Bowe Bergdahl, Army Sergeant Held by Taliban Since 2009, Is Released.

[Bad Water Bill]

How about 100 robotic lice generously sprinkled in each beard?

[richhodg66]

http://www.navytimes.com/article/201...rgdahl-release

I also highly doubt that anybody who brokered this deal bothered to consult the operational commanders in Afghanistan to gauge what the effect this would have on the situation there.

[pipehand]

http://www.cageprisoners.com/learn-m...embraces-islam

I'm thinking a very thorough debriefing is in order.

[dragon813gt]

This sure pushed a lot of other things out of the headlines.

[Bad Water Bill]

Makes one wonder just what this is distracting us from?

Oh yes the 38% INCREASE in my electric bill starting TODAY.

[357shooter]

Makes one wonder just what this is distracting us from?

Oh yes the 38% INCREASE in my electric bill starting TODAY.

I think you hit it on the head.

The EPA is supposed to release updated regulations on 6/2, in order to further decrease our carbon output. Just speculating but I think the coal producing states and the related jobs are about done for.

Benghazi seems to have disappeared, at least for now. The same for the IRS, NSA and all other scandals taking shape. Somehow Obama and his cronies will probably avoid jail time - but sooner or later it'll get ugly for the scum. More speculation on my part.

[gray wolf]

The 5 people being held at Gitmo were said to be known terrorist,
BUT, not enough evidence to try them as such. So they were being held indefinitely as a terrorist threat.
Kinda like they want to pick up and hold forever Americans suspected of what ever they want to suspect them on.
This was aired on late night radio news, 1080 AM out of Ct.
Sorry I don't believe anything on the news, if they say it's a sunny day I go out and look for myself.

[Bad Water Bill]

Why is my NATURAL GAS bill also scheduled to increase 28% shortly?

We are supposed to have the largest supply in the world and it is much cleaner than coal.

OOPS forgot the severe penalty because those nasty gas companies used Fracking.

Can anyone tell me where those BILLIONS of dollars are going to end up?

[dragon813gt]

Why is my NATURAL GAS bill also scheduled to increase 28% shortly?

We are supposed to have the largest supply in the world and it is much cleaner than coal.

OOPS forgot the severe penalty because those nasty gas companies used Fracking.

Can anyone tell me where those BILLIONS of dollars are going to end up?

Why weren't you given notice of the rate increase. Increases here have to be approved by the state and there are public hearings on it. You as in individual can ask for a hearing in front of a judge. It happens every time they propose a rate increase. I'm scheduled for a 2% hike if approved. Still trying to figure out why considering the gas is produced in this state. At the cost of destroying the entire northern tier. We're able to chose our energy suppliers so that helps keep the costs in check as well. If a company was to propose a 28% increase they would lose every customer in short order.

[Handloader109]

While I am glad to hear we got him out, I too don't consider him any sort of hero. POWS that are captured under fire, being shot down, etc are, but there are real questions about this guy. No flame suit needed imo

Welcome back, Soldier.

Making poor decisions, getting captured, and being the cause of 5 confirmed enemy being released does not make you a hero. It makes you a person who made a poor decision, got captured, and who is the reason 5 confirmed enemy will be back in Afghanistan to do what they do so well.

Not to mention the lives risked in the initial search effort, and now the lives at risk with 5 more enemy on the loose.

The man may have endured a long captivity, but he is no hero. Not in any sense of the word. Heros drag people out of blown up buildings under gunfire, clean out MG nests, and jump on grenades.

My flame suit is on, so go ahead.

[Outpost75]

THIS GUY WAS A DESERTER!

Five Good Soliders Died Searching For Him.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-of-night.html

We Lost Soldiers in the Hunt for Bergdahl, a Guy Who Walked Off in the Dead of Night
For five years, soldiers have been forced to stay silent about the disappearance and search for Bergdahl. Now we can talk about what really happened.
It was June 30, 2009, and I was in the city of Sharana, the capitol of Paktika province in Afghanistan. As I stepped out of a decrepit office building into a perfect sunny day, a member of my team started talking into his radio. “Say that again,” he said. “There’s an American soldier missing?”

There was. His name was Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, the only prisoner of war in the Afghan theater of operations. His release from Taliban custody on May 31 marks the end of a nearly five-year-old story for the soldiers of his unit, the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. I served in the same battalion in Afghanistan and participated in the attempts to retrieve him throughout the summer of 2009. After we redeployed, every member of my brigade combat team received an order that we were not allowed to discuss what happened to Bergdahl for fear of endangering him. He is safe, and now it is time to speak the truth.

And that the truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.

