The Truth About Bowe Bergdahl: a conversation with American Cipher author Michael Ames, Ep. 33

The Team House

dee takos

History, Documentary, Society & Culture, Government

4.7 • 929 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2020

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case--why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?--have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire--which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself--an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naïve young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cl7igKj1RI SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/

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Transcript

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0:40.3	Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.
0:43.0	Visit child and family resource network.org today.
0:47.0	Welcome everyone to episode whatever, I can never remember the number of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy.
0:56.5	This is our guest Michael Ames Michael is a journalist and he's the author of American
1:02.3	cipher which is really a deep dive on
1:05.2	Bo Bergdahl, the American soldier who walked off of his base in Afghanistan
1:10.1	and was held captive by the Hakani Network for how many years Michael almost five
1:15.7	almost five years until he was released and it's a super controversial event of
1:22.1	course and your book was pretty controversial as well.
1:26.0	Some of your findings and some of the research that you did with your co-author and we'll talk all
1:31.4	about that but I think people are also wondering where my co-host is Dave.
1:36.2	So Dave believes that he has the cold.
1:41.8	He calls me up or he texts me and he's like,
1:43.7	Jack, I got a running nose. I think it's just a cold man. It could be just the cold.
1:49.3	It could be just that. Or it could be the boomer remover we don't know we just don't know he hasn't
	...

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