Previously, on Serial. Gentlemen Lee is a good word. He's very much a gentleman. Coast guard, who can?
Yeah. Do you think he's lying? Um, and then all of a sudden he shows up in his uniform. Yeah.
From this American life in WBE Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Kade. I think the following will likely be a question at Bose Court Marshall.
Did the Army screw up by accepting Bo by deploying him to Afghanistan? Just to remind you, Bo was separated from the Coast Guard in 2006 after he became overwhelmed and had a breakdown during basic training. The Army, in order to enlist him two years later, would have to wave its usual standards, which it did. So the question actually is, did the Army recruiting process work like it was supposed to?
Bose separation from the Coast Guard wasn't labeled a psyched discharge on paper, but that's essentially what it was. So did the Army miss something? We talked to a retired Army psychiatrist, Dr. Elspeth Cameron-Ritchie.
She was deployed all over. She was chief of forensic psychiatry and also inpatient psychiatry at Walter Reed. And she was psychiatry consultant to the Army Surgeon General, the top mental health advocacy position in the Army. Dr.
Ritchie's assessment of how all this went down with Bo? Buh. She thought the whole thing sounded pretty normal, like standard practice. The fact that the Army didn't have all the details about Bose hospitalization in the Coast Guard, not uncommon.
She said getting access to more detailed medical information, especially between branches of the military, in this case Coast Guard and Army, was hard because the military's network system wasn't so hot. Information sharing was incomplete. But she also didn't feel like anything we told her about Bose Coast Guard situation would have been disqualifying even if the Army had known and had sent him for a mental health evaluation, as the Coast Guard doctor had recommended. Even if Bo had been assessed by, say, an Army psychiatrist, Dr.
Ritchie said it probably would have been one session, and unless you showed obvious outward signs of psychosis or something like that, you're really depending on the potential recruit to self-report any psychological problems. So it's quite possible Bo would have been okayed regardless. At the end of the day, Dr. Ritchie told us, the best assessment for whether someone's going to make it in the Army doesn't happen in the recruitment office anyway.
It happens during the sustained high pressure test of basic training, and Bo did really well in Army basic training. So that's one view. Now for a second opinion. Somewhere, that's what I've always got.
This is Dr. Michael Valdavino's. He's a clinical psychologist who's in the Air Force for about seven and a half years, and he worked in the CIR program, which teaches survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He knows Bo.
In fact, Valdavino's led the CIR psych team that helped reintegrate Bo right after his rescue. Those first few weeks when Bo was at the hospital in Germany. Two things. Valdavino's has permission from Bo to talk to me about their conversations.
And also, he was not officially Bo's doctor. His job was to reintegrate him, not diagnose him or anything. He never even saw Bo's medical record back then. So he's not breaking any doctor-patient confidentiality.
Well, three things, I guess. The last being, Valdavino's cares about Bo, so he's not dispassionate on the question of what happens to him. Well, Valdavino's view is that the Army recruiter should have looked harder at Bo's situation, should have asked more questions before signing him up. Even if the recruiter didn't have the particulars of Bo's Coast Guard discharge in front of him, or information about Bo's hospitalization.
He says the mere fact that Bo had been separated at all from a branch of the military begged more scrutiny. You know, it's a pretty big deal to get separated from the military. At the very least, I would think that this recruiter would be a little bit more concerned about that. And what if, what if taking it maybe a few steps further to say, hey, let me make sure that this guy is a good fit for what he's about to get into.
Because what a separation like Bo's tells you just on his face is that for whatever reason, this person couldn't hack it in basic training. And the Army recruiter's job is to send that potential recruit straight back into basic training. In Bo's case, the same situation he washed out of two years earlier. Finally, Valdavino says Bo told him that the recruiter did know about his problems in the Coast Guard because Bo says he told the recruiter.
Bo said he was afraid not to tell him since, you know, not a good idea to keep things from the government. You know, when I said, yeah, I told him everything. And then what he said, I said, he told exactly what happened when he broke down in training and went to the hospital and, you know, the incident in the barracks. And he said, yes, you know, I told him all these things.
