Cooper Dart

Long After, Hometown

Looking for an easy answer, click the search bar on the Free Encyclopedia. Type ‘Bowe Bergdahl.’ Press enter.

Remember that the Wikipedia Manual of Style dictates: “the first sentence of an article is almost always a definitional statement, a direct answer to the question ‘what is [the subject]?’”

“Beaudry Robert ‘Bowe’ Bergdahl (born March 28, 1986) is a United States Army soldier who was held captive from 2009 to 2014 by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan after he deserted.”

A direct answer to the question ‘what is [the subject].’ Bowe is the subject.

In the article’s main photo, he stands in an oxblood beret and U.S. Army uniform before a wrinkled American flag. His hair is shorn short, his nose wide at the bridge. This is the photograph that papered the hometown news for over a decade.

The burger joint next to the rodeo grounds in Hailey, Idaho, flew the black Prisoner of War/Missing in Action flag for five years. The flag foregrounds the silhouette of a bowed head before a distant watchtower and some barbed wire. Below, the words “you are not forgotten” in blocky white text. This flag was one of the first things people saw when they entered town from the south or the airport.

In 2009, the town tied yellow ribbons around trees and light posts to remember Bowe. Yellow ribbons as objects of remembrance date back to the Iran hostage crisis. But yellow ribbons also represent suicide prevention awareness, and bladder cancer awareness, and forgiveness in the Mormon religion. A yellow ribbon on a dog’s leash is also standard practice for signaling to others that the dog does not get along with strangers.

Hailey drowned in bright yellow—the ribbons around trees, the stickers with Bowe’s face, the homemade signs in nearly every storefront with the pleading directive “Bring Bowe Home.” The elementary school kids still too young to understand the weight of war and loss would have been confused about anyone needing to be brought home. Tugging their parents’ hands, they’d look around—at the four-screen movie theater, at the farmers’ market by the bank, at the little failing bead shop—and ask, “Why would anyone ever leave?”

As these kids grew older, they grew alongside the internet and open access. Maybe now, in our early twenties, we could finally find an explanation for Bowe’s story of home and departure and distance. If the answer is anywhere it must be here.

Click the search bar again.

The page "Why would anyone ever leave?" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

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Click the search bar. Type ‘Bowe Bergdahl.’ Press enter.

Bowe’s photo in the article is the same, but this time notice the red razor bumps on his neck. Were they caused by dry air? Haste? Indifference?

Scroll to the bottom of the page, then back to the top. If the definitional statement wasn’t revealing, it might be best to start at the beginning. In the ‘Early life and education’ section, see that Bowe was home-schooled. Click.

At one point, Bowe was just a rural kid learning from his mother at home while his dad drove a UPS truck through the dusty, wide streets. Bowe went to church. Bowe was like other kids who grew up at the foothills of the Rockies—he never seemed to outgrow dreams of adventure. He said that’s why he joined the Coast Guard and, later, the Army. The Army brought him to Afghanistan.

The article notes that there are major critiques of homeschooling. Click indoctrinated. Then click inculcating. The page is not much more than the Latin etymology: inculco — “tread upon, trample.”

He received his GED from the College of Southern Idaho, a small campus about an hour and a half south in Twin Falls. Recall the Built to Spill song:

My mom’s good, she got me out of Twin Falls, Idaho
Before I got too old

Wonder if Bowe’s capture all started at home in a backwards rural town. Wonder if he was there too long, or not long enough. It all depends on who is telling the story.

Who is telling the story?

Click the search bar. Type ‘Wikipedia.’ Press enter.

“Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ə-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ (listen) wik-ee-) is a free, multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors using a wiki-based editing system.”

Hover over a community of volunteer contributors then, instead, click open-collaborative. Economist Juliet Schor is quoted: “a clear definition of technology-mediated open collaboration might be difficult to pin down.” Open collaboration, by definition, is fluid and faceless. Open collaboration asks reductive questions like ‘what is [the subject],’ as if having more people tell the story will somehow bring us all closer to an answer. Open collaboration blows the barn door off and leaves the straw swirling. Still, the articles sit reliably at the top of most Google searches.

In the article, the hyperlinks draw outward like exits on a highway.

Start over.

Click the search bar. Type ‘Bowe Bergdahl.’ Press enter.

On June 27, 2009, Bowe emailed his parents in a big block of text. Read the paragraph and find the poem inside.

mom, dad The future is too good to waste on lies.
I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be
american. It is all revolting one of the biggest shit
bags is being put in charge of the team.

I am ashamed to be an American.
I am sorry for everything here.

These people need help, yet
we don’t even care when
we hear each other talk about
running their children down in the dirt streets
and laugh at them for not understanding
we are insulting them.

