The episode continued to try to answer perhaps the thorniest question of all in the Bergdahl case: Did American soldiers die searching for him? As far as the public knows, the Army did not carry out an official investigation or create a report answering that question. At least one former leader in Bergdahl’s battalion said no. The former head of intelligence in Afghanistan at the time said absolutely, yes. And then there were a lot of “sort of,” “maybe” and “yes and no.”

How can it be so gray? For one, in the weeks and months after Bergdahl’s disappearance, the patrols that went out were not always clearly dedicated to his search and rescue. Much of the time, soldiers didn’t know why they were going out for patrol, and higher up the chain, the reasons for patrols could be an “umbrella,” as Serial’s Sarah Koenig put it – it could be to find a certain Taliban leader, to take special outreach teams into the community and/or to try to find out information on Bergdahl’s whereabouts. His search was a reason for patrol often sandwiched in with other reasons for patrols, or requests for other resources.

Did people die on patrols after Bergdahl disappeared? Yes. Were they searching for Bergdahl when he died? Maybe.

To be sure, a lot of blame has been pinned on Bergdahl for deserting his post, one of the most egregious things one can do in the military. But as the Serial team wrapped up the season they zoomed out to the bigger picture – what it means to be at war, the haziness and ambiguity of this war in particular, and the public’s anger and confusion surrounding the War on Terror. And in between the big picture and the particulars of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl lie some interesting parallels.

“The question of how the country ultimately views him speaks to our capacity for forgiveness in some ways and also the ambivalence about Bowe reflects the larger confusion of wars,” Mark Boal, the producer whose taped interviews with Bergdahl propelled the season, said in the final episode, highlighting the differences between previous wars. “Because there’s this incredible haze over our thinking about the War on Terror because these wars just seem to be so hard to define, it seems like as a country we don’t know what to do with this guy.”

Bergdahl current works desk duty at Joint Base San Antonio while he awaits his military trial.

On May 21, 2014, President Barack Obama, flanked by Bergdahl’s parents, took to the White House Rose Garden to announce Bergdahl’s rescue after five years as a prisoner of war. Days later, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on network television that Bergdahl had served “with honor and distinction.”

The two served as a match that sparked a fiery war of words that included his former platoonmates making the cable news circuit to reject the hero portrayal and a bitter division between Capitol Hill and the Pentagon. A Government Accountability Office investigation concluded that DoD broke the law by not giving Congress 30-day notice of the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees who were traded for Bergdahl.

Cue heated congressional hearings and then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on the hot seat, defending the fact that Bergdahl remained in Germany for months after his release – too long, according to some lawmakers questioning Hagel.

And then there was one of the biggest questions of all for Hagel: Did anyone die in the search for Bergdahl? He insisted no, but it remains to be determined whether that’s true, the Serial team hinted.

For more on the Serial podcast and Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s case, click here.

In this episode we learn that Bergdahl was one part of a much bigger, more complex picture of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan — especially foreign relations between the two countries and the labyrinth of diplomatic efforts going on at the time. We hear about the “fraught and fragile” diplomatic process and failed attempts at reconciliations and peace talks as far back as 2001. And we find out how it ended up that Bergdahl would be traded for five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“It wasn’t a disaster and it wasn’t a brilliant achievement. It was a successful and necessary operation, but it wasn’t going to end the war,” Jim Dobbins, who was the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time of Bergdahl’s rescue, said in the episode.

The episode poses the question of what Bergdahl’s release to the U.S. meant in broader terms. Was it a tidy victory for the Taliban, who got everything they wanted for someone they were going to give up anyway? On the other hand, the U.S. had to get Bergdahl back somehow, was preparing to pull out of Afghanistan and needed prisoners out of Gitmo.

The next episode promises to delve more into what came next after Bergdahl’s rescue: We’re teased with a brief exchange about Bergdahl’s parents being assured he wouldn’t face serious charges and they probably wouldn’t need a military lawyer. We know now, of course, that wasn’t the case. So what happened in between?