As part of his application, Bo did a test that he had not consulted with a behavioral health care provider in the last seven years. When General Dahl asked him about that, Bo said the Coast Guard treatment, quote, wouldn't have triggered the idea of consulting a psychologist, unquote. Dahl found that to be consistent with both other paperwork, since on his medical history form, Bo checked yes to the question of whether he'd ever received counseling of any type. He said he was thinking of counseling he'd had when he was 10 years old.
General Dahl concluded that the Army recruiter, on paper, did everything he was supposed to, read the codes, followed the regulations. But in a footnote, Dahl seemed to agree that this system isn't good enough. That Bo's situation probably should have been looked at more carefully. He wrote that when you're deciding whether to reenlist someone, few things are more relevant than a prior separation.
He added, quote, it seems inadequate that we would rely on an interview and an applicant statement to explain the details of prior service and not review the separation action, unquote. And where was Bo's head at this time? It's funny, once you hear how Bo thought about the military, why he wanted to join, oddly, it does help explain why he decided to walk off his post. Did you think that you were going to be a career soldier?
I wanted to be a soldier, but I'm, you know, 1800. Bo loved Bruce Lee when he was a kid, thought he was cool. He watched his movies later read his books. Bo studied Asian warriors, especially samurai.
He learned about the Bushido code, which stresses honor and loyalty and self-sacrifice. In Bo's childhood bedroom, his dad kept a collector's set of old army manuals way up high in a bookshelf. He said his dad loved military history. Bo climbed up there and got the books down, even when he couldn't read, he'd study the pictures.
So, you know, as far as being a soldier in my mind, you know, I was... Bo's ideal soldier, the one from history, fights for a cause he or she is completely personally committed to. That soldier rallies behind military leaders that he or she trusts. The modern soldier turns out to have no choice about those essential aspects of combat.
Instead, he's a brainless private that does whatever the government tells him to do. Go here, go there, go fight these people. He's just a tool. That's how Bo saw it.
And the thing is, Bo knew this was going to be the case when he signed up. He sort of knew it. He thought he could handle that Gulf of Meaning. It's like in order to play the game, you had to play by the rules as they were being...
As they were... This is one of the things about Bo. He at once recognizes that his expectations were unrealistic, that he sees things differently from other people. But at the same time, he will fiercely defend his vision of how things should be.
He does not let go, especially when it comes to what he saw in Afghanistan. Do you think what you witnessed and what you were reacting to was the army in an especially bad way? Or was it just the army being itself and kind of messed up in a kind of average way? Does that make any sense?
Yeah, he's not the bully. Mark's conclusion about Bo, after all those months of talking to him, he's not a conscientious objector. But he's also not your casual deserter. He throws up his hands and just says, I don't care about any of this, I'm out of here.
Mark thinks he's the opposite of that. He's a rare person who will act, rightly or wrongly, it turns out. But still, he will act according to his principles. And his principles are wrapped up with a very institution that so many people now feel he betrayed.
It's a disillusionment of somebody that really believes in the army. He's somebody that thinks that military leadership is a sacred position. He wants the army to be better. The military is huge for him.
It represented something that's got to be a better word than huge, but it represented something very powerful to him, even before he joined. And to his sense of himself as a man, to his relationship, to his country, to all sorts of big identity questions that were floating around for him. And it's still really important to him. He still kind of wants his day of reckoning with those values.
That's in a way why he hasn't taken the more pragmatic role of this, which would just be to sort of stick your hands out and say, whatever you guys say, like guilty, just give me a good look at it. Yeah. I think he doesn't want to cross the line of saying, I had no point. Which is not to say that Bo wants all this attention on him now.
He wasn't seeking this big audience. And by the way, he's not asking to be some kind of like Paul Revere. He just wanted, he didn't, Bo never wanted the discussion that's happening now. His whole goal was to talk to, was like an inter-family dispute.
He wanted to talk to people in the military. He was actually a reporter that was sent to, that was like embedded or something with his unit. There was hanging around there. And it's like he pulled the reporter aside and said, hey, get a load of this.
