Bowe Bergdahl: US soldier in new Serial podcast ‘left Afghanistan base to

But over the past several months he spoke extensively with screenwriter Mark Boal, who shared about 25 hours of the recorded interviews with Sarah Koenig for her popular podcast, “Serial.”“As a private first-class, nobody is going to listen to me, ” Bergdahl said in the first episode of the podcast, released Thursday.

The US soldier who was held for five years by Taliban-linked insurgents says he walked off his base in Afghanistan in a stunt to prove he was like fictional Central Intelligence Agency movie spy Jason Bourne.

“All I was seeing”, he said, “was basically leadership failure – to the point the lives of the guys standing next to me were in serious danger of something going wrong, somebody being killed”. Suddenly, it starts to sink in that I really did something bad. It’s further unclear whether Bergdahl has been coached to say these things in order to demonstrate good intentions or disillusionment as he waits to hear whether the Army plans to drop the two desertion charges against him, one of which could lead to life in prison.

In 2014, he got his wish, via a controversial prisoner exchange that saw the United States release five Guantánamo Bay detainees in return for Bergdahl’s freedom.

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A Taliban propaganda video released Saturday, July 18, 2009 shows Bowe Bergdahl as a prisoner.

At the time of the exchange, the administration said negotiations were tenuous and they feared any leak of information would threaten Bergdahl’s life.

The Army still has not decided what it will do with Bergdahl.

In the episode, Bergdahl says he left his military outpost in Afghanistan in June 2009 because he was trying to get an audience with people high-up in the military so he could reveal potentially risky problems in the unit’s leadership. It is uncertain whether Bergdahl will go before a court martial. “What I can say is he, like everybody else, is ready for this to be over so we can move on to other things”.

“Like, doing what I did was me saying, ‘I am, like, I don’t know, Jason Bourne, ‘ ” Bergdahl said. “I was capable of being what I appeared to be”, Bergdahl says in the episode. Asked if put up a fight, he said no, he only had knives.

An Army officer has recommended that Bergdahl’s case be referred to a special court-martial, a misdemeanor-level forum, but the final decision rests with a general overseeing the case. “The contrast between the podcast and the strident, politically-inspired calls for drumhead justice (at best) could not be sharper”, Fidell said.

Some of Bergdahl’s account had already become public in a September preliminary hearing of his criminal case: the soldier walked away from his outpost to send out a radio signal that he was “DUSTWUN” – duty status-whereabouts unknown.

Dahl, who interviewed Bergdahl at length in his investigation, described him as “young, naive, and inexperienced”, and also “unrealistically idealistic”, adding that “I believe he is remorseful”. He said he expected to be imprisoned, but felt it was worth it. “In time of war, he set down his weapon, took off his uniform and left his comrades, and that is called misbehavior before the enemy”.