Posted on 06/11/2014 5:57:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Army sergeant and rescued Taliban prisoner Bowe Bergdahl has been caught up in a web of conspiracy theories and political noise since his handover in Afghanistan early last month, but those who know him are rejecting suggestions that he was a "a calculating deserter." The Washington Post today published excerpts from Bergdahl's journal, which he mailed along with a laptop and his copy of Atlas Shrugged, to his close friend Kim Harrison just before leaving his post and getting captured in the summer of 2009.
"Trying to keep my self togeather," he wrote, mixing philosophical musings and misspellings. "I'm so tired of the blackness, but what will happen to me without it. Bloody hell why do I keep thinking of this over and over."
Bergdahl, his friends said, "sometimes painted his fingernails black and identified with Japanese samurai warriors and medieval knights." He called himself "the lone wolf of deadly nothingness." He'd also been discharged from the Coast Guard in 2006 for psychological problems (he told friends he'd "faked it") but was taken by the Army anyway in the dark, two-war days of 2008.
"I"m worried," he journaled before being sent off to Afghanistan. "The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I'm reverting. I'm getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness."
Bergdahl also developed Ayn Randian ideas about finding "complete freedom":
On June 27, he sent an e-mail to his friends titled Who is John Galt?, a reference to the hero of Ayn Rands novel Atlas Shrugged, about individualism in a dystopian America.
I will serve no bandit, nor lair, for i know John Galt, and understand . . . Bergdahl wrote. This life is too short to serve those who compromise value, and its ethics. i am done compromising.
Three days later, Bergdahl walked off his post.
On the last page of his journal, the Post reports, Bergdahl imagined "a story about one going-crazy-to wander the earth alone."
What a fruitcake
Earlier the story was that he mailed his things home and told them to ‘use’ his things.
I think a lot of what is coming out in the last few days is BS from the white hut. Hagel, this story, trying to make out he was deeply depressed....
I'll work with al Qaeda though.
Reading comprehension was obviously not his strong suit.
sometimes i fantasize about leaving everything i know behind, and taking off for Kansas, where nobody knows me... and starting a new quiet life... kind of like that gal in Sleeping with the Enemy (the Julia Robert's character)... i would find a job and live in a small town...
The gubmint will redefine Bergdahl as a Tea Party member!
But of course.
OMG! He’s a right-winger! Stone him!
Espousing “Atlas Shrugged” and manifesting anti-American (never mind anti-religious) tendencies are not necessarily contradictory. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmPLkiqnO8 for just one example why. “You’re too intelligent to believe in Gott,” she told WFB. Economics is only part, and perhaps not so major a part as some of us choose to believe, of the Conservative ethos.
He’s not fit to sniff Eddie Willer’s jock.
He likes Ayn Rand... Must be a tea party kook.
He goes Galt SO HARD that he goes and makes himself a lackey to an all-controlling band of heroin dealers whose central belief is that EVERYTHING is pre-ordained by God?
And those men believe that ANY time a man has the feeling of having made an individual choice, that feeling is an illusory MIRAGE because NOTHING can exist outside the direct control of ALL POWERFUL God..?
And the only leverage he affords the Taliban is simply because by an accident of FATE he happened to be born in the USA..?
He is THAT Galt and he is THAT much an advocate of free will?
Wow.
And I get irritated when I see conservative commentators defending the economic system of the United States out of habit, as if we're still a capitalist free market.
We're not living in the same America as our ancestors. That Obama was twice elected should convince every conservative of that.
It's not surprising the young are very confused right now.
An unusual Atlas ping.
Big Gov Guy #1: “They’re not buying our story guys, what do we do?”
Big Gov Guy #2: “Let’s tell ‘em he reads Ayn Rand!”
All Big Gov Guys: “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
If he did????
He is a deserter. There are way too many witnesses to believe otherwise.
I saw the Medic from Bergdahl’s unit a couple of hours ago on TV. The host was asking him specifically if he thought Bergdahl was crazy. The Medic said no.
In a combat zone, nobody is going to tolerate a crazy person. It’s too dangerous. Nobody wants to go on a patrol with a kook.
OK, it doesn't make any sense at all.
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