This will make a great story. He didn't do that. He wanted to be heard within the military. So obviously that didn't happen.
And obviously he behaved in a way which runs counter to like every single military precept ever known since the dawn of time, which is, you know, you don't walk away from your, from your brother. So he's not a great messenger for his message. But that's also what makes it kind of interesting. In Bo's case, no one saw it coming, him walking off like he did, because it's so unthinkable.
But a few people say they did start to see signs that Bo wasn't totally okay. At the September hearing in Bo's case, Greg Leatherman, Bo's weapon squad leader, testified that at some point he noticed something was up with Bo. Quote, it started to kind of feel that he wasn't adjusting to the deployment like the rest of the guys were, unquote. Leatherman said he wasn't incredibly alarmed, but he figured he ought to say something to one of the higher ups about it, just in case.
One day he's on a patrol somewhere southeast of Sharana, and he finds himself sitting next to his first sergeant, public Jimenez. Quote, and so I told for sergeant that, you know, I thought that Sergeant Burgdahl should chat with somebody, you know, whether it be combat stress or a chaplain, or even if it were just, you know, the company commander, just sit down and hey, man, how's everything going? Bo's lawyer asked Leatherman how him and his responder to his suggestion. I'm just going to read you that part of the transcript answer.
First sergeant said that he didn't want to, he didn't want one of his guys to tell him what was wrong in his company. So it was not my place to tell him if he had problems inside of his company. Question. I think when we interviewed you, you had even more colorful language of what he said.
Yes, sir. Could you tell us that? Sure. He said, fuck off.
He said, shut the fuck up. No one needs to hear what a fucking E5 has to say about a guy in my company. And I said, Roger for sergeant. In his report, General Dall includes a statement from him, and as who says he doesn't recall this conversation with Leatherman or any conversation like that, and that Bo, quote, showed no red flags or emotional problems as far as I could tell, unquote.
Bo's friend said from his messages and letters home, they could tell he wasn't very happy with how things were going in Afghanistan. And in retrospect, you can sort of see his thoughts churning, plans forming. On June 27, just three days before Bo left Meast, he wrote a letter to his parents, Ventig, in which he sounded pretty disgusted with how the army was operating in Afghanistan. He wrote a more loving letter to a girl he was romantically involved with.
He wrote group emails. One was titled, Who Is John Galt? His friend Chad was on that email. I saw it and I was like, no, I'm not my friend.
Okay, here we go. I know. John Galt is a character from Atlas Shrugged. The very first line of the book is, Who Is John Galt?
And after about a thousand pages, he finally learned that John Galt is this genius industrialist who sort of single-handedly has shut down the world's economy in order to fix it. He stops the machine. In the book, he finally reveals himself, delivering, I give you not, a 60-page speech laying out his philosophy, or rather, Iran's philosophy. And honestly, just as an exercise, you can grab almost any sentence from that John Galt speech and apply it to what Bo ended up doing.
For instance, quote, a code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality, unquote. And now, just for kicks, stir it in and say the Bushido code, the part that teaches that it's your duty to try to right a moral wrong, regardless of whether you'll succeed. That's maybe a potent cocktail if you're Bo. Here's the text of Bo's June 27 email, quote, it is not the being of value who fails the system.
It is the system that has failed a man. For man should not stoop to fit the system, but the system should be made and remade to fit the man who holds value as worth. I will serve no bandit nor liar. For I know John Galt and understand this life is too short to serve those who compromise value and its ethics.
I am done compromising. His friend Nick read that email along with everyone else. Where did you just like, uh-oh. Or did you think like, uh, this is Bo, like sorting through Bo?
Yeah, this is, these are the kinds of things he would say. Kim Harrison was on those emails, too, and had gotten other messages from Bo, and she was starting to worry. She said she could tell he was frustrated, that he thought a situation was dangerous, that he was trying to hold himself together. Here's this, you know, he's writing these things, he's not sending emails, he's sending all these cryptic things.
He's in a state of mind, what's obvious to me, where, you know, mentally where he was at, it was stretched. It was on that precipice. You know what I mean? Where a person can make bad choices, like really bad choices.
