Beaudry Robert "Bowe" Bergdahl (born March 28, 1986) is a former United States Army soldier who was held captive from 2009 to 2014 by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bergdahl was tried by general court-martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy,[9] and on October 16, 2017, he entered a guilty plea before a military judge at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live ... We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks ... We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them [...] I am sorry for everything.

[28] Bergdahl walked away from his battalion on the night of June 30, 2009, at observation post (OP) Mest near the town of Yahya Kheyl in Paktika Province.

[35][36][37] Bergdahl had written (prior to his departure) e-mails to his parents in which he reported having become disillusioned with the war effort and bothered by the treatment of Afghans by American soldiers.

[26] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said: "The questions about this particular soldier's conduct are separate from our effort to recover any U.S. service member in enemy captivity" and that the military will investigate how Bergdahl was captured.

[46][47][48] On December 25, 2009, five months after Bergdahl's disappearance, the media arm of the Taliban released a video of "a U.S. soldier captured in Afghanistan" entitled "One of Their People Testified".

[50][51][52] He described his place of birth, deployment to Afghanistan, and subsequent capture and made several statements regarding his humane treatment by his captors, contrasting this to the abuses suffered by insurgents in prisons.

[62] In early 2014, it was suggested in some media that the United States government had attempted to secure the release of Bergdahl by paying a ransom and that the intermediary had absconded with the money.

Mark Allen was on a mission to gather information about Bergdahl from two Afghan villages in July 2009 when his unit was ambushed by insurgents using small arms, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

[66][67] Officers who served in Afghanistan during that time told CNN that diverting resources to find Bergdahl delayed the closing of Combat Outpost Keating,[64] where eight American soldiers were killed on October 3, 2009, when 300 Taliban insurgents overran the base.

At 10:30 a.m. (EDT) on May 31, 2014, Bergdahl was handed over by 18 Taliban members to a special operations team[72] in eastern Afghanistan,[73] near Khost on the Pakistani border, in what was described as a "peaceful handover".

[76] On June 13, 2014, he was flown by military plane to San Antonio, Texas, where he was taken to the Brooke Army Medical Center to complete his recovery and reintegration.

[81] The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (NDAA) mandates that all prisoner transfers from Guantanamo Bay require 30 days' notice to Congress, which was not done in this case.

[84][85] For months, U.S. negotiators sought to arrange the transfer of five Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp to the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

The transfer was intended as one of a series of confidence-building measures designed to open the door to political talks between the Taliban and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government.

[88] On May 31, 2014, President Obama appeared with Bob and Jani Bergdahl in the White House Rose Garden where he spoke about the prisoner swap that resulted in the recovery of their son.

"[91] Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said he was "extremely troubled" and that "This fundamental shift in U.S. policy signals to terrorists around the world a greater incentive to take U.S.

[92] This sentiment was repeated by Congressmen Buck McKeon and James Inhofe, who released a joint statement saying that terrorists now have a "strong incentive" to capture more soldiers.

[93] Ted Poe, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, said the Bergdahl exchange appeared to violate the United States policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

[94] Anderson Cooper asked White House spokesman Jay Carney if it can "still be said that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists" to which Carney replied: It can be ... because when you put on the uniform of the United States and you go and fight on behalf of your country in a foreign land at war, and you're taken captive by the enemy, the principle that we don't leave our men and women behind doesn't have an asterisk attached to it depending on who's holding you.

The group is not on the State Department's official list of terrorist organizations and has long been a battlefield enemy in the ground war for control of Afghanistan.

Ditto the Taliban leaders released over the weekend.Time pointed out that the United States and other countries have "negotiated with terrorists" multiple times in previous years.

[99][100][101] National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on ABC News' This Week on June 1, 2014, several days after the exchange, saying Bergdahl "served the United States with honor and distinction.

"[102] Following the announcement that Bergdahl was formally charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, much debate regarding the administration's handling of the negotiations resumed, centered on Rice's comment and then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki's statement in late March 2015 that the swap was "absolutely" worth it.

[103][104][105] In September 2014, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 249 to 163 (with 22 Democrats joining the Republican majority) to pass a nonbinding resolution condemning President Obama for failing to give Congress thirty days' notice before exchanging Bergdahl.

[110] During the course of Dahl's inquiry, Bergdahl told investigators that he left his position in June 2009 to report on "misconduct in his unit" and that he had intended to return quickly.

They contended that the effect of President Trump's statements violates a prohibition on unlawful command influence, a legal concept in military justice.

Senior Judge Reggie Walton partially granted the government's motion to dismiss the case, but he rejected claims that comments from President Trump and Senator John McCain had influenced the military court-martial.

[147] After sentencing on November 3, 2017, his civilian attorney indicated that the defense team would still seek to have the Prisoner of War Medal issued to Bergdahl for the five years he spent in captivity.