Hero or Deserter?

Is Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl a deserter, hero, or victim of the Afghanistan war?

Who is to know? Who has all the answers to these questions? And why do we want to know, or even need to know? And why in just 15 minutes or less?

I know the American public is curious about many things. The American media has made an industry out of providing answers to the public’s questions. But are the answers adequate and accurate? Perhaps we should also ask, is the public’s curiosity a legitimate concern to feed?

I’m leaning toward the negative answer to the latter question. It is one thing to be curious; it is another to have a meaningful interest in knowing. Besides, knowing about anything has an element of timing which plays an important part in all of this.

A solider goes missing. Policy is to search and retrieve the missing soldier. If the soldier has been abducted by enemy forces, it has always been US military policy to ‘never leave a man behind’.

The circumstances of the absence, the search, the finding, and the eventual retrieval or rescue, are other facts to be accumulated, laid out and full meaning determined. It takes time to do this.

The media often engage in this important process. Unfortunately they tend to inform the public before they have meaningful information to share. Reporting someone missing is a fact; reporting just that is OK. But putting into question motive, possible scenarios of what happened and why, is clearly the beginning of creating gossip.

Gossip almost always leads to false conclusions. It also always leads to damaging chatter that leads many astray from fact.

In the matter of Sgt. Bergdahl, will the media, politicians, and talking heads please shut the hell up until authorities have the time to research and discover what the truth actually is if it is even possible to do so? Until then, the rest of us can only wonder. And gossip. But the latter does us no good and harms innocent people.

Best we give truth the chance of being learned.

June 10, 2014