Army Gen. Robert Abrams didn’t explain his thinking when he referred Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to a general court-martial that could send him to prison for life. But let me hazard a guess.
The general wants to signal that desertion and misbehavior before the enemy are serious matters in a time of war. That’s a sound signal to send not only to our GIs but also to our politicians — and to the press.
Which is racing to grapple with the meaning of the coming trial. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dispatches and editorials are pouring over the wires. It seems the country gets the importance of this case.
It’s a shame CNN failed to put the Bergdahl question to any of the Republican candidates Tuesday night — particularly because the debate was about foreign policy and what it means to be commander-in-chief.
Only hours before the debate, Bergdahl’s lawyer lashed out at Donald Trump for calling the sergeant “a no-good traitor, who should have been executed.” What do the other candidates think?
What do they think of the Constitution’s treason clause? It prohibits treason from being defined as anything other than levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
No authority has accused Bergdahl of treason, though if he picked up a weapon while with the Taliban or simply adhered to them, he’d have been on the thinnest constitutional ice. Even then, a conviction of treason would be hard to imagine.
That’s because the Constitution prohibits convicting someone of treason except on the testimony of two witnesses. They have to be witnesses to the same act. And the act has to be overt.
Bergdahl doesn’t have to be a traitor, though, to be in big trouble. Misbehaving before the enemy, one of the charges against Bergdahl, is plenty serious. It’s the charge that could send him away forever.
It’s hard to think of a moment this serious since Private Eddie Slovik was executed for cowardice in World War II. A petty thief from Detroit, Slovik thought he would get off lightly when he twice fled the front — and refused to go back.
Instead, Slovik was convicted of cowardice, his appeals went for naught and Gen. Eisenhower refused clemency. The war was almost over when the private was stood up before a 12-man firing squad and shot to death with eleven bullets.
Years later, William Bradford Huie wrote a book about it. It was reviewed in The New York Times by a famous general-turned-historian, S.L.A. Marshall, who cast doubt on the idea that Slovik served as an effective example.
Marshall confessed that with all of his own service as an officer and historian of the war in Europe, he’d never heard of Slovik until Huie’s book. He concluded that the lesson of Slovik’s life (and death) is that not all men are cut out for combat.
That’s going to be a hard case to make for Bowe Bergdahl, who joined a volunteer army — which is, itself, a question I would like to see put regularly to the candidates. (If we’re serious about the war, do we need a draft?)
It’s not my purpose here to quarrel with President Obama on Bergdahl. The House Armed Services Committee reckons Obama broke the law in making the deal without Congress, but the Constitution’s commander-in-chief clause could trump that.
It was Bergdahl’s own platoon-mates who gave the country the first serious view of the issues that are now going to go to a court-martial. That came in a memorable interview six of his comrades gave to Megyn Kelly.
The GIs made clear how well America is represented on the battlefield by its enlisted men. They were calm, judicious, articulate.
In a stunning moment, Kelly asked them to raise their hands if they thought Bergdahl deserted. Six hands went up.
“Wow,” Kelly said. Then she asked them to raise their hands if they had any doubts on that head. No hands went up. Yet Bergdahl’s platoon-mates reserved judgment on what happened once he was in enemy hands.
If it does go to a general court martial, the panel — roughly, if not exactly, equivalent to a jury — would reportedly include enlisted men. That is, Bergdahl’s peers. Kelly’s interview reminds us what a glory the American GI is. So Bergdahl will be in just hands.