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People in town have heard Donald J. Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, regularly call Sergeant Bergdahl “a dirty, rotten traitor” who should be executed or simply pushed from an airplane without a parachute.

The valley that surrounds Hailey is a relatively affluent and liberal sliver in a deeply conservative state, which added to the sense of being under siege in the immediate aftermath of Sergeant Bergdahl’s release.

“There’s some really ignorant people who live some places in the West,” said Fritz Haemmerle, the mayor. “They’re very right wing, they’re very militant, they’re very uninformed and they’re people with guns and with an attitude.”

There is also far more ambivalence about Sergeant Bergdahl, who now faces a court-martial and a possible life sentence on charges of desertion and endangering troops stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, a move that led to his capture by the Taliban.

Sergeant Bergdahl, who is now 29, is not believed to have visited Hailey since his return to the United States. His only public comments have been featured in a podcast, Serial, whose second season is focused on his case. In it, Sergeant Bergdahl said he walked off his outpost in hopes of hiking to a larger base about 18 miles away to tell a general about what he considered the dangerous incompetence of his commanding officers.

Sergeant Bergdahl told the same story to Army investigators, who found it credible. Lt. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, the lead investigator, said at a preliminary hearing in September that Sergeant Bergdahl “had delusional expectations for his deployment. The general also said there was no evidence that Sergeant Bergdahl, who identified with John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” intended to desert or that any soldiers had been killed while searching for him.

The brunt of the threats in Hailey were borne by a small group of women who had led the campaign to free Sergeant Bergdahl. Some knew him because “he danced with their daughters,” said Ms. Horton, the ballet teacher, who also let Sergeant Bergdahl live at her house during stretches of his teenage years when his family life was strained.
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When every member of your unit says you deserted, then it will be hard for the administration to show that he did not desert.

If I deserted, what would I come up with as a story after I was caught?

“I was leaving to ____________” (fill in the blank)

Any defense after the fact has to begin something like that.

I suppose a real nutcase would say, “I was asleep in my bag and a team of special ops Taliban seized me and took me to _______________________”

Sergeant Bergdahl said he walked off his outpost in hopes of hiking to a larger base about 18 miles away to tell a general about what he considered the dangerous incompetence of his commanding officers.

That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. If you have problems with your chain of command, there are channels to file a grievance against your senior leadership and/or CO. If every other of several avenues fail, you've got the IG.

Be-bopping to the next camp to talk to the general is only going to get you hauled into the Security office with MPs asking "What the f&%# are you doing?!" That meeting is never going to happen, that's like walking off your job on the factory production floor, heading up to the front offices, and expecting to have a walk-in meeting with the CEO. When the general does some checking and finds out he never talked to his First Sergeant, chaplain, or Legal, he'll find out what Restriction and Extra Military Instruction are. He was a Sgt. and he was baffled by these concepts? He needed to be drummed out of the service, what an ignoramous. True or false, going forward with that story is the height of stupidity.

"There's some really ignorant people who live some places in the West," said Fritz Haemmerle, the mayor. "They're very right wing, they're very militant, they're very uninformed and they're people with guns and with an attitude."

Twenty one years ago 168 people were killed by Timothy McVeigh. He was executed for his crimes as he should have been. I have NEVER met the person who defended that monster.

There has not been ONE person killed by a 'right winger' in the last 21 years.

But...

There have been 12,660 MURDERS in Chicago since 1995 - the majority of those murders committed by young black males. Year in year out... not something that happened 21 years ago - murders happening everyday in Chicago...(and other large cities in the US.)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago)

What Matthew Rosenberg did was repeat the same kind of hate/lie used against Jews for hundreds of years... lies against large groups of innocent people ... based on one person or maybe none... but used for years to justify hatred toward a group... in this case - conservatives.

Rosenberg should be ashamed of putting the above hate quote by Fritz Haemmerle in the paper. Should I repeat the lie about blood in matza? Even if I can 'quote' some random hater?

Matthew Rosenberg would not make or allow to be made - the same types of generalities against blacks or Jews or any minority... He would demand facts. Not so when the target group is conservatives. Blacks get a free pas even with overwhelmingly larger number of murders committed every month in the United States. Black murder rates are like a McVeigh every month... but there's no generalizing... not the by liberal press...

(Figure 27 shows the percentage of murder offenders by race /ethnicity for r 2011. The majority of murder offenders were Black... http://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2011-Murder-Report.pdf 2011 Murder Analysis Report Chicago Police Department Research and Development Division 53 White 3.5% Black 70.5% Hispanic 24.3)