Twenty minutes after Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his remote Army outpost in Afghanistan in the middle of a summer night, carrying little more than vacuum-packed chicken, knives, water and a compass, he began to realize just how dire his predicament was.
“I’m going, ‘Good grief, I’m in over my head,’” Bergdahl said.
“Suddenly, it really starts to sink in that I really did something bad,” he continued. “Or, not bad, but I really did something serious.”
Bergdahl recounted his experience publicly for the first time in the premiere episode of the second season of the podcast “Serial,” which was released at 6 a.m. Thursday. In interviews with the screenwriter Mark Boal, he explained in his own words why he had left his base in June 2009, an action that prompted a manhunt involving thousands of troops and led him to spend nearly five years in brutal captivity under the Taliban.
His odyssey ended in May 2014, when the Obama administration swapped him for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a deal that was heavily criticized by Republicans.
The prisoner exchange soon set off a charged political debate over whether Bergdahl was a traitor who had endangered his comrades or a confused soldier who had wanted to warn senior commanders about leadership problems in his platoon. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said two months ago that Bergdahl was “clearly a deserter.”
Bergdahl is awaiting a ruling on whether his case will go before a court-martial.
By agreeing to let “Serial” use his interviews with Boal, who was conducting research for a movie he plans to make, Bergdahl will have a chance to make his case to a wide audience.
“As you can imagine, he’s been the subject of a lot of sound-bite coverage,” Boal, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and producer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “He has a definite point of view about hit-and-run TV reporting, and so this was the opposite of that.”
The high-profile topic is a significant departure from the show’s celebrated first season, in which the narrator, Sarah Koenig, plucked a story about a murder in a Baltimore suburb out of obscurity. She spent many hours interviewing Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the crime in 2000.
“Serial” was downloaded more than 100 million times and earned a Peabody Award. It was widely viewed as an influence in a Maryland court’s decision to grant Syed a hearing to introduce new evidence, an important step toward potentially getting a new trial.
In the first episode of the new season, Koenig said that as Bergdahl stood, scared, in the open Afghan terrain, he briefly contemplated returning to his outpost, but decided against it.
“After all, the guys there are watching for people coming toward them, and they’re manning big machine guns,” she said. “He might get shot.”
Instead, Bergdahl told Boal, he altered his initial plan, which was to trek 18 miles to a larger military base to raise concerns about problems in his unit. Now, he said, he would also track Taliban insurgents placing improvised explosive devices in the road and deliver that information to his superiors.
“When I got back to the FOB, you know, they could say, ‘You left your position,’” he said, referring to his forward operating base. “But I could say: ‘Well, I also got this information. So, what are you going to do?’” That would have been a “bonus point,” he added, to mitigate “the hurricane of wrath that was going to hit me.”
As the new season begins, Bergdahl’s case has reached a critical juncture: At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Gen. Robert B. Abrams is expected to decide soon what charges he should face.
Army prosecutors initially accused him of desertion (a potential five-year sentence) and endangering troops who searched for him (a potential life sentence). But the Army’s investigator, Lt. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, testified at a preliminary hearing in September that prison time would be “inappropriate” and that Bergdahl was truthful and sincere — while also suggesting he was delusional. The hearing’s presiding officer, too, has recommended that he not be subject to jail time or punitive discharge, according to defense lawyers.
On the first podcast, Bergdahl explained his departure from his base just as Dahl said he had during the investigation: He wanted to create a crisis in order to get an audience with high-level commanders, so he could describe what he saw as leadership problems that could endanger troops. But the sergeant also said he had wanted to demonstrate that he was a stellar soldier.
“I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying to prove to the world, to anybody who used to know me, that I was capable of being that person,” he said, adding that in some sense he wanted to emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the espionage movie character.
Bergdahl’s chief defense lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, said Wednesday: “We have asked from the beginning that everyone withhold judgment on Sgt. Bergdahl’s case until they know the facts. The ‘Serial’ podcast, like the preliminary hearing conducted in September, is a step in the right direction.”
(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)
The program’s producers were reluctant to discuss future episodes or to say how many there would be.
“Do we have a ‘Jinx’ moment or something like that?” Julie Snyder, an executive producer, said, referring to the dramatic conclusion of the HBO documentary series “The Jinx,” in which real estate scion Robert A. Durst may have confessed to murder. “No, we’re not holding back on something that the world needs to know.”
The producers declined to comment on whether they had Dahl’s investigative report, which the Army refuses to release despite efforts by Fidell and some news organizations, including The New York Times, to make it public.
Boal, the writer of “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” said he had begun speaking to Bergdahl a few months after the sergeant returned to the United States. Boal planned to make a movie about him.
Bergdahl was initially skeptical of Boal’s Hollywood connection and was not familiar with his movie work, Boal said. But after speaking for a couple of months, the two grew more comfortable with each other, and Boal began recording their conversations for “research purposes.” He recorded 25 hours.
“There was never any intention for the tapes being public,” Boal said.
This year, though, Boal and Hugo Lindgren, the president of Page 1, a movie and television production company, realized they had a trove of great material in the tapes. Lindgren, a former editor at The Times, was looking for advice and took them to Snyder so she could offer an “honest opinion if this stuff was good as audio,” he said.
Lindgren said he did not anticipate that the tapes would become part of the “Serial” podcast.
Snyder and Koenig had already begun reporting for a second season. But that story was going to take time — they declined to discuss what it was about — so they listened to the tapes and were intrigued. Koenig said she was initially a “very uneducated consumer of this story. But when I went back and read all the reporting, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Once they were able to get a handle on their own reporting needs, they became confident that the Bergdahl story would work for the second season.
Boal asked Bergdahl for permission; he agreed after listening to the first season of “Serial” at Boal’s request.
Bergdahl was interested, Boal said, that he could tell his side of the story over multiple episodes. (Koenig said the season would be “eight to 10-ish” installments but cautioned that this could change.)
Listeners familiar with “Serial” will find that its catchy theme song has been modified. “We wanted to change it because the theme the first year really belonged to that story,” Snyder said. MailChimp, last season’s only sponsor, will be joined by a few others. “We didn’t make much ad revenue off the last season,” Snyder said.
She said future episodes would be about more than just Bergdahl and would also shed light on unanswered questions like whether his Taliban captors quickly spirited him over the border into the Pakistani frontier, where they had a haven.
“Exactly how long did the search last? What were the consequences of the search? Was this all a search in the name of Bowe? Was this top cover for stuff that they wanted to be doing, but they already knew Bowe was in Pakistan anyway?” she said. “All of that is super interesting, and we definitely are heading down that path.”