Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
Army Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl said he deserted his unit “to highlight poor leadership” and because he wanted to be like the movie character Jason Bourne.
“Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don’t know, Jason Bourne. I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing,” Bergdahl said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “Serial” podcast.
“You know, that I could be what it is that all those guys out there that go to the movies and watch those movies, they all want to be that, but I wanted to prove that I was that.”
Among Bergdahl’s claims is that he left his unit “to create Dustwun – a radio signal that stands for ‘Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown.’” The move was to demonstrate his unit’s alleged poor leadership with the deserter stating he understood his flight would result in a manhunt and a “hurricane of wrath.”
Bergdahl said he realized he was “in over his head” and decided to take the Bourne route to collect “intelligence and look for the Taliban before turning himself in as a way of limiting the amount of trouble he faced.”
He said the Taliban captured him after he got lost. He was confronted with six or seven men with AK-47s on motorcycles in the desert. Bergdahl became a prisoner of war for five years.
“And they pulled up and just…That was it,” he said.
Bergdahl insists poor leadership in his unit was the real problem.
“And what I was seeing, from my first unit all the way up into Afghanistan, all I was seeing was, basically, leadership failure, to the point that 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,” he said.
His desertion lead to the deaths of six fellow soldiers who went on missions to get intelligence of Bergdahl’s whereabouts or in attempts to rescue him.
Bergdahl was released when President Barack Obama traded him for the release of five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay. It is uncertain whether Bergdahl will go before a court martial.