Even if Bowe Bergdahl was disillusioned with the Afghan war, he was a casualty, not a coward
At dawn on April 6, 1943, along the North African battlefront at Wadi Akarit, a young British soldier named John Bain watched a unit of Seaforth Highlanders pass through his lines on their way to fight German troops on the ridge above. On that day, General Montgomery wrote, Britain’s fighting men suffered “the heaviest and most savage fighting we had had since I commanded the 8th Army”.
The Seaforths dislodged the Germans, and Bain moved up the hill with his Gordon Highland Regiment to secure the position. More than a hundred Seaforths were killed and wounded, and the corpses of German and Scottish soldiers lay everywhere. Bain described the scene: “My own friends went around looting the corpses, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing. Off their own people. Why that is so much worse than taking it off the Germans, I don’t know, but it was somehow.”
Bain, who had fought at El Alamein and other battles, was shocked and suddenly, as he wrote, “seemed to float away”. In psychiatric terms, he suffered a “fugue,” a desperate and necessary escape from unbearable reality. In military terms, he deserted.
Bain, better known after the war as the poet Vernon Scannell, was one of an estimated 100,000 British soldiers who deserted during the Second World War. Most suffered nervous breakdowns, called variously battle fatigue, combat psychoneurosis and, nowadays, post-traumatic stress syndrome. Bain, who was sent to a brutal military detention centre, returned to duty in time for D-Day.
He wrote about waiting in his landing craft to face the German guns at Juno Beach:
What I with many others that day shared/was pre-traumatic stress disorder, /or, as specialists might say, we were “shit-scared.”
A few months later, in the High Vosges mountains of eastern France, the Germans had dug in and stopped the advance of the American Seventh Army. The static warfare, trenches, steady artillery bombardment, trench foot and loss of morale resembled First World War combat. It was too much for a 19-year-old sergeant called Steve Weiss, who had endured terrible suffering in Italy and France, won battle decorations, seen most of his comrades killed and needed medical treatment as much as any soldier with a physical wound.
“I was so depressed I didn’t give a shit,” he explained to me years later. “If you want to shoot me, shoot me.” He was sentenced to life with hard labour, a term commuted after an army psychiatrist examined him nine months into his punishment.
None of the deserters whose lives I have examined left their posts because they opposed the war.
Which leads us to Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier freed by the Taliban in return for the US releasing five Guantanamo Bay inmates. He deserted his comrades in Afghanistan five years ago after reportedly becoming disillusioned with the war.
Shortly before Bergdahl was taken hostage, the British journalist Sean Smith spoke to his platoon. One soldier said of the Afghans: “These people just want to be left alone.” Another added: “They got dicked with from the Russians for 17 years and now we’re here.” The first went on: “Same thing in Iraq when I was there. These people just want to be left alone. Have their crops, weddings, stuff like that, that’s it, man.”
Bergdahl was not quoted but he may have shared this disenchantment with the war and the dissonance between what he believed he would do in Afghanistan and what actually happened there.
So much disinformation, from those for and against the controversial prisoner exchange, surrounds his story that we are unlikely to know the truth until Bergdahl breaks his silence. In the meantime, he must be traumatised not only by his months in the field but by five years as a captive in conditions that can only have been appalling and terrifying.
My experience of captivity by Muslim militants in Lebanon in 1987 was, I can assure anyone who has not been through it, unforgettably miserable. I stayed a mere two months, and I had not come straight from the trauma of life as a combatant.
For the time being, a little compassion may be more appropriate than condemnation. A Second World War US Army manual, Psychology for the Fighting Man, noted: “Such a sufferer from war shock is not a weakling, he is not a coward. He is a battle casualty.”
Charles Glass is the author of Deserter: An Untold History of the Second World War (Harper Press)
