For five years Bergdahl was held captive until the US arranged a prisoner swap.
"As a private first-class, nobody is going to listen to me," Bergdahl says in the first episode of season 2 of the “Serial” podcast that was released on Thursday. "No one is going to take me serious that an investigation needs to be put underway."
The audio is part of a series of extensive interviews that he did with a screenwriter over the past few months, that were handed over to the popular podcast.
The portion released does not detail what the failure was that he speaks of, but he states that he believed that disappearing and reappearing would give him access to top officials.
Bergdahl explains that, after disappearing, he became nervous about his reception when he reappeared, so he attempted to find information to offer up on who had been planting bombs in the area.
"I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying to prove to the world, to anybody who used to know me… I was capable of being what I appeared to be," Bergdahl says. "Doing what I did was me saying I am like Jason Bourne. I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world I was the real thing."
In March, Bergdahl was charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, although there has been a recommendation that his case be moved to a misdemeanor-level military court.
His attorney believes that it is important for the public to hear Bergdahl’s side of the story.
"Some of the information that is going to come out is inevitably not going to be what we would have preferred in a perfect universe, but net-net, we'll take it and allow people in our democratic society to form their own opinions," attorney Eugene Fidell told the Associated Press.
"It's like how do I explain to a person that just standing in an empty dark room hurts?" Bergdahl recounts. "It's like well, a person asked me, 'Why does it hurt? Does your body hurt?' Yes, your body hurts but it's more than that. It's mental, like, almost confused…. I would wake up not even remembering what I was,” Bergdahl explained.
"It's like you're standing there, screaming in your mind,” he added.
