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Bowe Bergdahl: America's Last Prisoner of War by Michael Hastings | Politics News | Ro... Page 6 of 14 armored vehicle designed to protect soldiers from the roadside bombs being used by the Taliban -- got hit with an IED. Bowe's platoon was deployed to escort a tow truck to get it down off the mountain. But on the way to escort the truck, an MRAP in Bowe's own platoon was hit by an IED. The unit found itself stuck in the mountains for four days, guarding the wreckage while their commanders debated whether to fly in the parts needed to fix the vehicles. Some of the time, Bowe wrote his family, was spent near a village that "was not too friendly to Americans" because it had been attacked by the Taliban. "So the elders were telling us to leave," he reported, "because the taliban was there, and we couldn't leave because command finely decided that they would fly in the parts (one MRAP needing a new engine) and would rebuild the MRAPs up there." Once the MRAPs were finally fixed, the unit started to leave the mountains, only to be hit by yet another IED -- the third of the mission - and to come under a blistering attack from rocket-propelled grenades. "It was at the point that the guys where beginning to climb into the trucks that the first RPG hit about 30m away from them," Bowe recounted, "and then the RPKs and the AKs began to splatter bullets on us, and all around us, the gunners where only able to see a few of them, and so where firing blindly the rest of the time, up into the trees and rocks. The .50 went down on the first shot on. the truck i was in, and i had to hand up my SAW for the gunner to use. I sat there and watched, there was nothing else I was allowed to do.". No soldiers were killed in the ambush, but Bowe blamed the screw-up on his superiors: "Because command where too stupid to make up there minds of what to do," he wrote, "we where left to sit out in the middle of no where with no sopport to come till late mourning the next day." He concluded his e-mail with a nod to the absurdity of the situation: "The end of the 8 hour mission that took five days, ver the next month, as he saw more of the war firsthand, Bowe's e-mails to his family lost their sense of absurdity and took on a darker edge. In one heartbreaking incident at the end of May, an Afghan official and four of his children were killed in a Taliban attack. The bodies were moved to. Bowe's outpost, along with a wounded Afghan police officer.. In early June, after photographs taken by Sean Smith appeared in The Guardian, Bowe's unit got reamed out by its commander for its lack of discipline. Bowe's squad leader, Sgt. Greg Leatherman, was demoted, and two other sergeants in the squad were reassigned. According to Fancey, one was made "a gate guard for the rest of the deployment." As often happens in the Army, senior officers were going unpunished for screw-ups like the MRAP mission, while lower-ranking men paid the price for minor infractions. The unit, for its part, continued to bungle even the most basic aspects of military duty. During the last. week of June, the platoon spent a day resupplying at Forward Operating Base Sharana. When someone in the unit lost his weapon, everyone in the platoon had to drop what they were doing and look for it. To make matters worse, on an earlier trip to Sharana, 10 members of the platoon had been. poached to pull guard duty at another base, leaving the unit even more undermanned than usual. Then, on June 25th, Bowe's battalion suffered its first casualty of the deployment. A popular officer, 1st Lt. Brian Bradshaw, was killed in a blast from a roadside bomb near the village of Yaya Kheyl, not far from the outpost. Though Bradshaw was in a different company, the 24-year-old's death rocked the unit, shattering the sense of invulnerability that accompanies those who have just arrived. in country. Bowe's father believes that Bradshaw and Bowe had grown close at the National Training. Center, and his death darkened his son's mood. It was all too much for Bowe. On June 27th, he sent what would be his final e-mai to his parents. It was a lengthy message documenting his complete disillusionment with the war effort. He opened it by addressing it simply to "mom, dad." http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/americas-last-prisoner-of-war-20120607?print-t... 8/8/2013