Three days later, Bowe walked away from his observation post in eastern Afghanistan. The outpost had armored vehicles and towers and traffic checkpoints aimed at counterinsurgency efforts.

An Afghan boy claimed he saw a foreign, uniformed man crawling through the grass on the morning of Bowe’s disappearance. The man’s hands parted the stalks before his eyes, the slender leaves brushed against his cheeks. His knees stirred ochre dust. The wall of grass spread before him while a sour smell rose from the broken stems. Bowe might have remembered home then. He might have remembered being home-schooled near the hills, far from the wetlands at the mouth of his canyon where the herons and rainbow trout dance in the land trust’s preserve, where cotton flies from the cottonwoods in the summer over giddy kids playing hide and seek in the park breathing deep with stomachs pressed against a world that was then so, so small.

An article on grasses of Afghanistan reveals Agropyron—a drought-resistant wheatgrass with dense inflorescences. Agropyron is an introduced genus in Idaho, but it still fills the rangeland around Hailey.

Think that Bowe has nothing to do with grass.

Start over.

Perhaps it’s time to change course. On the homepage, click Random article.

Macelognathus—a genus of dinosaurs from the Late Jurassic Period which lived in what is now Wyoming. Wyoming with I-80 rolling east miles and miles alongside the shimmering air above painted metal fracking silos. I-80 rolling east away from Idaho through drifting snow toward a rubble of truck stops and it’s January.

Follow the links: click extinct, click living fossils, click geologic time. Immense. Capacious. Almost comforting.

Drive out to college in the penumbral new year. Turn the headlights on. There has to be a way out of everything.

That night, have a nightmare about a one-way highway whose end is very far away.

Never return to the random article option.

Start over.

The Army designated Bowe a DUSTWUN—“duty status, whereabouts unknown.” The United States could not confirm Bowe dead or captured. The label marks a transitory status capped at ten days.

Unknown isn’t dead, isn’t alive. Unknown isn’t home, but it might have been closer than before.

Start over.

Recall hearing that clicking the first hyperlink in the main text of any Wikipedia article and then clicking the first link of the next article, on and on, will eventually lead to the ‘Philosophy’ article. According to Wikipedia, 97% of its pages lead to philosophy in this manner.

Test out this theory with Bowe. Bowe’s article leads to United States Army to land to Earth to planet to astronomical body to astronomy to natural science to branch to sciences to builds to empirical to information to uncertainty to epistemic to, ultimately, philosophy—“the study of general and fundamental questions.”

Realize that all articles lead back to Bowe—if Bowe connects to philosophy then everything that connects to philosophy connects to Bowe. The problem is now dizzyingly large, like the realization that all of the roads in the country are connected to each other.

70 Wikipedia articles link directly to Bowe Bergdahl: 2009 in the United States, March 28, the useless pages List of people from Idaho and List of Norwegian Americans.

Home does not directly link to Bowe, and neither does Bowe to home. Still, there’s a lingering circulatory aspect to Wikipedia, which implies inevitability, which is horrifying.

Circulation: “The act of moving in a circle, or in a course which brings the moving body to the place where its motion began.”

See also: Small-world network.

Start over.

Bowe is in captivity and back in Hailey, the kids play at war in the park by the river. Shotguns swing after clay pigeons in the brush. White trucks with aftermarket engines roar through spring rills flush with runoff. The yelling, the fires, the bronze sky at evening and the aspens all springing up from a single massive root system. The trout under the bridge. The game warden on the trail.

Kids point at the tattered yellow ribbons on the cottonwoods and tug their parents’ hands asking “Why is Bowe still not home?” Depending on the family, they might answer with something about a vague foreign evil, or a distracted government, or dismiss the question altogether. As the spring floods recede, the river isn’t where anyone left it, but it still winds its way south to the reservoir. There’s something uncanny in the new gravel banks, something about a home changed forever.

A month after Bowe left his post, the Taliban shared the first video of him as a captive. His head is shaved, and he sits on the ground eating behind a low table.

“Well I am scared. I’m scared I won’t be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner. I have my girlfriend who is hoping to marry, I have my Grandma and Grandpas, I have a very very good family that I love back home in America and I miss them every day that I’m gone . . . ”

Scroll to the comments section of the YouTube video.

- Ryan commented “I’m surprised they feed him they were actually nice to him the usually strip u naked and torture and humiliate you and then kill u.”
- James commented “Was he set free? Hope he’s doing good,” to which John responded “He was a deserter, he knowingly left his unit, should have rotted in a cave.”
- Eliana commented “I’m pretty sure..he’s dead.”
- FieldMarshalRommel23 commented “I would under no circumstances be taken prisoner, even if that meant shooting myself!”

