![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/635937961404992842-bergdahl-lawyerjpg.jpg\")
Defense lead counsel Eugene Fidell speaks to members of the media Sept. 18, 2015, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, during a break in a preliminary hearing to determine if Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will be court-martialed.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Darren Abate\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n “The more Americans know about this case, the better,” Fidell said in an email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An\u00a0Army\u00a0spokesman didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment about the new documents during after-hours Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the interview, Bergdahl expressed misgivings about how he and other\u00a0soldiers\u00a0were sent to help retrieve a disabled armored vehicle before encountering explosives and enemy fire that turned a six-hour mission into one lasting several days. None of the men was killed, but Bergdahl said an officer complained they were unshaven upon their return to base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said he began to worry that if he didn’t say anything, a future bad order could get someone in his platoon killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He described coming up with a plan to leave the observation post his platoon was manning: “The only thing that I could see was, I needed to get somebody’s attention.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He ruled out going to the media and instead decided to trigger an alarm by sneaking off and then walking to a larger base nearby. He described his thought process, referring to himself in the third-person: “That guy disappears. No one knows what happened to him. That call goes out. It hits every command. Everybody goes, what has happened?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within a couple days, he planned to show up at the base: “the\u00a0Soldier\u00a0shows up … People recognize him. They ID him. They go, ‘What did you just do?’ And that\u00a0Soldier\u00a0says, ‘I am not saying anything about what I did until I am talking to a general.’ “<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, he wound up in enemy captivity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said he left a post in Afghanistan in 2009 to draw attention to what he saw as bad decisions by officers above him, according to documents released Wednesday that also show he was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":29520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":70,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,70],"tags":[],"coauthors":[861],"class_list":["post-37978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-army"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"EVYV2UFBCVFHZKZWRFXABQA23M","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-army\/2016\/03\/17\/sgt-bowe-bergdahl-explains-his-reasoning-in-newly-released-documents\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n