Why I Felt I Had to Go to Bowe Bergdahls Hearing

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Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, right, leaves the courtroom facility in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Andrew Craft / The Fayetteville Observer, via Associated Press.

Why I Felt I Had to Go to Bowe Bergdahl’s Hearing

By GARY FARWELL
November 10, 2017


In February 2010, in southeastern Idaho, I buried my eldest son: Chief Warrant Officer 4 Gary Marc Farwell, who was killed in a U.S. Army helicopter crash in Germany. Among the guests at the funeral were a couple from central Idaho named Bob and Jani Bergdahl. The Bergdahls didn’t know me or my son, but they still drove two and a half hours to pay their respects, a gesture I never forgot. The Bergdahls wanted to show their support for other military families in the midst of their own tragedy. The previous June, their own eldest son, Bowe Robert Bergdahl, had disappeared from his outpost near Yaya Kheyl, a village in Paktika Province, a remote area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

After nearly five years of captivity, Bergdahl was released to Army forces on May 31, 2014, in a controversial prisoner exchange that was accompanied by reports that Bergdahl had deserted his post, and that as many as eight soldiers died in the efforts to recover him. Since then the family has been subject to a great deal of ridicule within the military and the media. Last month, Bowe Bergdahl finally pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and during the last week of October, I drove to Fort Bragg, N.C., for his sentencing hearings, to repay the Bergdahls’ gesture in a way.

On the Monday morning the hearings began, I was the first person in the courtroom. Whatever my intentions had been, it felt a bit ghoulish to be there, to watch a person sitting within earshot of a roomful of soldiers and civilians revisiting in great detail the worst decision of his life. In the courtroom, Bergdahl stood visibly tense, flanked by his military and civilian lawyers, his eyebrows deeply furrowed. When the judge asked if he wished to withdraw his guilty plea, Bergdahl said “no” so softly I could barely hear it.

After a motion from the defense to dismiss the case was considered — along with President Trump’s comments about Bergdahl, and whether they would affect the fairness of his treatment by the courts — the judge recessed the hearings until Wednesday at 10 a.m. That morning I was waiting in the courtroom once again for the proceedings to begin, when a man who looked to be in his 70s or 80s, dressed in a fresh digital camouflage uniform and with insignia indicating that he was a colonel, sat down right next to me. He wore a green beret and a gold Special Forces ring and had Ranger and Special Forces tabs along with airborne wings and a combat infantryman’s badge with one star on top, which meant he’d fought in at least two wars for this country. “I’ll be glad when this crap is over,” he told me. “I got my firing squad standing by.” The country and the army were “going to pot,” he complained, lacking discipline and values. I nodded.

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More at link.

[yallerdawg]

1. Not exactly clear what this article is about.

On Wednesday at Fort Bragg, as the hearing wound down for the afternoon, I lingered in my seat as the crowd thinned, then leaned against the bar separating me from the defense. I caught Bergdahl’s eye and extended my hand. Two days later, I was back at the veterinary hospital where I work, finishing my last surgery of the day, when I saw the news: The judge had ordered Bergdahl dishonorably discharged but gave him no prison time. Many people I know and respect, who consider Bergdahl a traitor, were furious. But many of those people never walked into a recruiter’s office.

Like the Dotard.

[procon]

2. The writer's heartfelt compassion was clear in this poignant story.

He saw how war had changed his own son. He saw the calamity of his son's mental health problems and how that illness drove him to try to kill himself. He wrote extensively about his disgust at encountering the disgraced officer who showed up in camo, a murderer whose punishment amounted to little more than a snap on the wrist.

The writer saw the inequality of what passes for justice in the manner in which the military court handled the case of a murderous officer vs a young enlisted man with mental health problems. He shook Bergdahl's hand because, more than most of us who "never walked into a recruiter’s office", he understood how the horrors of war affects young men and he saw the same psychiatric ordeal that made his son want kill himself playing out in the tragic events surrounding Bergdahl's bewildering story.

I