I don't think, you know, it's not suicidal or that kind of thing at all. It was just he's frustrated, he's on edge, and not really completely logical in his right mind. But is this what you understood at the time that you're using this in hindsight? No, no, no, no, no, I this was clear to you at the time.
Really clear, yeah. A few days later, some army people show up at her door to tell her Bo is missing. And just a day or two after that, a box arrives at her house, from Bo. He'd send it from Afghanistan.
It's got his computer, his iPod, his Kindle, a journal, and a copy of Atlas Shrugged. It's been pretty widely reported that at Bo's military hearing, his lawyer said this carefully phrased, but also somewhat vague thing regarding Bo's mental health. He said a quote, neutral army psychiatry board has now concluded that back in June 2009, that Sergeant Bergdale possessed a severe mental disease or defect, unquote. This past week, I finally found out what he meant by that.
In May of last year, Bo's defense team asked for what's called a 706 Sanity Board, a mental health assessment in connection with the charges against Bo. An army forensic psychiatrist, a well-regarded doctor named Christopher Lang, met with Bo and gave a diagnosis, skits a type of personality disorder, that he said Bo would have had as of the time of the alleged misconduct. And I'm guessing this too will be part of Bo's defense at the court martial proceeding. Dr.
Valdavinos, the seer psychologist who knows Bo, said that when he heard this diagnosis, he thought, yeah, I think they hit the nail in the head. Very much, you know, some of the things that he struggles with, it, it, it, it, to permeates a lot of what's going on. You see this a lot play out through his life, you know, from development through his teenage years to his young adulthood, it really does tell the story of Bo, unfortunately, you know. Again, Bo gave Valdavinos permission to talk about this with me.
He described the basic characteristics. Folks who were diagnosed with a certain personality disorder, they're generally folks who would rather be owners, you know, they sort of lack close friends. They incorrectly interpret events, including feeling like some external events have personal meaning to them, you know, they dress in peculiar ways sort of eccentric, you know, believe in sort of special powers, you know, perceptual alterations, persistent and excessive sort of social anxiety, you know, which Bo really struggled with. Bo's grand ideas about his future, about his capabilities, the romantic adventures he wanted to make happen.
Valdavinos says those all fit the profile. He said for anyone with a psychiatric illness like this, symptoms tend to get worse when you're under stress. One of the major symptoms is paranoia and the potential to misinterpret situations. And Valdavinos says it's not a stretch to say that's probably what happened when Bo was deployed to Afghanistan, where it's actually dangerous, it's obviously stressful.
Bo's not super tight with the guys in his unit. He starts to think his battalion commander is against them, might even send them on a suicide mission, which is very paranoid thinking. And that all leads to a decision that isn't, well, entirely sane. By that point, I think the paranoia that all kind of pushed him over the edge and he said, I'm doing it.
When you start thinking about the idea of him being Jason Bourne and, you know, him doing special operations to sort of set into that whole narrative that, you know, I'm going to be able to do this, I'm going to go and bring the help and not really thinking through the ramifications of walking off a basin to basically into the Taliban. For most of us, it would be an absolute, sort of an absolute boundaries for us to say, even if I'm frustrated with my command, even if I'm frustrated with this mission, frustrated with the army, there's still something, I think, biologically that's going to keep us from literally walking off a basin. Right, like just self-preservation at that point, when to go to the airport. And so for him to actually do that, you have to think through like, wow, how could he have done it?
And when you look at the whole photo picture, it starts to make sense. Well, let me know things that would happen with Bo at the Coast Guard, what happened in Afghanistan, that's all the peace. The army knows about this diagnosis. At the September hearing, the army prosecutor, Major Margaret Kurtz, gave a preview of the army's thinking on the subject.
She read aloud one of the key points from the psychiatrist, Dr. Lang's report, quote, that in 2009, at the time of the alleged criminal misconduct, the accused was able to appreciate the nature and quality and wrongfulness of his conduct, unquote. In other words, mental illness or no, Bo should be held responsible for his actions. The other day I checked back in with Mark to see if the diagnosis made him think differently about anything.
