of the house. And you know, officially when I turned. When he was about 15, Bo 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, a little performing arts school in Ketchum, the next town over from Haley.
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, Bo was around all the time.
He ended up becoming attached to our family. That's Kayla. A few people told me, if you want to know about Bo, talk to Kayla. She understands him.
Kayla says with her, Bo was watchful and serious and very sweet. Like one birthday for my birthday card, he went around our small little town with a card and just asked random people to sign it for me. And my little message, yeah, it was the coolest idea. And knowing Bo and how shy he is and how little he wants to be noticed and how strangers know who he is, that wasn't even bigger just for him than it seemed like because that's hard for him.
He doesn't want to do that. I know he doesn't like that. Right. This is like teenager Bo.
Yeah, teenager Bo is super quiet. He would blush very easily. He's going to be very mad at me saying that, but he blushes really easily. And so he was really, he was embarrassed.
And he wanted, I don't know, he was this gentlemanly. He's a good word. He's very much a gentleman and very, very conscious about saying the wrong thing or being inappropriate or anything like that. The Harrison's opened up a tea place in Ketchum, which is the ski town.
The tea bar was called Strega and they served food and had a little boutique and hosted performances. The hangout basically. Kayla and her brother worked there. They were both homeschooled too.
And Bo worked there. He'd make, help me make grapes sometimes or mostly he would hide weapons everywhere and like sit in a corner and watch people. He was like security. We just had random weapons hidden everywhere.
There was like a flail, like a spike ball in the chain. I think was underneath a cabinet somewhere and there was an ice pick hidden next to the chair. Like a joke? No, no, no.
I mean kind of, we thought of it was kind of funny, but him it was like, you know, you need weapons available when you need them. He never had to use them, obviously, but you know, he was in charge of being the safety guy and knowing that it would be cool. He wanted to be, I'm sure my mom, you heard my mom say this, but he's a protector. 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 Bo's house, so Bo began staying at the Harrison's for stretches, for while he even slept at Strega. Kim says especially when he was younger, it was like Bo 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 Bo. 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 tape his mouth shut for a couple days, see what would happen.
Bo 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 friend 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, throughout stories. Mostly though, he was trying to figure himself out. It really mattered to him. The seeking and knowing what kind of man he was going to be.
Nick was about five years older than Bo. He also worked at Strega. He and Bo would talk and talk for hours sometimes. Nick doesn't so much that Bo was searching for something concrete, like a profession.
He was wrestling with the big existential questions. I really think so much about how to do with questions of virtue, of what was right, more than anything. I think that's what he was really working on and focused on all the time, was coming up with his values for himself. And he just did a lot of watching to see what everyone else did and reflected against it.
And he didn't want it to be anyone else's. Bo wasn't going to take anyone else's word for it about what was right, what was moral. He was going to forge his own code. And Kayla says the one he ended up adopting for himself.
It was strict and it was uncompromising. I've had arguments about this with him about this many times. And he gets really passionate about it. You know there's a problem in the world.
But what kind of human are you unless you're doing something about it? Like you're not a good person if you know that there's something wrong and you're not doing everything and your power to fix it. Really? He holds the world and everybody in it to unrealistically high expectations.
And if you don't live by those expectations or by those morals and that honor that he thinks you should and he tries to live himself and he has no respect for you. And he doesn't understand. It just sounds sort of impossibly idealistic. The point where it kind of is sort of strangles how you move through the world or something.
Yeah, it's really handicapping to him. Like it's a handicap. He's constantly struggling to understand how people are okay with everything. You know what I mean?
Like he doesn't have an understanding of how differently they appeal the world. Yeah. I think he's slowly understanding that not everybody can accept the way he thinks. But that's never going to change the way he thinks.
I get it. Yeah. Like he has the least flexible system ever. During his late teens, early twenties, Bo would work for a while in Idaho and then take off somewhere for a job or trip and come back and go off again.
Kim, Kayla's mom, says Bo 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. 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. And experience the topo he'd rather be doing what they were doing than what he was doing.
And he went from dawn. 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. Bo didn't really talk much about it. They probably thought he was out of his mind for going there and this year, this kid with blonde hair, this young Q kid from Idaho with blonde hair and blue eyes. I'm enjoying the foreign Legion.
Hey, sign me up. And they probably thought he was completely bonkers for doing that because he was for doing that. That was just like a really bad choice. And of course, when he tells me about it, I think part of the reason he did it was to see my face.
Because he didn't tell you about it beforehand. Oh, he did. I was like, are you kidding me? That is a dumbest thing I've ever.
You know, that was the beginning of me getting incredulous at his choices. That was the first, no, maybe not the first, the first of many or one of many. He trained on his bike. Nick said Bo 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 okay, but his bike was ruined. So he came back to catch him and started in on the next idea. Eventually, the next idea became the military, which wasn't a huge surprise to his friends. Bo's brother-in-law was in the Navy, and Bo 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, swooping in when they needed him. And they knew Bo wanted to put himself in situations that would require courage and grit, that would test his metal, 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.
