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War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mills
1850

Michael,
It's great you have still have contacts willing to send you insider information that exposes the lies of the Obomination and IT'S criminal element!
Bergdahl is clearly guilty of desertion, collaborating with the enemy during wartime, and treason. He should be tried for all those offenses
His father should also be tried for treason plus collaborating with and giving aid to the enemy!

The doctrine that we always do all we can to recover one of our own is an immensely important pledge we make to all of our troops and citizens. That is true with regard to this soldier even if there are questions about how he wound up in the hands of the enemy. We had one pilot in Viet Nam that we expended many resources to recover and several other soldiers did give their lives in this eventually successful recovery.

My concern is at what price do we do this? Suppose the enemy demanded 20 soldiers? A thousand? The handover of a small nuclear weapon? A few biological weapons? Withdrawal of our forces in certain parts of Afghanistan? Return of Bin Laden if we were holding him captive? Is there a point where we would have to say no? I understand that if I am the parents (God take care and bless them) I am willing to do almost anything. That is why we have leaders and government to make these tough decisions. I pray to God that we never see the day when we learn that one or more of the five Taliban who were set free carried out a jihadist mission that cost the life or lives of others.

Dear Michael,
Bergdahl is a deserter. Every war has them. The thing they have in common is that they are usually a square peg in a round hole. He should have been spotted early on by his closest NCO and action taken to isolate and discharge him before he became a liability. It's called man management and it is a skill every NCO should learn. Action now should be to debrief him and put him in prison for a short term. His card is now marked and no doubt the security services will put him on their watch list. The thing now is not to be seen to vindictive by the public.
Regards

At first I just assumed all the uproar was mostly a certain amount of anti Obama rhetoric that will follow any president. The more I learn, the more I am highly offended. I can now only hope that he will be tried for desertion and aiding the enemy during war. I also hope that the individuals that we traded had been secretly injected with a slow incubating virus.
Oh well, neither will happen and more innocent people will die with Bergdahl's finger prints all over the hypothetical trigger.

The report reads 'kidnapping'. I do hope that is changed to 'denounces citizenship' and he is deported with his father or spends
50 years in the brig on latrine duty.

Will spread around. Be safe, and God Speed.

Trading Bergdahl for 5 Taliban seems to be the only way the U.S. can get to the bottom of whether he deserted (and if he did, try him for desertion) as well as get some Taliban out of Gitmo so their intentions could be determined. The uproar over their release seems strange in light of all the U.S. citizen violent criminals we release every year on our own soil. Anyway, if the Taliban guys do return to their former occupations, we can now go after them with drones and deal with them once and for all. I'm personally glad my tax dollars are no longer supporting them.

When the leader of your country is the enemy, we can't expect him to punish anyone collaborating with the enemy. The enemy in bed with my enemy is my enemy.

We provided information on his exact location and activities several times over a years period of time and was told he his not a priority. WHY, did Obama make him a priority that caused a release of 5 terrorists? We heard the first lie that he was in poor health-lie-, after that lie didn't work they claimed he was going to be killed-again a lie. Where does it end, lets pray not with the destruction of our nation.

What happened to Human Reliability programs? It appears it needs to be re-instituted from the cuuent Commander in Chief on down.

I have yet to read anything 1st hand that states they watched him walk off base. Nothing that quotes Pvt Bergdahl as saying, "I walked off base." So, no. Nothing is "clear," other than Internet anon's talk a lot of smack about things they know nothing about and likely don't know what they don't know.

I don't care if he sent boohoo letters to his parents. People vent. Hell, its the main reason I hated remote assignments because it's hard to vent about the a$$hat you work with when he could be right outside the tent, or the next table over.

It's convenient no one mentions two escape attempts, but you take Taliban icom chatter as Gospel. SMH

wow. I think you would benefit from Stephen Pinker's Better Angels book - It makes this whole thing understandable - also The Deserters by Charles Glass

I have been one of your readers since you started and I have always found you to be Enlightened.

While I do believe the following:
1. He deserted his unit
2. He assisted and was friendly to the Taliban
3. People died trying to find/recover him

What is NOT clear... at ALL... is:
1. Why he left
2. how much duress he was under and what he helped the Taliban with.

Pvt Bergadahl was a "special" person. He was raised sheltered and his parents did not seem to raise him with any sense of duty. He seems (though I have no direct personal knowledge of this) to be a bit narcissistic and thinks the everything revolves around what he things or wants. Did he walk off to help the Taliban or did he just want to "get away" and hike to India? Both are bad, both should be punished, but they are vastly differing levels of "bad".

What has not been discussed is what, if any, medical conditions he may have had, other problems (like "walking off" during training) he had prior to deployment, and what the unit did or did not do about them. None of this excuses him abandoning his unit and fellow Soldiers. People I have talked to who know more about this than I do seem to think that he never should have been deployed in the first place due to a myriad of factors that I will not discuss here.

Take that for what it is worth... in the end, we will have to wait and see what comes out from the investigation/court-martial. Hopefully the army will do the due diligence no matter what comes out.

I am glad he is coming home. I am just a bit dismayed at the administration's attempt to "spike the football" and do a touchdown dance to celebrate this as some great victory. Once again, they show a lack of understanding of military culture. To us the "How and Why" are important. Your personal honor is important. Your commitment to your country, the Army, your unit, and your fellow Soldiers are all important. Points that are lost on politicians on both sides of the isle as they try to use this to score political points regardless of how it affects our Nation.

I read through the documents. It appears that many of the commenters here didn't. This is the first piece of reliable information I've seen on this subject and I feel like it has shed a lot of light on things.
The most important part is the translations of the chatter that was being monitored. He was hanging out with some Afghan civilians who were captured with him. That should say to anyone with common sense that his intent wasn't to "go to the other side." My take on this information (which can of course be wrong) is that he was disillusioned with what was going on and attempting to connect with common Afghanis, not Taliban.
Is he a hero? No.
Is he a traitor or deserter? Probably not.
Did he break the rules? Yes.
Does he deserve punishment? Yes.
Has he been punished enough already? Probably.
Please stop politicizing this issue. I don't give a damn about your opinion about Obama. Obama was barely even president yet when this private was captured. So many of you are allowing your hatred of the President cloud your judgment.
If anyone has a right to be angry with him, it's the people who had to go looking for him and the families of anyone who lost life or limb in that process. The rest of you should be ashamed for being so judgmental of a young soldier. There's a reason that "dumb" and "private" are heard together so often.
I know that not everyone is going to agree with me, but if you don't I ask that you at least wait for the results of the inquiry before declaring that a fellow soldier deserves to die.