Thursday, March 26, 2015

It's Official: Bowe Bergdahl update

Yeah, he's a deserter and a terrorist sympathizer.  Nothing we didn't already know, of course.  If Bergdahl was blameless then the Pentagon would have released the report on him months ago.  Now we find out that he will be charged with desertion.  Meanwhile six soldiers died trying to "rescue" him and President Obama released five terrorists to get him back from his "captivity".

I wonder how many people those terrorists have killed since they were released and how many they will kill in the future.

I wonder when we stopped executing soldiers who committed this type of treason.  A quick Wikipedia search reveals Eddie Slovik as the last executed for desertion, in 1945.  Maybe it is time to update that statistic.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

6 soldiers did not die trying to rescue him. They died during combat operations, in a combat theater, for which they were getting combat pay. BEING there is what killed them. Coming into contact with the enemy was the whole point of them being there. People die when that happens. It is part of the job. There is no evidence that if Bergdahl had not run away that those same soldiers would not still have died in other operations or that MORE than 6 others would not have died instead. you cannot predict the future or calculate the outcomes of what might have been.

A whole lot of the other guys died during the Bergdahl search too. He doesn't get credit for those either.

In this country, you hold people accountable for what they did, not what happened to other people during the next 48 hours. What he did was desert.

NotClauswitz said...

If you don't use it you lose it and it has no value. We should use it.

heresolong said...

GV, Not sure where I suggested that he should be held accountable for the deaths of those soldiers. I also didn't suggest or state that they would be sitting in Hawaii sipping Maitais if he hadn't deserted. Of course they might have died some other way or some other where. But it is also a reality that had he not deserted there would have been exactly zero operations designed to find him and get him back. They would have either been on missions that were actually useful to our goals in the area, or they wouldn't have been on missions.

So yes, I do hold him responsible. He degraded our war effort by his despicable actions. Accountable? Well, that's another matter and no, he is neither being charged nor punished for that, and I didn't suggest that he should be.

Bottom line, he still deserted while in an active hostilities zone, he put his fellow soldiers and the mission at risk, and those are at least two reasons the penalty for desertion is death.