"Judge not, that ye be not judged" — Matthew 7:1

John S. McCain Held in North Vietnam

(Not Left Behind)

McCain Part of POW Homecoming 

(Meets President Nixon in May 1973)

American POW in North Korea

(Was Left Behind)

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (2010 photo)

( Taliban Captive: 2009-2014)

(Not Left Behind)

A lot of knives are out against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Some of the nastiness has even been directed towards his father, Bob Bergdahl, for his appearance. What is lacking in this saga, however, are the facts of the whole story. We have not heard it from Sgt. Bergdahl, and we need that story. It will come out for sure in the end but along the way here a few things we need to keep in mind right now:

1.  We do not know the precise reason or cause for him to have left his post (unit) in 2009.

2.  We do not know the frame of his mind or mental condition at that time, either (was he drunk, on drugs, or some other reason; who knows).

3.  We know he was help captive by the Taliban for 5 years and early report reveal he was kept in a cage under ground for weeks at a time. We have not yet heard about any other harsh treatment.

4.  The public will find out the facts, once the military has done their thing ... we have to put our trust in that system and for sure, we do not need this to be political in any sense.

Keep this in mind, too re: Sen. John McCain recently said (I paraphrase), in part: "We must not hold anything against Bergdahl for what he said or wrote while being held by the Taliban."

Sen. McCain's story in part from his captivity in North Vietnam from here (one chapter of 12 chapters). 

He was shot down on October 26, 1967, and released back to U.S. control on March 14, 1973:

Even after one year held captive, every two hours, one guard would hold John S. McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days. Finally, he lay on the floor at place called “The Plantation.” He was a bloody mess, unable to move, badly injured leg swollen ever since he was shot down and an arm broken more than once.

A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again. McCain said later: “I reached the lowest point of my five years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide.”

What happened next in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, is chronicled this way: 

McCain looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers. A guard saw what he was doing and burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch. McCain's will finally wilted and broke under the torture and beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.

McCain slowly wrote in part his confession:  “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.” 

He wrote in later years that he would never forgive himself.

Now here we are today with this from Sgt. Bergdahl in this story: Writing from a Taliban “prison,” Bergdahl urged his family and his government to wait until they had all the facts before judging him for leaving his base. Then Bergdahl explained, at least in part, why he left his fellow troops in 2009. 

Let’s face it, there is a lot more to this story, yet today in American society with the instant news and 24/7 cable-to-cable constant repetition,  coupled with the ugliness driven mostly by FOX along side rampant Talk Radio ripe with opinions minus the facts, I see that it appears we have reached back in time to the old West and readopted this slogan regarding early justice: “Bring the guilty bastard in, give him a fair trial, and then hang him.”

If facts matter and they should in all cases like this, then we need to get all of them before we judge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and hang him. Imagine he were your son, or you were standing in his shoes?