I guess it's an interesting data point. I don't know that it's the north star of the story. Mark feels like he already knew walking off was not a rational thing to do. So putting a label on Bo's way of thinking didn't really change much for him.
I told Mark that for me, the diagnosis maybe let go of any lingering doubts I had about the truthfulness of Bo's account, like all the details that didn't add up. Well, yeah, if you're paranoid and doing some magical thinking, of course the details don't add up. It makes me believe him that he really was in his mind trying to raise an alarm. Mark already believed Bo though.
So aside from a legal defense, Mark wasn't sure the diagnosis made much of a difference. And he worried in fact that once they heard the diagnosis, people, maybe people like me would disregard everything Bo was saying about his military experience. I do think that for you, the diagnosis, it makes him more credible to you, but it also means you take him less seriously, I think, as a kid with opinions, as like an American soldier with opinions. No, I don't think that's quite right.
I think his assessments in a general way of like the, like, I think we can all agree, like the Warren Afghanistan has not been a success, right? I guess I more think he was kind of right by accident. Oh, right. What does that mean right by accident?
Like he sort of happens to be right, but he's not specifically right in the particular instances he's necessarily giving as examples of the overall failure. But he's responding to real data points, right? I mean, he's not thinking that stuff just from his from his cat log cabinet, Idaho. I guess, but I mean, again, I know we've sort of argued about on them before, but I feel like, you know, his beef with Amna, remember, isn't like we never should have gone up there in the first place.
We never should, you know what I mean? His beef really, at the end of the day, his biggest complaint is this feeling of our commander doesn't care about our welfare. And in fact, it was to the point where he was maybe going to send us on a suicide mission to get rid of us because we were bad for his reputation, right? Like that's not, no.
I mean, there's a lot of different judgments that are stacked on top of each other. And the last one is just deeply paranoid and you can reject it on its face. I don't think there's a commander in the US armed forces who would do anything remotely like what Bo was suggesting. Okay.
So that I just think is just, but the other, but the judgments that proceed that maybe this commander has other priorities in it besides purely the welfare of his soldiers. I think that's clearly on the face of it true, because he did put American lives at risk to retrieve equipment. And that is part of the calculation of war and you can talk to people and up and down the chain of command and they'll say, yeah, shit, like that happens all the time where you weigh someone's life against a piece of equipment. And that may be an everyday calculation, but that doesn't make it any less fucked up, especially if you're the kid that is whose life is being weighed to get the equipment back.
Here's where Mark and I diverge a little. He links Bo's personal experience more directly to the problems of the war than I do. He wants to be careful to separate what Bo's saying from who Bo is. In a case like this, though, that's the wrong.
And Mark sees that. I keep going back to something that somebody said to me a long time ago, which was like, I kind of agree with everything he said, but I still want to punch him in the face, you know? It's like that line from the Big Lebowski. You're not wrong, Walter.
You're just an asshole. I've heard something akin to that sentiment from a bunch of the soldiers who served with Bo. It was not, I mean, leadership without a call. You know, he's right about a lot of the shit.
We all got, we all worried about it. That's Daryl Hansen. Does the fact of his, what he describes as his good intentions matter to you? Yes, it does.
I mean, but an intention like that is not ever justified to me. It's something so huge and such a big decision that, that caused so many consequences with it. I feel like you don't want to have to be God to make that kind of decision. He made like a God-like decision.
I want to be careful not to suggest all the soldiers we talk to are in lockstep here. Some of them, even when we talked to them last summer, said they'd already forgiven Bo and moved on. Others said they'd never get over it. In the past week or two, my producer Dana and I checked in with about a half dozen soldiers, who see if anything they'd heard from Bo so far on the podcast had made them feel differently.
Some said they still thought he was lying about why he left. Others said they believe him now and are trying to forgive what he did, but they just can't quite get there. Here's Ben Evans. He may have had the greatest intention of the world, but yeah, I just don't.
I can't. Yeah, I just don't. Yeah. I talked to John Thurman for a while recently.
