Bergdahl opens up in new ‘Serial’ podcast

It is the 29-year-old’s first interview since he left his base in Afghanistan in 2009 and was held captive by a group affiliated with the Taliban for five years. “I’m way over my head”… suddenly it really starts to sink in”, Bergdahl said.

“I was in the open desert, and I’m not about to outrun a bunch of motorcycles, so I couldn’t do anything against, you know, six or seven guys with AK-47s”, Bergdahl said.

“In this room, in this blackened dirt room, it’s tiny”, Bergdahl said in the first episode in National Public Radio’s “Serial” podcast, which will focus on his case.

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 unsafe problems in the unit’s leadership.

“All’s I was seeing was basically leadership failure, to the point where the lives of the guys standing next to me were – literally from what I could see – in danger of something seriously going wrong and somebody being killed”, Bergdahl says in an interview. The Taliban later on captured him and he now faces court martial and a life sentence. “You’re standing in this blackened, dirt room that’s tiny and just on the other side of that flimsy wooden door, that you could probably easily rip off the hinges, is the entire world out there-it is everything that you’re missing”. He returned to the United States a year ago in a controversial prisoner exchange involving five Taliban prisoners.

But that’s not how military officials – and some members of the media – saw Bergdahl’s case: He was charged in March with desertion.

Bergdahl said he often wondered, “What am I?”

Bergdahl’s fate is now in the hands of Gen. Robert B. Abrams, the current FORSCOM commander, who has succeeded Milley as the convening authority in the case.

Among the more shocking findings of the report was the fact that investigators found the Taliban Five resumed their terror-tied activities once their transfer to Qatar was complete.

“DUSTWUN” is the title of Season 2 of the “Serial” podcast”. Bergdahl admits he left on his own volition with a plan to return.

Republicans in the House of Representatives armed forces committee on Wednesday released a report that said US President Barack Obama had not informed Congress about the prisoner exchange in a timely manner.

Of course, the big question is whether or not the podcast will be able to match the success of it’s first season, which garnered more 100 million downloads. Getting to the heart of his story and why he went AWOL is only one fraction of a larger puzzle that Serial is putting together with this second season.

With Season One wrapping up last December, anticipation for a new story has been building, with the first episode confirming that rather than rehashing a little known murder case, it would take a close look at something that was all over the news. “I was trying to prove to myself, the world, to anybody that knew me that I was capable of being that person”.