One of Bowe Bergdahl’s most prized possessions during his five-year captivity with the Taliban — was a dress.
“When they moved me around, they’d put a girl’s dress over me and then a burka over me and then because anything I touched because I’m an infidel – everything I touch is dirty,” Bergdahl explained on the fourth episode of the popular podcast “Serial” Thursday.
“So thankfully they left the dress and the burka in the room so I was able to use that as warmth.”
The episode, called “The Captors,” dove into the background of the Hakkani terror group based in Pakistan that held Bergdahl, who is accused of deserting his army post back in 2009.
The terror cell, which was once described as the “Sopranos of the Afghanistan War,” also held former New York Times journalist David Rohde captive for seven months.
Rohde managed to escape shortly before Bergdahl was kidnapped – but was interviewed for the podcast series to shed light on the conditions and the people who kept the US soldier hostage.
He met Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a terrorist commander in charge of Bergdahl, once while he was in Taliban custody.
“He seemed more radical than my guards,” Rohde recalled. “He was deeply, incredibly and sort of angrily anti-American. There was a joke one of his men made about killing me or chopping my head off.”
Videos of the Taliban cutting other prisoner’s heads off were constantly shown to Bergdahl, who was kept in solitary confinement inside a 6-foot metal box during the final years of his imprisonment.
Most of his time inside the box was spent thinking about each second he was in there.
“The only thing you can really understand is how long the seconds are lasting,” he said. “You’re not in tomorrow, you’re not in next week, you’re not in next month. You’re in this second and it can last an eternity.”
Sometimes, Bergdahl would try to distract his mind, replaying the same line, “I fell into a bit of fire,” from the Johnny Cash song. He also frequently thought about ways to stay warm and about food.
And the only other frequent thought in his mind was how to escape – which he attempted one last time despite two failed ones earlier in his imprisonment.
‘You’re in this second and it can last an eternity.’
- Bowe Bergdahl on being confined in a 6-foot metal box.
Following days of torture where a guard would use a razor to slash him “60 or 70 times at once,” another terror thug came into his cell to taunt him.
“He was like, ‘Oh, in order to exchange you, the Taliban is waiting for all the prisoners in all the prisons to be, all the Muslims around the world to be released,’” Bergdahl recalled. “He came there just to mess with me.”
Slowly, Bergdahl used a combination of his spit and water to try to dig up the particle board on the bottom of his cage floor, which he noticed covered up the only weak spot of his metal box.
But the plan backfired – as the material had expanded in the cold. Bergdahl had to work feverishly over one night to try to get it back down, using the tip of a battery he had found to wittle away at it.
“I never stopped trying to escape, but that night burned something out of me that never came back,” he said. “I just lost something inside of me that’s hard to explain. Things didn’t matter anymore.”
In September, the lead debriefer in Bergdahl’s case, Terrence Russell, testified that “his experience ranks at the same echelon of the most horrible conditions of captivity that we’ve seen in the last 60 years.”
A top Army commander announced in December that Bergdahl would face a court-martial on changes of desertion and endangering troops in the days following his disappearance.