On the night prior to his capture, Bergdahl pulled guard duty at OP Mest, a small outpost about two hours south of the provincial capitol. The base resembled a wagon circle of armored vehicles with some razor wire strung around them. A guard tower sat high up on a nearby hill, but the outpost itself was no fortress. Besides the tower, the only hard structure that I saw in July 2009 was a plywood shed filled with bottled water. Soldiers either slept in poncho tents or inside their vehicles.

The next morning, Bergdahl failed to show for the morning roll call. The soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company discovered his rifle, helmet, body armor and web gear in a neat stack. He had, however, taken his compass. His fellow soldiers later mentioned his stated desire to walk from Afghanistan to India.

The Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey later wrote that "[w]hether Bergdahl…just walked away from his base or was lagging behind on a patrol at the time of his capture remains an open and fiercely debated question.” Not to me and the members of my unit. Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not "lag behind on a patrol,” as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.

Our deployment was hectic and intense in the initial months, but no one could have predicted that a soldier would simply wander off. Looking back on those first 12 weeks, our slice of the war in the vicinity of Sharana resembles a perfectly still snow-globe—a diorama in miniature of all the dust-coated outposts, treeless brown mountains and adobe castles in Paktika province—and between June 25 and June 30, all the forces of nature conspired to turn it over and shake it. On June 25, we suffered our battalion’s first fatality, a platoon leader named First Lieutenant Brian Bradshaw. Five days later, Bergdahl walked away.

His disappearance translated into daily search missions across the entire Afghanistan theater of operations, particularly ours. The combat platoons in our battalion spent the next month on daily helicopter-insertion search missions (called "air assaults”) trying to scour villages for signs of him. Each operations would send multiple platoons and every enabler available in pursuit: radio intercept teams, military working dogs, professional anthropologists used as intelligence gathering teams, Afghan sources in disguise. They would be out for at least 24 hours. I know of some who were on mission for 10 days at a stretch. In July, the temperature was well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit each day.

These cobbled-together units’ task was to search villages one after another. They often took rifle and mortar fire from insurgents, or perhaps just angry locals. They intermittently received resupply from soot-coated Mi-17s piloted by Russian contractors, many of whom were Soviet veterans of Afghanistan. It was hard, dirty and dangerous work. The searches enraged the local civilian population and derailed the counterinsurgency operations taking place at the time. At every juncture I remember the soldiers involved asking why we were burning so much gasoline trying to find a guy who had abandoned his unit in the first place. The war was already absurd and quixotic, but the hunt for Bergdahl was even more infuriating because it was all the result of some kid doing something unnecessary by his own volition.

On July 4, 2009, a human wave of insurgents attacked the joint U.S./Afghan outpost at Zerok. It was in east Paktika province, the domain of our sister infantry battalion (3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry). Two Americans died and many more received wounds. Hundreds of insurgents attacked and were only repelled by teams of Apache helicopters. Zerok was very close to the Pakistan border, which put it into the same category as outposts now infamous—places like COP Keating or Wanat, places where insurgents could mass on the Pakistani side and then try to overwhelm the outnumbered defenders.

One of my close friends was the company executive officer for the unit at Zerok. He is a mild-mannered and generous guy, not the kind of person prone to fits of pique or rage. But, in his opinion, the attack would not have happened had his company received its normal complement of intelligence aircraft: drones, planes, and the like. Instead, every intelligence aircraft available in theater had received new instructions: find Bergdahl. My friend blames Bergdahl for his soldiers’ deaths. I know that he is not alone, and that this was not the only instance of it. His soldiers’ names were Private First Class Aaron Fairbairn and Private First Class Justin Casillas.

Though the 2009 Afghan presidential election slowed the search for Bergdahl, it did not stop it. Our battalion suffered six fatalities in a three-week period. On August 18, an IED killed Private First Class Morris Walker and Staff Sergeant Clayton Bowen during a reconnaissance mission. On August 26, while conducting a search for a Taliban shadow sub-governor supposedly affiliated with Bergdahl’s captors, Staff Sergeant Kurt Curtiss was shot in the face and killed. On September 4, during a patrol to a village near the area in which Bergdahl vanished, an insurgent ambush killed Second Lieutenant Darryn Andrews and gravely wounded Private First Class Matthew Martinek, who died of his wounds a week later. On September 5, while conducting a foot movement toward a village also thought affiliated with Bergdahl’s captors, Staff Sergeant Michael Murphrey stepped on an improvised land mine. He died the next day.
It is important to name all these names. For the veterans of the units that lost these men, Bergdahl’s capture and the subsequent hunt for him will forever tie to their memories, and to a time in their lives that will define them as people. He has finally returned. Those men will never have the opportunity.

