General says Bergdahl doesn’t deserve jail

The Army general who carried out an investigation last year into the alleged desertion of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said he believes that a jail sentence would be “inappropriate,” despite the massive search that followed when Bergdahl walked away from his unit’s outpost in Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl testified here Friday that he found Bergdahl “unrealistically idealistic” about other people and remorseful for his actions.

In June 2009, Bergdahl left his platoon’s outpost, Observation Post Mest in Paktika province, with plans to run 19 miles to the larger Forward Operating Base Sharana, cause a disruption and get the attention of a general, Dahl said. Instead, he was captured by insurgents who held him for five years.

“I do not believe that there is a jail sentence at the end of this process,” Dahl said.

Bergdahl, 29, faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison.

Dahl was ordered to investigate Bergdahl’s actions last year after the soldier was recovered by U.S. Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as part of a controversial swap approved by the White House in which five Taliban detainees were released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They now live in Qatar.

The general interviewed Bergdahl for hours in August 2014, compiling a 371-page transcript of their conversations. The investigation lasted 59 days. Dahl had 22 members on his investigative team, and 57 people were interviewed, he said. Bergdahl’s interview came at the end.

Dahl found that Bergdahl left his platoon without his firearm because, he said, he wanted to blend into his surroundings until he reached the larger base.

Dahl called Bergdahl “very bright and very well-read”and fascinated by samurai warrior culture. He knew he would get into trouble for running away from his base, but he told Dahl that he felt compelled to do so at the time because he was concerned that his platoon was in danger because of what he perceived as poor leadership.

Bergdahl was deeply critical of many fellow soldiers, Dahl said. Despite being a low-ranking enlisted soldier, Bergdahl thought that he should have a larger role in targeting the Taliban. He considered taking a fellow soldier’s M9 pistol with him on his run to Sharana but probably decided against it because he didn’t want to get him in trouble.

“I think he actually believed that if five Taliban rolled up on him, he would have been able to dispose of them,” Dahl said.

Instead, Bergdahl was quickly captured and beaten in the process, Dahl said. He was shuttled between a number of insurgents that first day on motorcycles and in vehicles, while U.S. soldiers frantically searched for him.

“I got the impression they didn’t know what the heck to do with him,” Dahl said of the insurgents who captured Bergdahl.

The soldier was beaten with hoses and copper wire, starved and left without medical treatment despite severe diarrhea for three and a half years while in captivity, according to a senior defense official who described his treatment Friday.

Terrence Russell of the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency choked up while describing how insurgents with the Haqqani Network abused Bergdahl.

Even the women and children who were told to feed Bergdahl and take him to the bathroom mistreated him, with one child hitting him repeatedly with a chain, Russell said.

“Sergeant Bergdahl was held in conditions where if it were a dog, you would be thrown in jail for pet abuse,” Russell said.

Bergdahl tried to escape multiple times, at one point making it nearly nine days before he injured his hip and was taken captive again. The soldier ate grass to survive while free, according to Russell, who described Bergdahl’s treatment as worse than anything he had seen since the Vietnam War.

Bergdahl will require a lifetime of medical care as a result of the injuries he sustained during captivity, a medical professional said Friday.

Curtis Aberle, a family nurse practitioner and case manager for Bergdahl at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, said the soldier suffered muscular nerve damage in his lower legs, degenerative back damage and a loss of range in motion in his left shoulder that prevents him from lifting heavy objects.

Bergdahl was held in a crouched position for long periods of time while imprisoned, Aberle testified Friday, and he would be unable to deploy again.

The detail is important in Bergdahl’s case because he could be denied medical benefits if convicted. Aberle said that when Bergdahl attempted a modified version of the Army’s physical fitness test in the last few months, walking 2.5 miles caused his legs to swell “to the point where he could not wear any boots.” The condition is likely permanent, he said.

“It’s my opinion that Sergeant Bergdahl does not meet retention standards for the Army and should not remain in the military,” Aberle said.

Aberle testified on the second day of what is known in the military as an Article 32 hearing, the military’s equivalent of a grand jury hearing, except that it is public. The officer overseeing the hearing, Lt. Col. Mark Visker, will make a recommendation about whether Bergdahl should be court-martialed to Gen. Robert Abrams, who is in charge of the case.

Prosecutors on Thursday had called three witnesses to describe the scale of the search for Bergdahl and the risks it posed for soldiers.

The hearing wrapped up Friday afternoon.

This story was originally published September 19, 2015 at 2:01 AM with the headline "General says Bergdahl doesn’t deserve jail."