John's mother is a therapist and like a lot of veterans, he's also had counseling to help him deal with the after effects of deployment. So I thought he'd be a little more touchy-feely on the question of Bo's mental health. I wanted to know if a diagnosis would help John, not to say that what Bo did was okay, but whether a diagnosis would help John forgive Bo, just personally. I got pretty pushy with John about it.
He was a really good sport. You know, we all experienced the same thing and we didn't walk off. I know. I know.
But you're saying we all experienced the same thing and we drove on. Yeah. And what I'm saying to you is you didn't experience well, yes, we didn't see it from his lens. You know, he was he was getting scared by it.
Yeah. And you weren't. Right. Like you're not perceiving danger in those reprimands.
And he is. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I don't think there was danger in those reprimands because I know, dude, I know that's not the we're not arguing whether he's correct.
We're not arguing whether he's correct. Yeah. I really, really, really try to see it from his side through his lens. And I understand that he and I have very different brains.
Perception or not? I mean, I still can never forgive him. I can't. And it's on principle.
He broke that intimate bond that we all share with each other. That's not something you can ever come back from. I don't care where your head was, Bo, you still fucking did it. You walked off and you betrayed us.
It's like you stop there. Yeah. That's there. It stops there.
And that's just that. That's the infantryman I'd be taking over. I'm a died in the will of civilians from a family of civilians. My father was in the army in World War II, but he didn't deploy overseas.
The only war stories I remember him telling me were about like, carousing in Denver. Sorry, dad. So it wasn't immediately obvious to me why some of the people both served with were not even just mad. They were hurt, deeply hurt in some cases.
What I understand now is that that bond, that brotherhood they feel, it's not just a cliche. Well, it is a cliche, but it's also profoundly true. I think about it this way. In my life, who would die for me?
Really? My mom, maybe? Who would I die for? My kids?
And so imagine you're in a platoon. You become so close, so fast, to all these guys around you. You recognize each other's cough, or they're silhouette in the dark. You would die for the other guys in your platoon, even if you don't like them, you'd do it.
And they would die for you. It's not even hypothetical. It happens all the time. And because of that, personalities aside, these guys become family to one another.
If you walk away like Bodid, you break the promise you all have made to each other. You undermine the whole enterprise. Your family starts to crumble when you need it most. And that's what the soldiers say happened during the search for Bow.
Most friend Chris Ingalls said it was like the soul of their platoon just dwindled. People shrank into themselves. Even afterwards, second platoon felt like they were blamed for bow-leaving, that they were sort of banished from the larger family of the battalion. A sergeant everyone told us they just loved, a guy named Larry Hine, was moved out of the platoon, and replaced by a commander who was to put it gently, much stricter.
After helping with Afghan elections in August of 2009, the platoon went on to a town called Monacan and embedded with Afghan security forces. And they did well enough there that they got accommodations and a visit by General McCrystal. But still, overall, a lot of them just felt robbed. Like their whole deployment lost its meaning.
When I talked to Daryl Hansen again a couple weeks ago, he said after hearing the podcast, he'd soften some Torbo. I don't have as much hate as I do towards him. Even though the world knows Daryl Hansen would have shot him, which I was in the way of. I went to him today.
But what about the time? And I think all, you know, but today I'd probably shake his hands, be like, dude, think about next time, you know, full what you do. Think about it a little bit more, you know, would it worth it? Almost all the soldiers we talked to said they still thought Bow should go to Quorum Marshall.
And Mark, though he thinks it's taking too long, also said it makes sense for Bow to go through the military justice system. After all, Mark says, the United States did put a lot of time and money and energy into getting Bow back. And that's as it should be. But we did take extraordinary measures.
Next time on Serial. Right now, the address serial podcast.org. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode. But first, serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.
Coming up on the next episode of Serial. I had previously had discussions with Somali Warlords, Asian dictators, and Afghan and Surgeon leaders. So given that range of contacts, I didn't find anything unusual about these. The Taliban are like simple state-powered people.
Do you want to deal or not? He's done more serious time than anyone could possibly imagine. I mean, the release video and holy shit, there's Bow again. The old strategy to win this with money, to win this with soldiers with military might was doomed.