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Bowe Bergdahl: Hero, Victim, Traitor

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Back when conservatives were outraged that Bowe Bergdahl hadn’t yet been released, Bowe was called a hero. Because his ongoing captivity was a mark against the Obama administration, it was convenient for Bergdahl to be cast in the role of POW. Bergdahl was the simple and pure-hearted American boy left to languish in a Taliban camp while the Obama administration focused all its energy on gay marriage and the environment.

Now that Bergdahl has been rescued, conservative critics have shifted modes from hero-worship to victim-blaming, calling Bergdahl a traitor for having wandered off of his base in Afghanistan. But doesn’t walking away from your heavily fortified compound and into a combat zone, with no plan and only the most basic of necessities, sound much more like a cry for help than desertion?

Until his release, Bergdahl had been the last remaining POW in our most recent theaters of combat. It’s a fundamental part of the ethos (and a point of reassurance during recruiting) of the American military that we don’t leave a man behind, so President Obama traded a handful of Gitmo prisoners for Bergdahl. The prisoners, hailed as a “Jihadist Dream Team” by some nameless entity at Fox News, would have likely been released soon anyway. They’re now scheduled to spend a year in Qatar, and if they survive that, will most likely be killed by drones in Waziristan in 2016. Hillary Clinton gets the scalps.

But the efficacy of the prisoner swap is only an officially sanctioned sideshow to the juicy psychodrama central to the entire affair, the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s disappearance. While it’s still a bit hazy pending an official military investigation, the narrative of Bergdahl’s abduction has thus far vacillated between Bergdahl being captured while on patrol, to his becoming disenchanted with America’s goals and wandering off his base in something resembling a fugue state. Regardless, six soldiers were killed in the ensuing search for him. That, and the fact that some people dared to call Bergdahl a hero for being, you know, an American soldier who survived five years of captivity, has some people so mad that his small Idaho home town has had to cancel its homecoming celebrations because of the backlash.

Years before the announcement of the swap, the narrative was circulating that Bergdahl was the most insidious thing you can accuse an American soldier of being (besides, maybe, a snitch): a traitor. A Non-Commissioned Officer from Bergdahl’s own platoon, Sgt. Matt Vierkant, said that he was mad about the exhaustive searched launched for Bergdahl back in 2009, saying that Bergdahl “deserted during a time of war, and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him.” Gerald Sutton, an Infantryman who served alongside Bergdahl, said that he didn’t want Bergdahl to be hailed as a hero, but rather “face court martial.”

These are guys who personally served with Bergdahl, so you can imagine what other people, for whom he’s just a two-dimensional ideological target, are saying about the guy. The vehemence of this camp can be broken down into two co-dependent categories: one, Bergdahl is a traitor who wasn’t worth saving; two, because Bergdahl was a traitor who wasn’t worth saving, he deserved his captivity. You can almost play a Mad Libs with conservative victim-blaming using these two points of reference. Try it yourself using Trayvon Martin, people living in poverty, or victims of sexual assault as examples. The formula for this type of indignation is simplistic and wonderfully tautological: the most powerless agent in any situation gets the blame for the situation that has robbed him or her of power.

Without knowing all the details of Bergdahl’s case, it seems clear that anyone wandering from the relative safety of their fortified confines and heading into Afghanistan on foot, armed only with a few bare essentials is pretty obviously succumbing to the outrageous pressures of being in a war. Beyond opposing that war, and sending letters home denouncing American strategic intentions, setting off alone into countryside seems more like a sad cry for help than a calculating attempt to undermine American military efforts.

The most notorious case of an American soldier abandoning a base before Bergdahl was Robert Bales, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison for massacring sixteen civilians in Kandahar. Wandering off a military base into a combat zone is not something someone in a healthy state of mind does. So, when conservative pundits and Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers express outrage at the deaths of the soldiers who were ordered to searched for him, one wonders why that indignation isn’t directed at the policy makers who put them there in the first place, or the mental health screens that Bergdahl may have slipped through, or at everyone who had contact with him and witnessed his changing behavior and odd state of mind without doing anything to get him help. In other words, one wonders why the blame is placed on the one person in the story who seemed to have the least control.

Of course it is harrowing to hear the outraged parents of soldiers who were killed searching for Bergdahl. Andy Andrews, father of deceased Lt. Darryn Andrews, said on the show Fox and Friends that he thinks there was a government conspiracy to cover up the reasons his son actually died. Mr. Andrews and his wife Sondra are hoping that Bergdahl will be tried for treason, and they think that their son’s death is tainted by its having been part of a search party for a traitor. But there is a more fundamental question we should be asking here: what exactly would be worth dying for in Afghanistan?