Bowe, in the video, continues. He pleads with America, on behalf of himself and his fellow soldiers: “Please, please bring us home. So that we can be back where we belong and not over here wasting our time and our lives, and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home.”

Home, where the yellow ribbons hang in tatters and the tense dry canyons burn in August.

Start over.

The page "Where is he now?" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

Start over.

The page "Why isn’t home enough?" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

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Remember Hailey Elementary School. Remember watching a video of a fox catching a rabbit and clenching its jaws, but the rabbit’s legs were still kicking. Remember yelling that the rabbit was still alive, to which the teacher responded that it was, in fact, dead; the movements were just reflexes. Remember whispering it’s still alive.

Remember tapping your mother’s shoulder from the backseat and asking about Bowe. Remember the shaky war journalist footage on the small TV in the living room. Remember watching your mother drive. Remember never before merging onto the freeway because it seemed impossible—seemed huge—but then one day near Boise, at sixteen, it just happened, and the world was instantly bigger. Remember those little gas station exit towns that all looked the same. Remember the midwestern drive-in motels with their crisp, thin sheets. Remember leaving.

Click the search bar. The cursor blinks. Watch the cursor blink.

“Bring Bowe Home” was a directive, but what could any of us have done?

Type ‘Bowe Bergdahl.’ Press enter.

Bowe stands before the flag. It’s the same photo, but notice that his eyes are slightly off, the left squinted and the other alert.

Click five high ranking Taliban members. These men were five of the many Afghan detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the United States considered them “high-risk”. The United States’ side of the story reports that in the summer of 2014 they ended up releasing the so-called “Taliban Five” to Qatar in exchange for Bowe.

However, in 2012 an Iranian news source said three of the five men had already been returned in exchange for Bowe. In 2013, an Israeli outlet claimed the U.S. released all five of them expecting nothing in return. Wikipedia claims these reports were “premature.”

Some, including Michael Flynn, assert that up to six American service members were killed in the search for Bowe. A former senior military officer told The New York Times that it was “difficult to establish a direct cause and effect.”

Find Wikipedia’s five pillars. Notice the second:

2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view

But it’s hard to write about Bowe without sounding conspiratorial. It’s hard to be sympathetic when what’s true could be any number of links to any number of articles, all of which lead back to philosophy, which never provides any answers.

Start over.

The Taliban published a video of Bowe’s release in 2014, five years after his capture. In it, Bowe wears a flowing white shirt and pants, blinking in the daylight from the backseat of a pickup truck. Then he’s standing, swaying on his feet, eyes forward, while the camera pans up to a helicopter landing under a bright sun nearing the horizon. His left hand holds a small bag and he has a gray shawl over his shoulders. A member of the Taliban waves a white sheet on a stick while three Americans in plainclothes emerge from the helicopter. One of the American men takes Bowe in his arms and helps him balance as they walk back to the helicopter. The Afghan landscape in the video is eerily similar to the sagebrush steppe of southern Idaho.

Pause the video. Go to Geography of Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan is a landlocked mountainous country…”

Start over.

At the top of many Wikipedia articles is a link with ‘disambiguation’ next to the title. “Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous...”

For example: Mercury. Wikipedia fractures the topic into its various meanings—Mercury (element), Mercury (mythology), Mercury (planet).

Ambiguity is distinct from vagueness, the style guide notes. One allows multiple plausible interpretations, the other makes drawing any conclusions impossible.

Find no italicized text at the top of Bowe’s article. No For other uses, see Bowe Bergdahl (disambiguation). Nothing leading to a list deconstructing Bowe as subject—

- Bowe Bergdahl (deserter)
- Bowe Bergdahl (son)
- Bowe Bergdahl (child)
- Bowe Bergdahl (‘I am ashamed to be an american’)
- Bowe Bergdahl (‘should have rotted in a cave’)
- Bowe Bergdahl (fox)
- Bowe Bergdahl (rabbit)
- Bowe Bergdahl (Home)

Start over.

The page "Home (enough)" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

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Stare at the screen as if this time will be enough. The Wikipedia logo in the top left corner is a puzzle-piece globe, still incomplete with the north pole gaping, the articles all assembled piecemeal by hundreds or thousands of people invested enough in a story to help write it.

At the top of the Bowe Bergdahl article, click from ‘Read’ to ‘Edit’. Start rewriting the opening sentence—that definitional statement, that direct answer to the question ‘who is Bowe Bergdahl?’ Let the sentence go on and on until it fills the screen. Then go further. Don’t stop writing even as the sun sets over Croy Canyon in the west and all the kids emerge from the grass for dinner, dropping bikes in front yards with the wheels still spinning as they run toward front doors in butter-yellow light. Remember leaving. Keep writing. Who is Bowe Bergdahl. Who is Bowe Bergdahl.

Delete it all.

Start over.