Photo by United States Army | CC by 2.0
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl is likely to get a concentrated taste of military “justice” when he is sentenced later this month for two violations of military law. On Monday, October 16, 2017, he pleaded guilty before a military court to “desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.” Bergdahl claims that he left his unit in the field in Paktika province of Afghanistan in 2009 for what he said was an effort to report a “leadership failure” in his unit. He was subsequently captured by the Taliban and tortured. He repeatedly attempted to escape from captivity, and was ultimately freed in a trade for Taliban prisoners after five years of captivity. He has spent the last three years as a clerk at Fort Sam Houston in Texas and was charged in 2015 with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.
Readers will recall the photographs and news accounts of Bergdahl’s parents at the White House where President Obama explained that the U.S. never leaves prisoners of war behind in defending the prisoner exchange.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump stated, or more accurately ranted, categorizing Bergdahl as a “dirty rotten traitor.” The latter was a curious response from a person who never spent a single day in the military, received a diagnosis of bone spurs that excused him from the military during the Vietnam War, and could best be described as a “sunshine patriot.” While tens of thousands of U.S. lives were ended…