Bergdahl was not the first American soldier in modern history to walk away blindly. As I write this in Seoul, I'm about 40 miles from where an American sergeant defected to North Korea in 1965. Charles Robert Jenkins later admitted that he was terrified of being sent to Vietnam, so he got drunk and wandered off on a patrol. He was finally released in 2004, after almost 40 hellish years of brutal internment. The Army court-martialed him, sentencing him to 30 days' confinement and a dishonorable discharge. He now lives peacefully with his wife in Japan—they met in captivity in North Korea, where they were both forced to teach foreign languages to DPRK agents. His desertion barely warranted a comment, but he was not hailed as a hero. He was met with sympathy and humanity, and he was allowed to live his life, but he had to answer for what he did.

The war was already absurd and quixotic, but the hunt for Bergdahl was even more infuriating because it was the result of some kid doing something unnecessary by his own volition.
I believe that Bergdahl also deserves sympathy, but he has much to answer for, some of which is far more damning than simply having walked off. Many have suffered because of his actions: his fellow soldiers, their families, his family, the Afghan military, the unaffiliated Afghan civilians in Paktika, and none of this suffering was inevitable. None of it had to happen. Therefore, while I’m pleased that he’s safe, I believe there is an explanation due. Reprimanding him might yield horrible press for the Army, making our longest war even less popular than it is today. Retrieving him at least reminds soldiers that we will never abandon them to their fates, right or wrong. In light of the propaganda value, I do not expect the Department of Defense to punish Bergdahl.

He’s lucky to have survived. I once saw an insurgent cellphone video of an Afghan National Police enlistee. They had young boys hold him down, boys between the ages of 10 and 15, all of whom giggled like they were jumping on a trampoline. The prisoner screamed and pleaded for his life. The captors cut this poor man’s head off. That’s what the Taliban and their allies do to their captives who don’t have the bargaining value of an American soldier. That’s what they do to their fellow Afghans on a regular basis. No human being deserves that treatment, or to face the threat of that treatment every day for nearly five years.

But that certainly doesn’t make Bergdahl a hero, and that doesn’t mean that the soldiers he left behind have an obligation to forgive him. I just hope that, with this news, it marks a turning point for the veterans of that mad rescue attempt. It’s done. Many of the soldiers from our unit have left the Army, as I have. Many have struggled greatly with life on the outside, and the implicit threat of prosecution if they spoke about Bergdahl made it much harder to explain the absurdity of it all. Our families and friends wanted to understand what we had experienced, but the Army denied us that.

I forgave Bergdahl because it was the only way to move on. I wouldn’t wish his fate on anyone. I hope that, in time, my comrades can make peace with him, too. That peace will look different for every person. We may have all come home, but learning to leave the war behind is not a quick or easy thing. Some will struggle with it for the rest of their lives. Some will never have the opportunity.

And Bergdahl, all I can say is this: Welcome back. I’m glad it's over. There was a spot reserved for you on the return flight, but we had to leave without you, man. You’re probably going to have to find your own way home.

[popper]

How about 100 robotic lice generously sprinkled in each beard? Probably get eaten by the real ones. "What difference does it make?".
nuf said?

[HarryT]

I also think Bergdahl is a deserter. But I wonder why the US Army kept paying him and increasing his rank while he was training with the Taliban. I'm surprised at all the people that are supporting Bergdahl.

[jcwit]

Does not surprise me in today's US.
Today we make hero's of deserter's.
What have we become?

[Mumblypeg]

Outpost75, Thank you for the truth, that's all we ask for but I am sure that many including myself are not surprised at this... You know, not that I would even go if begged, but "IF" I was to go to the White House for an honorable reason.... I would at least cut my hair and get a shave to look presentable .... I guess some people just have no pride any more.

[Taylor3006]

I also think Bergdahl is a deserter. But I wonder why the US Army kept paying him and increasing his rank while he was training with the Taliban. I'm surprised at all the people that are supporting Bergdahl.

Innocent until proven guilty is why. Same is for that Fort Hood shooter. It sucks but it is the way it works. I do find it odd that he was given rank, in the Navy you earn rank thru testing and time in service but it isn't just handed to you. Maybe the Army does it differently, dunno. I agree that this guy needs investigating and a court martial to find out what the hell went on the night he was captured. If men from his unit died while looking for him and IF he deserted, then he deserves the death penalty.

[Love Life]

In POW status you are still eligible for promotion. I'm not sure if it is non-competitive, but you are still eligible.

[searcher4851]

The report I heard as to why the trade was made is because he was not being considered a hostage, but a prisoner of war. According to the brain trust in power, the whole thing was just a prisoner exchange instead of negotiating with terrorists.
I'd ask just how dumb these people think the American people are, but then I look at who is in the White House, and I guess that answers the question.

[deep creek]

i wonder if given the chance if he would have traded his life to help one of those that traded his for bergdahls???

[starmac]

Probably a dumb question, but how does anyone know he was captured, if he left on his own??