TROUBLED

Bergdahl’s Pre-Capture Writings Revealed

Beginning with his time in Coast Guard.

Since before he was discharged from the Coast Guard for psychological reasons in 2006 until his capture by the Taliban in 2009, Bowe Bergdahl kept a handwritten journal, wrote essays, stories, and emails that The Washington Post has now published. In the writings, Bergdahl’s daily struggles come to light. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness,” he writes at one point. Later in the journal, Bergdahl writes, “I will not lose this mind, this world I have deep inside. I will not lose this passion of beauty.” After Bergdahl vanished, a box containing his journal, his laptop and a copy of Atlas Shrugged were sent to the home of his friend Kim Harrison, who shared them with the Post. Bergdahl wrote of dreaming of walking away to China, or into “the artist’s painted world, hiding from the fields of blood and screams, hidden from the monster within himself.”