Bowe #Bergdahl's Views Shifted After First Taste of War

At the Wall Street Journal, "Private Was Gung-Ho, but Soon Complained About Army's Strategy":

Bowe Bergdahl arrived in Afghanistan ready to kill.

Like many soldiers heading into a war zone for the first time, the 22-year-old Army private was eager to get into the fight. As he and his unit prepared for battle in late 2008, he approached his squad leader at their Alaska military base with a memorable question.

"The first thing he said was: 'Can I cut off the face of the first Taliban I kill and wear it like a mask?' " said Josh Korder, an Army soldier who said he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

The bravado didn't last. Then-Pfc. Bergdahl's view of America's war began to turn after his first big firefight on an Afghan mountainside in May 2009. A month later, after complaining about the Army's strategy, he disappeared from his post.

Now that Sgt. Bergdahl, 28, has been released after nearly five years in Taliban captivity—he was promoted during that time—some of his friends and fellow soldiers are speaking out on the question at the heart of the controversial prisoner exchange that freed him: Why did he vanish?  "I've been thinking about it since the day he left," said Mr. Korder. "Where'd Bergdahl go?"

Was he trying to switch sides? Did he want to leave the war behind and become a nomad? Was he betrayed by two Afghan police officers who Mr. Korder said mysteriously fled from the same outpost the day the soldier disappeared?

The answer rests with Sgt. Bergdahl in a U.S. military hospital bed where he is probably unaware of the political turmoil his release has created. A spokesman for his family declined to comment on Friday, as did the Army.

The Army and the soldiers who served with Sgt. Bergdahl have no doubt that he walked away from the tiny military outpost on June 30, 2009. A classified Army investigation concluded he voluntarily left the compound in eastern Afghanistan, but it stopped short of characterizing it as a desertion, said military officials familiar with the report.  Some soldiers who lived and fought with then-Pfc. Bergdahl described a man with conflicting and often contradictory views of the war.

Pfc. Bergdahl at one point complained to them that the Army's soft-edged "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency campaign wasn't the way to win the war. But he spent hours hanging out with Afghan police officers, studying the local language and praising their culture, they said.  He chafed for a time at not having more chances to attack the Taliban but appeared to respect the way Afghan insurgents fought.

Zach Barrow, a 27-year-old Army gunner who rode in the same truck as Pfc. Bergdahl, described his shift.

"It seemed like he was this die-hard, Rambo-esque soldier who wanted to kick a— and take names who then became this Peace Corps kind of guy who wanted to help the people," Mr. Barrow told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview about Sgt. Bergdahl.

Soldiers who trained with then-Pfc. Bergdahl described the arriving Army private from Idaho as a quiet loner who favored books on Buddhism over video games. He told friends he was named after Chick Bowdrie, the tough Texas Ranger in author Louis L'Amour's cowboy short stories.

Especially at first, Pfc. Bergdahl was eager to fight. In May 2009, shortly after he arrived in Afghanistan, he took part in a mission to rescue an Army unit stuck in the mountains after a roadside bomb had disabled one of its armored vehicles.

On the narrow mountain road, a vehicle in his convoy hit a roadside bomb, leaving his unit stuck in the middle of Taliban-dominated terrain for days. As the stranded soldiers grew anxious, waiting for commanders to come up with a plan, Pfc. Bergdahl fantasized about life in Afghanistan.

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