This is the third in a series of posts about Serial 2, a podcast focused on the war in Afghanistan. It centered around Bowe Bergdahl, and I wrote responses to the podcast for my first semester International Relations major-required course, Introduction to World Politics. We learned about the international state system, and challenges to international politics today.
In the first zoom out of the Afghanistan: A Sense of Place, Afghanistan looks bigger than I thought it was. I Googled to discover Afghanistan is about the same size as Texas. In a closer zoom, the country is divided into four sections: regional command north, west, east, south, and in the east, the RC Capital, a circle within the center. RC Capital is Kabul province, and east command divides into 14 sections. South of Kabul is Logar, Paktika, and below it, another region also labelled Paktika. Zooming in closer, in the north of Paktika, on the southern border of the country, is FOB Sharana and below it, OP Mest. On the Pakistan side of the eastern border is North and South Waziristan, around where Bowe was held.
From the third episode, Escaping, it looks like Bowe Bergdahl is at least 60 (and probably much more than that) away from FOB Sharana, in Pakistan. Wherever he is held, especially in Pakistan, it is far from any metropolis, and far from U.S. personnel. In the third episode of the Serial 2, the listener begins to feel a sense of the vast aloneness Bowe felt in captivity, and two escapes he attempted in the first year of captivity. I was much harsher in my opinion of Bowe when I had only heard the first part of the story, but now hearing about this first year and how much he suffered, he was still a young, twenty-three year old guy, not much older than me. I do not think the media treatment of Bowe, the sensationalization of him was at all deserved.
At one point, in his second attempt, he manages to be outside for about nine days, and sees the night sky, for the last time looking at stars before he returns with Special Forces. He also sees American drones, too far above to ever see him on the ground. To me he’s an image of a person, like a shipwrecked sailor on an island, invisible to someone (or something) far away. Bowe felt great and overwhelming impossibility, and even in escape he was trapped.
To me, this episode encapsulates his imprisonment, if only by comparing it to the possibility of escape and the joy he took in being outside, of seeing the sky, something listeners know and experience. I think he should called a survivor, and Sarah Koenig points to this escape as an identifier that Bowe is not a sympathizer, as he is termed in the media, because even in the midst of malnutrition and abuse, he works to get away. The entire episode, Koenig is asking Bowe, what happened? And Bowe is detailing the mundane, the everyday, and the process of creating an escape plan, of gathering a nail and a PVC pipe and a key, the abuse and neglect but that he keeps trying. Surviving keeps him functioning.
Bowe’s entire world is what he has, what he might be able to create for himself. While Bowe is held by the Haqqanis, he survives by making himself absolutely filthy, and by learning that everything he does has an immediate trade-off. For his first escape, nobody is watching and he runs to a roof, but he is seen and imprisoned and beaten.
I wrote in my first episode response that Bowe was acting selfish, and I still think part of that is true. His idea to walk to FOB Sharana was misguided, and almost certainly doomed to not succeed (I would say fail but I do not think, even if he made the walk, that he would have been received well), but everything afterward was excessive. Everything done to Bowe is to keep him weak and reliant on the network to survive, and part of that is the geography of where Bowe is held. He’s close enough to hear a military base, and kept in the mountain fortress where there are other people, but it is enough going on to maintain the resources to hold him in one area and to disguise him in the bustle of a community. Serial 2’s Escaping is about the dichotomies: of being captured and free, of being alone and still in the company of other people.
