Serial for Breakfast

I sometimes ask friends if they are fans of the "Serial" podcast. It's a risk, let me tell you, because I usually end up saying it like this, "Do you listen to 'Serial'?" And of course, if they don't know the show, they're hearing, "Do you listen to cereal?" So far no one has inadvertently confessed to listening to the breakfast food, but to the uninitiated conversation partner, it can make for a tense 30 seconds in which I try to explain that, no, in fact, I understand that breakfast cereal doesn't talk. You know?

If you know, then...

Can I just talk a little about my perception of Bowe Bergdahl right now?

He breaks my heart. He's the trapped idealist. He wants to protect people. And the military had (has?) this idea of counter insurgency that can sometimes come close to peacemaking. And how great would it be if we were making peace? So great! But what could possibly go wrong is that if you're using soldiers as peacemakers, the soldiers aren't being soldiers, and they may resent you for it. The soldiers are ill-trained and ill-suited to the job of humanitarian. They are trained to follow orders, not be adaptable. They are trained to kill a person, not to smile politely on the street, not to hand out watercolors to children. Mixed messages.

So, I'm listening to Bergdahl pose intense questions that eventually move him to action. (Arguably the dumbest action, desertion, but whatever.) At one point, he asks how a person could lead a platoon when he appeared to be more concerned about the army's equipment than the lives of his soldiers. Bergdahl was shocked that a soldier's life was not prioritized over equipment. (It's a calculation... it costs between half a million and $1 million to get a soldier to Afghanistan. It costs roughly that to buy a counter-IED vehicle.)

He is trying to learn the language and customs of the people, trying to win them over in small ways, as a thinking person might who is attempting to be counter-insurgent the way he understands it, which comes off as someone trying to be creatively likable.

I'm just thinking about how this guy trained with the wrong people. Join the Peace Corps, dude. Better yet, stop trying to find the ones to blame and kill; leave that to those in your platoon who could. You, Bergdahl, you become a creative peacemaker. You learn history, territory, hierarchy of the new place, and explain their fears to us, explain our fears to them. Help nations decide on a best course of action. Even after listening to the last episode on this, I wonder what he'll become.