In Serial podcast episodes 7 and 8, which were released within 24 hours of each other as two parts of one episode titled “Hindsight,” we learn some key things about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

For those who haven’t followed the Bergdahl case closely, it probably came as a surprise to hear that his time in the Army wasn’t his first go at the military. In 2006, he went to Coast Guard boot camp, where he suffered a mental breakdown and was subsequently hospitalized and discharged from the service.

A mental health professional who evaluated him at the time noted that Bergdahl should get a green light from a psychiatrist before rejoining the military – but that message apparently never made it to Army recruiters. But even if it had, it may not have prevented him from enlisting. At the time, the Army had relaxed standards and was issuing more waivers in response to the war in Afghanistan, where they needed more boots on the ground.

Another critical fact we learned in these episodes is that Bergdahl is diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which we learn makes sense with his personality: isolated, eccentric, socially anxious and paranoid, among other traits. It fits with the Bergdahl we’ve come to know through Serial, preoccupied with moral code, obsessed with being a warrior and convinced that Army leadership was out to get him and his platoonmates.

Undoubtedly, the diagnosis will be used in his defense as his legal proceedings move forward. But does it answer questions about why he walked off post – or just raise more?

Click here for more “Discussing Serial.”

We already know Bergdahl sees himself as a whistleblower of sorts, claiming that his goal was to catch the attention of higher-level Army officials and reveal wrongdoing and bad leadership. In “5 O’Clock Shadow” we hear more about that – namely, a battalion commander that Bergdahl believed could put his group in danger as retribution for making him look bad, and a perceived dissatisfaction with the direction of Army ground operations.

Bergdahl deployed to Afghanistan in the early days of Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, or COIN, which aimed to win the support of Afghan villagers as a way to beat back the Taliban. As soldiers note in the episode, that often meant handing out candy and watercolor maps of Afghanistan to locals, not kicking down doors or shooting bad guys. In other words, it was far from the image those soldiers had when they signed up for the Army.

Under COIN the Army struggled to convince locals that they weren’t there because they hated Islam, and instead wanted to join forces to combat a common enemy – soldiers on the ground struggled with an image problem much bigger than themselves or their platoons or battalions. COIN deployed them in more diplomatic roles, more nation-builders than enemy-slayers, and that wasn’t what they were trained for.

Combined with a battalion commander that Bergdahl and his platoon-mates saw as adversarial, frustrations mounted. Most of the soldiers were able to shrug incidents off, but for Bergdahl, each one fueled growing anger and fear that led him to his whistleblowing plan. And even though many leaders saw Bergdahl as a model soldier – one who was physically fit, who studied the doctrine and fell in line – that image quickly changed when he walked away from his post and into an unprecedented chain of events.

Rohde, who was captured in Afghanistan while researching a book, was familiar with the region, its people, customs and culture. He was captured along with his interpreter and driver. Perhaps above all else, he was a civilian. These all made for a different experience than what Bergdahl says he endured.

Rohde’s escape also made a big difference: The Taliban wasn’t about the let that happen again, especially not with an American soldier, someone looked at much less favorably than a civilian journalist.

In episode 4 of the Serial podcast, we hear more about Bergdahl’s experiences in captivity, including his banishment to a 6-foot cell, where he was subjected to torture such as being slowly cut as many as 60 or 70 times, he said. But we also hear about what was happening just outside the walls of Bergdahl’s captivity, including the complicated network of terrorist leaders and government officials that operated in concert and helped facilitate his five-year imprisonment.

Berhdahl was held by members of the Haqqani Network, a terror organization linked to the Taliban that also coordinated with the Pakistani government, even serving as an intermediary between the two. The situation on the ground at the time was fraught with complicated relationships and networks that crossed the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan – and possibly made it that much harder to track Bergdahl.