I'm not sure, and at this point neither is anyone else, of what were the exact nature and circumstances of Sgt. Bergdahl's absence from his duties. But CBS should be ashamed of itself for reducing what is a very complex and complicated issue to a false choice between the facile categories of 'hero' and 'deserter.' There is very little in life that is so black and white, and the use of such emotionally charged labels such as 'hero' and 'deserter' are particularly unhelpful.

One of the big problems we have as a society is precisely this widespread tendency to view every issue through a simplistic, binary filter, in which even the most morally complex questions are reduced to two opposing choices, one of which is perfectly good (i.e., patriotic, heroic, etc.) and one of which is perfectly bad (i.e., treasonous, cowardly, etc.), when the reality of the matter is that, in almost every instance, there are an infinite number of ways to see a particular issue that fall somewhere along the continuum of good-to-bad, and thus resist such facile, binary categorizations. Politicians, political parties, and certainly military leaders have long sought to encourage this kind of simplistic, binary thinking among the general public, because the more they can force the public to perceive, say, the question of support for a particular military engagement as a choice between patriotism and treason, or between nationalism and disloyalty, the fewer hard questions the public asks about those military engagements, and the easier it becomes to portray those who ask such hard questions as being somehow disloyal or unpatriotic. This was never more on display than in the run up to the war in Iraq: those who dared to question the impending invasion were labeled as being 'anti-American, or as being part of some alleged "blame America first" crowd.

The military has a long and rather unsavory history of employing this kind of reductionism in its approach to the question of desertion. We all learned in school, for example, about Washington's concern, during the Revolutionary War, for his troops, of his importunings to the Continental Congress to allocate funds to adequately feed, clothe and compensate the soldiers in the Continental Army. Here we had soldiers, most of whom were conscripts, and many of them unwilling conscripts, and most of whom were drawn from the ranks of those who were too poor to own land or businesses and thus had little stake in the outcome of the war (which was, after all, more of an aristocratic insurrection than a genuine revolution). Having been forced to serve by the aristocrats who sat in the Continental Congress, they found themselves, in the dead of winter, having not received the pay to which they were entitled in months, hungry, ill-clothed and dying of exposure, while their commanding officers (all drawn from the landed gentry, of course) continued to wine and dine in relative comfort, to say nothing of the fact that the entitled aristocrats in the Continental Congress who had compelled them to serve continued to dig into their own pockets in order to fund a military engagement that really served only the interests of the landed gentry! Should we really wonder, then, that desertion had become a major problem for the Continental Army? And can we really blame those soldiers for refusing to allow themselves to be so exploited?

But we all heard much less in school about Washington the brutal, despotic General, who routinely ordered the summary executions of those caught attempting to flee their forced servitude. In one instance in New Jersey, when a group of soldiers was caught attempting to desert, not only did Washington order their executions, but he forced the friends of those attempting to desert to serve on the firing squads for those same soldiers. That is an example of psychological terror of the most brutal sort. Nor de we hear -- indeed, because there was nothing to hear about -- of Washington caring enough for his troops that he was willing to sacrifice his own comfort, or that of his officers, to help the conscripts who were forced to sleep in overcrowded, poorly ventiolated and disease-ridden cabins. Washington cared about his men? Well, as a means to an end, perhaps.

The military tries to foster the notion that desertion has only two possible motives: treason or cowardice (that is to say, the military reduces desertion to a choice between malicious intent and character weakness). The reality is usually a whole lot more complex. Sometimes, a soldier is simply not psychologically equipped to handle the mental and emotional stress of combat,, and in a cloud of confusion, sees his only option as being that of simply walking away. Is it really fair to characterize such a soldier as either a traitor or a moral weakling? I hardly think so. And if a soldier is, indeed, under such an absolute obligation to the military and governmenet, should there not be a corresponding obligation on the part of the military not to mischaracterize, and certainly not to romanticize, the true nature of the service a potential recruit is likely to face? And this is not even to mention the question of the government's obligation to be honest with the American people about the true motivaions and objectives of any given war. If the government, and/or the military, can cavalierly break faith with a soldier by misrepresenting the true nature of an ongoing conflict and that soldier's likely service in it, why, then, should the soldier continue to bear the burden of an obligation that was entered into in bad faith by the military and/or the government?

Sgt. Bergdahl's actions may or may not meet the legal criteria for desertion -- that is for a court-martial, not a public opinion poll, to determine. But until those larger questions are addressed, I don't think any of us has the right to be particularly moralistic in our assessments of a particular soldier's decision to walk away from his post. And as Americans, if we are ever to be anything other than the tools of whatever politicans happen to be in power, or the tools of those who are, for the moment, not in power, then we all need to begin recognize when politicians, aided and abetted by mainstream news outlets, begin to try to frame very important yet morally ambiguous issues into a dualistic framework of good versus bad, patriot versus traitor, or hero versus deserter.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bowe-bergdahl-hero-or-deserter.