The news just broke that Bowe Bergdahl has been given a dishonorable discharge, with no jail time. People are outraged. Matthew Betley (a former Marine officer and author of a series of political action-thrillers), told me, “As a former Marine, I am literally sitting here with jaw on the government-stained carpet, wondering how we’ve come to this point in society. Bergdahl gets no prison time and only a dishonorable discharge? This decision is a hammer-blow to the face of every service member who served honorably. We are no longer a society of accountability. I literally feel like a part of our society just died.”
If you want to someone might feel so strongly, go revisit Steve Hayes’ piece from 2014, titled: “We swore to an oath and we upheld ours. He did not.”
In it, Hayes spoke with members of Bergdahl’s platoon shortly after Bergdahl was freed. Their reactions were searing:
In an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, National Security Adviser Susan Rice claimed that Bergdahl “wasn’t simply a hostage, he was an American prisoner of war, taken on the battlefield.” She added: “He served the United States with honor and distinction.” “That’s not true,” says Specialist Cody Full, who served in the same platoon as Bergdahl, and whose tweets over the weekend as @CodyFNfootball offered an early firsthand account of Bergdahl’s departure. “He was not a hero. What he did was not honorable. He knowingly deserted and put thousands of people in danger because he did. We swore to an oath and we upheld ours. He did not.” “He walked off—and ‘walked off’ is a nice way to put it,” says Specialist Josh Cornelison, the medic in Bergdahl’s platoon. “He was accounted for late that afternoon. He very specifically planned to walk out in the middle of the night.” “He was a deserter,” says Specialist Full. “There’s no question in the minds of anyone in our platoon.” . . . “The amount of pain he’s caused,” says one of Bergdahl’s platoon mates, his voice trailing off. After a long pause, he resumes. “The time he was DUSTWUN was the most miserable time of my life. It was absolute hell. A bunch of us had a pact if we found him. We’d each get him in a room for five minutes and short of killing him we could do what we want.”
