“Everybody’s improving their own areas, improving the villages around them, making life better and making it easier for us to leave — we started the engine, we walk away,” said Nick Tabaczka, then a staff sergeant in Blackfoot Company (the same unit as Bergdahl) and now a University of Alaska Anchorage student. “When all this happened, everything changed.” “After Bergdahl disappeared, we started doing our rescue missions back to back,” said Kenneth Nall, then a private and now a stay-at-home dad. “That’s when people were starting to get hurt all the time, because we had pushed so many more soldiers in theater to look for this guy.” Nall himself was badly injured when his Army vehicle struck an improvised bomb in the search for Bergdahl.
The first jubilant moments when Bergdahl was released by the Taliban on May 31 in a swap for five Guantanamo prisoners quickly turned sour and political. Some in Congress objected to the swap. Members of BergdahlÂ’s Second Platoon, interviewed in national media, in some cases in arrangements made by Republican strategists, described Bergdahl as a deserter. The former soldiers said at least two Anchorage-based soldiers were killed in action because of him.
With the issue simmering on the national stage, four former soldiers from Bergdahl’s company, including three from the platoon that split duty at Outpost Mest with Bergdahl’s platoon, agreed to an interview last week. They said they wanted to express solidarity with the soldiers from the Second Platoon, at least on the point that the Army should investigate Bergdahl as a deserter who endangered his fellow soldiers and should be held to account in a court-martial if the facts warrant. But they also said they had no interest in getting involved in the partisan politics surrounding Bergdahl’s release and said they were happy he can now come home — even if his destination is a brig and not his hometown of Hailey, Idaho.
The four, Tabaczka, 34, from Manistee, Mich.; Nall, 35, from Lubbock, Texas; former Sgt. Johnathan Rice, 27, from Daytona Beach, Fla.; and former Spc. Ryan McNeely, 27, from Buchanan, Mich., all remained in the Anchorage area as civilians after leaving the ArmyÂ’s 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. They served in the BrigadeÂ’s 2009 deployment to Afghanistan with the 150-soldier Blackfoot Company of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. Rice approached the Anchorage Daily News / Alaska Dispatch last week to express his opinions on BergdahlÂ’s release.
'They had lost their man'
