I don’t know that he was a POW, either. A deserter*, who gets into trouble with the enemy for crimes that have nothing to do with his fighting against them, does not automatically become a POW, IMHO.
A deserter, whether he is convicted as such, or not, is still a deserter.
I don’t think BB is a hero, and I will be surprised if many say that he was. He definitely wasn’t ‘one of *their *heroes’.
It was pretty clear to me that he walked away from his post because he was nuts. Still is. That is still probable cause for desertion. He is still one of us, and I, for one, am happy for his family that he is home and safe, even if in a US military prison. The US really needs to do something about mental health care.
Mr. Chairman, The Great State of Dickens casts all of its 14 votes for the next President of the United States, The Great Sun Jester!
The armed forces stopped designating US personnel as “prisoners of war” in 2000. The term now in use is more general: “missing/captured.” Bergdahl was classified as “missing/captured” soon after he disappeared.
If Bergdahl is acquitted of the charges, do you still think he should have been left in Pakistan?
Bowe Bergdahl had no business even being in the military. I heard he was booted from the Coast Guard for mental health reasons and it sounds like someone in the recruiters office may have pulled some strings to get him enlisted. If those rumors are true, I almost think he’s been punished enough already.
So I’m certainly okay with the swap that we made.
Opinion.
Rumor
Pure speculation.
Ah, so you do know what a rumor is.
Yeah, let’s base the validity of a government action on rumor and speculation.
This is why we have this nifty thing known as “a trial”.
Monty - get a grip, man. Saying that Bergdahl probably didn’t belong in the Army isn’t a totally whacko idea, nor does it have any bearing on his trial, nor does it have any significant meaning on whether or not a prisoner exchange was justified.
The press has published bits of his personal journals, and it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that he wasn’t in a good state of mind. There seems to be a reasonable basis to conclude that he left the Coast Guard after 26 days due to some type of bad fit - his friends told journalists that it was because of mental illness. The Army last summer couldn’t confirm whether they had actually reviewed that episode or not before allowing him to enlist.
I think making a deal to get him home was unquestionably the moral thing to do. But implying that Sgt Bergdahl and the Army were most likely getting along like peas and carrots? Are you kidding? What’s your real issue here?
Get a grip yourself, Ravenman. Nowhere did I imply that “SGT Bergdahla nd the Army were most likely getting along like peas and carrots.” Also, unless the Army has changed rather drastically since I went through BCT, “his friends” don’t constitute competent medical authority.
Maybe he didn’t belong in the Army. If he didn’t, then the Army probably shouldn’t’ve promoted him to SGT. But the determination for what happened is for the trial to do. And that should be based on actual fact, not rumor and what little evidence manages to find its way into the media.
Wait, now someone has to be a “competent medical authority” for us to give any credence to what they say on such matters? If my friends tell you that I have hay fever in the spring, are you going to dismiss what they say because they aren’t MDs?
You’re making it sound like folks on a message board have the same duty as jurors to ignore news reports in favor of eyewitness or expert testimony. In reality, we’re a bunch of people reading newspapers and forming our own conclusions that have no legal consequence on anyone else in the world. I will bet you anything that if someone looked through your own posting history, we would find that you formed conclusions on various issues based on media reports, rather than on some courtroom-level standard on the rules of evidence. Do you doubt that?
The bizarre part is that your calling out people who seem to fundamentally agree that getting him back was the right thing to do, and the courts should determine if he did something criminally wrong.
And the Army promoted Bergdahl to specialist and then later sergeant while he was in captivity. The fact he was promoted is neither here nor there with respect to his quality of a soldier.
Being acquitted of the charges is a legal matter. It depends if he did what he was accused of, not of what a jury convicts him of.
The idea that desertion should be a capital crime is itself ridiculous. It’s just shit based on jingoism. The idea that any employer can force you to work without you being able to quit is ultimately a form of slavery, even if you sign up for it. Consent doesn’t last forever.
Also, for the interested, Bowe Bergdahl is the subject of Season 2 of Serial, the podcast that was a huge hit last year when it examined the murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction (which has subsequently been overturned) of her then-boyfrien, Adnan Syed.
Here the website for Serial, with the first episode of Season 2, up -
Meant to add - Wapo article about Serial & Bergdahl -
That’s just stupid.
The military isn’t just “any employer”. It’s an organization that’s charged with fighting the country’s wars, and as such, operates under different rules than other employers.
Most of the reason desertion is punished so harshly is because if there’s not a certain deterrent, some soldiers may find that it’s preferable to take their chances with the military legal system rather than fighting the enemy. It’s somewhat of a relic of conscripted militaries, in that if you weren’t really wanting to be there, there had to be a reason you just didn’t bail, and that something was the harsh penalty for desertion.
That said, I tend to think that the military has a pretty good balance right now- you can get things like entry-level separations if you decide the military’s not for you early on, but they punish the bailing out on your comrades due to selfishness very harshly- mostly for the deterrent factor, but also as a certain backup to the idea that everyone has everyone else’s back, and transgressors of that code are punished harshly.