Please don't do that. That's Kim, who, it should be noted, is a pacifist to begin with. And he knew how I'd react, it's totally predictable, and I'm, you know, asking him, are you sure this is something you want to do? I think it's a horrible, horrible idea.
Not just for, you know, not for everyone, but, you know, for you, 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. I said, look, I know if you want to do that, I'm not going to listen to me, of course you're over 18, you can do whatever you want.
But if you're going to do that, look into the Coast Guard, because at least then you'll be helping people. You'll be like saving people's lives, saving vessels, patrolling waters, being on the ocean, those are all things that you like, so if you absolutely must, then, you know, that's probably a good option. Have you thought of that already? No.
So we did. You joined the Coast Guard. In January of 2006, Bo went to Cape May, New Jersey, and started trading. He was 19.
It lasted only a few weeks. He didn't want to be weak. He didn't want to not be able to participate in that system to achieve those goals, but his sensitivities and his way of pondering and overthinking things made it incredibly difficult in that environment to survive. It didn't take him long to realize he wanted to get out of there.
That he'd made a mistake. And in the communications that I had from him at the time, they were becoming increasingly more worrisome. I was just in pain for him. You know, I'd read these little notes.
You know, they're only like a little spiral notebooks. You flip. You're about the little thing. Three and a half.
Yeah. My five. Maybe this was a four by five, four by six with the ripped-off spirals at the top and just running really small. And the writing would change too, you know, and as we stress level increased, the tone was changing.
It was more rambling. It was more desperate. It was just rapidly, you know, eroding. I think I wrote a couple letters back like, you know, are you okay?
I'm getting really worried. This needs to end. You know, what can I do? And so one day out of the blue, Bo shows up at Strega, the T-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 came in the others, they didn't really believe him. According to General Dahl's investigation, what happened is that on Bo's third week of training, he was found on the floor with blood on his hands and face. Wasn't serious.
It was a nosebleed. Bo 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, shaking, 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, observed that PFC Burgdall'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 re-enlistment, unquote. So Bo gets disqualified for continued service in the Coast Guard because of a diagnosis of adjustment disorder with depression. And he goes back to Idaho.
That got me washed out, but you know, I didn't sit right with me, which is one of the joint arm he was being an army. The Syrian law is all the people who, like, basically, I knew when I was in there, helped with that hurt being from people that were, you know, was then going to be weak. They basically thought I was the baby, you know, just waiting with both guard really wasn't, because the coach was obviously, obviously, no, there's no, you know, I was older, and I was looking on, I worked better for this, and I ended up. Because of the way that Bo 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 re-enlist.
In other words, the army would have to waive its usual standards to let Bo in. In May 2008, when Bo 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% of army recruits got waivers. By 2007, it was 20%. 2008, the year Bo enlisted, it was about 17%.
Because his Coast Guard discharge was labeled uncharacterized, it seems pretty much all Bo 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 Bo, says, quote, I have matured and know that I'm 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, Bo 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 re-enlistment. And Bo 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, Bo was accepted into the army. This time he hadn't told anyone in advance. He was being very evasive and I just was getting really annoyed.
I'm like, all right, what's going on? You're lying. I can tell you're lying to me. You're not telling what's going on.
And this went on for a couple months. And then all of a sudden he shows up in his uniform. Yeah. I launched, literally launched myself.
I'm like, I'm going to grab his shoulders and shaking his shoulders. What are you doing? Did you sign the thing already? Is this a done deal?
And he's like being really quiet and kind of got the smile on his face. Like I knew he would react like this is why I didn't tell you. And I was just out of my mind. I just freaked out.
And this is because again, you'd had these fears about his suitability before he went to the Coast Guard. Those fears were born out. Yes. And now he was doing it again.
Yes. And you just knew this is not. This is a really bad idea. This is just the worst idea ever.
And it was the army. Setting aside the question of whether it was a good idea for Bo to join the army. So the army have let Bo in. Next time on Serial.
Serials produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chibison, me in partnership with Mark Bol, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Paige I, and Anna Perna Pictures. Our glasses are editorial advisor, Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor, researched by Kevin Garnett, fact-checking by Michelle Harris, copy editing by Anahia Lonnie. Emily Conan is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Myers, and Mark Phillips, the show's mixed by Kate Polinsky.
Kristen Taylor is our community editor, other serial staff, Seth Lind, Elise Ferguson, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks to Joey Palacios, Captain Nicole Eldridge, Heather Hansen, and Ben Mannion. And a big thank you to Jonathan Menquivar and Robin Simeon, our great colleagues at This American Life for helping us so much this week and last week. Thank you guys.
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. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode, which is actually part two of this episode. But first, Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.
Coming up on the next episode of Serial. He's writing these things, he's sending emails, he's sending all these cryptic things, he's in a state of mind what's obvious to me, it was stretched. They incorrectly interpret events, no belief in social powers, persistent and excessive social anxiety. It's something so huge and such a big decision.
I feel like you won't have to be God to make that kind of difference. That's not something you can ever come back from. I don't care where your head was, though you still fucking did it. It really does tell the story of both.
Unfortunately, you know.