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But somehow, this idea that people died looking for Bowe-to a lot of people, it's not a question. Again, the army itself hasn't formally investigated the question of whether people died looking for Bowe-that we know of. We put in FOIA requests with the army long ago on all these cases, but haven't gotten anything back. They were both redacted, so we can't tell what the precise mission orders and objectives were. We've seen army investigations on only two of the four cases. Official information on these missions is thin. (There were four of them.) We talked to soldiers who were there, and to people higher up who planned and organized them. And none of those missions was a search-and-rescue mission. The six names of soldiers who died, they were all on missions that happened later, seven to ten weeks after Bowe disappeared. And for the month of July, people were sent out all over Paktika Province and beyond, doing nothing but missions to find the DUSTWUN.īut, rather miraculously, no one died on those missions. And we know for sure there was a massive search for Bowe. Usually, there are six names, all from Bowe's battalion, the 1st of the 501st. There have been lots of media stories, declarative stories, citing specific cases of soldiers who died because of the search. Just, he was there, he says he knows it to be true. When he said those are dots he connected, he wasn't thinking of any particular cases of soldiers who died. General Flynn's no-brainer scenario-I haven't found one like that. I explained to him that this was one of my outstanding questions about Bowe's story. So Flynn, just under McChrystal, he's a big deal. McChrystal, in case you've forgotten, was commander of US and coalition forces for all of Afghanistan. He was General Stanley McChrystal's director of intelligence. Back in 2009, when Bowe went missing, Flynn was in Afghanistan. He's a retired lieutenant general who was head of DIA-the Defense Intelligence Agency. Michael Flynn is the highest-ranking person I've interviewed so far. Some people very high up in the military world are saying, yes, people did die looking for Bowe. What exactly should we blame Bowe for? What's his fault, and what isn't? And, the heaviest moral charge against him-the elephant in so many discussions about Bowe and about the trade and about the military proceedings against him: did any American soldiers die looking for him? To a lot of people who served in Afghanistan, and to their families, if you don't consider the consequences of Bowe's decision to walk off OP Mest, it feels as if something important and painful has been papered over, and that doesn't feel like justice. And a reckoning is what the military wants, understandably. Let's move on.īut that leaves out a reckoning. But the army shouldn't have let him enlist in the first place. Sometimes Bowe's case is summed up like this: What Bowe did was wrong. John was at the edge of the group, so his commander sends him and another guy back inside to find Bowe. It became clear there was a number missing. And they'd all have to rush outside and muster up.Įach person had a number, and they called out in order: "0-1," "0-2," "0-3," et cetera. (They did that a lot, these wee-hours fire drills.) Some commander would bang on the top of a garbage can and wake everybody up. One night a couple of weeks in, John says there was a fire drill. But he led me to another guy, also from that boot camp class: John Raffa. Justin was 17 at the time, and there are some details he couldn't recall. He remembers seeing blood and broken glass in the bathroom and yellow caution tape. He remembers standing outside on a freezing February night in Cape May, New Jersey, while something strange happened inside. And he remembers the night Bowe broke down.