As a longtime lurker and someone who really enjoys and feels that I have gained a lot from this site, in both entertainment and knowledge, I have been waiting to make my first post to be something that would spark conversation.

At the beginning of November when driving home from a long weekend in Asheville, NC I stumbled upon a podcast called Serial, that chronicled a rather mysterious murder case from the 90s in Baltimore in which a boy named Adnan Syed supposedly murdered his high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee. The podcast follows a surprisingly unbiased investigative reporter, considering she works on NPR's This American Life, as she digs into the case, interviewing all associated with it, in attempt to clear up a lot of the murkier details of the case, not simply exonerate a poor Muslim boy wrongly convicted in America. She actually seemed to want the truth, no matter what it was. I was hooked and knocked out most of Season 1 on my drive and finished the rest during my commute in the following week.

Today, Season 2 came out. It centers around the Bowe Bergdahl story. The first episode contains phone conversations between Mark Boal, a movie producer (Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) and Bergdahl. Apparently this is the first released discussion with Bergdahl about his disappearance. In the first episode he claims that his intention was to raise a DUSTWUN while running from his OP to back to a FOB to call attention to poor and in his opinion dangerous leadership and living conditions. I'm calling bullshit, but this should at least be interesting. In the next episode, Sara Koenig, the investigative reporter, calls and interviews one of the Taliban dudes that was around during his captivity. It's pretty enraging to listen to, but interesting all the same. Check it out if you get the chance. It can be found here. [URL=https://serialpodcast.org/]

I hope I linked this properly. I'm sure I'll hear it if I didn't.

I saw this show up in my podcast feed this morning.  It's funny a few months ago Sarah Koenig was spotted somewhere that was linked to Bergdahl.  She vehemently denied that season 2 was going to be on the Bergdahl story but I don't think many believed her.  

I still have some reservations that she might not be totally unbiased in the story telling, but we'll see.  I greatly enjoyed season 1 and I hope they do the story justice and don't "pick sides".  They seemed to try to stay as impartial as they could in season 1.

Kind of interesting that they go from a story that nobody ever heard of to now a story that everybody's heard of.

and



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I had heard that and was skeptical as well. It seemed like they had a good thing going with the unknown case angle. The Bergdahl exchange never sat right with me and if they report on this the way they did Adnan's case, it should prove to be very interesting. Any idea when Bergdahl's court martial is? Curious as to the timing of the release of this podcast juxtaposed with the timing of his trial.

Trust me, by looking at Twitter, few really know the story.

Bergdahl does not deserve enough air time to say  "please don't kill me!" plead for his worthless life.

FREE ADNAN!!!!!

I'm not interested in anything that traitorous fucktard has to say.  The only thing I want to hear out of his mouth is his last breath.

I get that. However, if the Bergdahl story is held to last season's standards, I don't see how this podcast will help him in the slightest. Will likely do far more harm to his case than good. I would hope that the Army, in this instance, like the FBI director "doesn't give a rip" about the politics or optics and does what is right, not what the current admin wants.

I wasn't interested in listening to the podcast, but during the holidays all the podcasts I normally listen to stop producing and all the right wing radio hosts I like go on vacation.  So out of boredom, I listened to it.

 


I wasn't interested at first because I thought it would only be Bergdahl they talked to and it'd be sympathetic.  And Bergdahl as you'd expect, tries to paint his motivation for deserting in the best light possible (he was doing this to raise the profile of his complaints against abusive or incompetent officers and intended to return to the main FOB within 1-2 days).




But the podcast interviews not just the soldiers in his unit who had to look for him, and others who got pulled into the hopeless search for him (they all knew he was in Pakistan and would never find him).  It details the suffering the troops had to go through on extended patrols looking for him.  A platoon of Green Berets were tipped about a house holding Bergdahl.  When they went into it, it was booby trapped with C-4 in the walls.   It could have killed them all.  The podcaster asks what they would have done when they found Bergdahl.  They said they would have shot him.  These were his comrades in the same platoon who knew him best.  They didn't like him before he deserted because he preferred to socialize with the Afghan army soldiers, which they found very weird.




They also managed to interview his captors.  And, surprise, the story Bergdahl told is very different from the one the captors told.  Something interesting is that the captors hated and resented Bergdahl as well.  The women and children hated his smell and appearance, and the guards hated him because they were stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but guard him.




The whole war stopped to look for this really stupid, self-centered and delusional twit.  The search for Bin Laden was also halted so assets involved with that could look for Bergdahl.  The Federalist named him The Worst Millennial of 2015, which is indeed a high bar to meet.




Anyway, I'll probably keep listening to it.  Next episode airs 1/7/16.