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Previously on Serial. Gentlemanly is a good word. He's very much a gentleman. Coast guard, who?
And then all of a sudden, he shows up in his uniform. Yeah. From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. I think the following will likely be a question at Beau's court-martial. Did the Army screw up by accepting Beau, by deploying him to Afghanistan?
Just to remind you, Beau was separated from the Coast Guard in 2006 after he became overwhelmed and had a breakdown during basic training. The Army, in order to enlist him two years later, would have to waive its usual standards, which it did. So the question actually is, did the Army recruiting process work like it was supposed to? Beau's separation from the Coast Guard wasn't labeled a psych discharge on paper, but that's essentially what it was. So did the Army miss something?
We talked to a retired Army psychiatrist, Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie. She was deployed all over. She was chief of forensic psychiatry and also of inpatient psychiatry at Walter Reed. And she was psychiatry consultant to the Army Surgeon General, the top mental health advocacy position in the Army. Dr. Ritchie's assessment of how all this went down with Beau, eh, she thought the whole thing sounded pretty normal, like standard practice. ♪
The fact that the Army didn't have all the details about Beau's hospitalization in the Coast Guard, not uncommon. She said getting access to more detailed medical information, especially between branches of the military, in this case Coast Guard and Army, was hard because the military's network system wasn't so hot. Information sharing was incomplete.
But she also didn't feel like anything we told her about Beau's Coast Guard situation would have been disqualifying even if the Army had known and had sent him for a mental health evaluation, as the Coast Guard doctor had recommended. Even if Beau had been assessed by, say, an Army psychiatrist, Dr. Ritchie said it probably would have been one session. And unless you showed obvious outward signs of psychosis or something like that, you're really depending on the potential recruit to self-report any psychological problems.
So it's quite possible Beau would have been okayed regardless. At the end of the day, Dr. Ritchie told us, the best assessment for whether someone's going to make it in the Army doesn't happen in the recruitment office anyway. It happens during the sustained high-pressure test of basic training. And Beau did really well in Army basic training. So that's one view. Now for a second opinion. Somewhere, the ball was dropped.
This is Dr. Michael Valdovinos. He's a clinical psychologist. He was in the Air Force for about seven and a half years, and he worked in the SEER program, which teaches survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He knows Bo. In fact, Valdovinos led the SEER psych team that helped reintegrate Bo right after his rescue, those first few weeks when Bo was at the hospital in Germany.
Two things. Valdivinos has permission from Bo to talk to me about their conversations. And also, he was not officially Bo's doctor. His job was to reintegrate him, not diagnose him or anything. He never even saw Bo's medical record back then. So he's not breaking any doctor-patient confidentiality. Well, three things, I guess. The last being, Valdivinos cares about Bo, so he's not dispassionate on the question of what happens to him.
Valdevinos' view is that the Army recruiter should have looked harder at Bo's situation, should have asked more questions before signing him up.
Even if the recruiter didn't have the particulars of Bo's Coast Guard discharge in front of him or information about Bo's hospitalization, he says the mere fact that Bo had been separated at all from a branch of the military begged more scrutiny. You know, it's a pretty big deal to get separated from the military. At the very least, I would think that this recruiter would be a little bit more concerned about that and would have taken it maybe a few steps further to say, hey, let's make sure that this guy is a good fit for what he's about to get into.
Because what a separation like Beau's tells you, just on its face, is that for whatever reason, this person couldn't hack it in basic training. And the Army recruiter's job is to send that potential recruit straight back into basic training. In Beau's case, the same situation he washed out of two years earlier. Finally, Valdivino says Beau told him that the recruiter did know about his problems in the Coast Guard. Because Beau says he told the recruiter. Beau said he was afraid not to tell him, since, you know, not a good idea to keep things from the government.
You know, and he said, yeah, I told him everything. And I went, Hannah, specifically, I said, you told us exactly what happened when you broke down in training and, you know, went to the hospital and, you know, the incident in the barracks. And he said, yes, you know, I told him all these things. As part of his application, Bo did a test that he had not consulted with a behavioral health care provider in the last seven years. When General Dahl asked him about that, Bo said the Coast Guard treatment, quote, wouldn't have triggered the idea of consulting a psychologist, unquote.
Dahl found that to be consistent with Beau's other paperwork, since on his medical history form, Beau checked yes to the question of whether he'd ever received counseling of any type. He said he was thinking of counseling he'd had when he was 10 years old. General Dahl concluded that the Army recruiter, on paper, did everything he was supposed to—read the codes, followed the regulations.
But in a footnote, Dahl seemed to agree that this system isn't good enough, that Beau's situation probably should have been looked at more carefully. He wrote that when you're deciding whether to reenlist someone, few things are more relevant than a prior separation. He added, quote, unquote.
And where was Bo's head at this time? It's funny, once you hear how Bo thought about the military, why he wanted to join, oddly, it does help explain why he decided to walk off his post. Did you think that you were going to be a career soldier? This is where I'll admit that my mind did get lost in fantasy. I wanted to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then.
Right. Right. Right.
Bo loved Bruce Lee when he was a kid, thought he was cool. He watched his movies, later read his books. Bo studied Asian warriors, especially samurai. He learned about the Bushido code, which stresses honor and loyalty and self-sacrifice. In Bo's childhood bedroom, his dad kept a collector's set of old army manuals way up high on a bookshelf. He said his dad loved military history.
Bo climbed up there and got the books down. Even when he couldn't read, he'd study the pictures. So, you know, as far as being a soldier, in my mind, you know, I was very much left in history. But that's where I ended up having problems was because I wanted to be a soldier. But the only option I had was to be, you know, a modern soldier.
Beau's ideal soldier, the one from history, fights for a cause he or she is completely personally committed to. That soldier rallies behind military leaders that he or she trusts. The modern soldier turns out to have no choice about those essential aspects of combat. Instead, he's a brainless private that does whatever the government tells him to do. Go here, go there, go fight these people. He's just a tool. That's how Beau saw it.
And the thing is, Beau knew this was going to be the case when he signed up. He sort of knew it. He thought he could handle that gulf of meaning. This is one of the things about Beau. He at once recognizes that his expectations were unrealistic, that he sees things differently from other people.
But at the same time, he will fiercely defend his vision of how things should be. He does not let go, especially when it comes to what he saw in Afghanistan. Do you think what you witnessed and what you were reacting to was the army in an especially bad way? Or was it just the army being itself and kind of messed up as it, you know, in a kind of average way? Does that make any sense? Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe it was normal. Maybe what I was looking at was simple, everyday army. However, the way I was looking at it was, this is messed up. This shouldn't be like this. So here, regardless of whether it was off the chart from regular stupidity or if it was everyday stupidity, what I was looking at was problems. What I was looking at was things that needed to be fixed.
Mark's conclusion about Beau, after all those months of talking to him, he's not a conscientious objector. But he's also not your casual deserter who throws up his hands and just says, I don't care about any of this. I'm out of here. Mark thinks he's the opposite of that.
He's a rare person who will act, rightly or wrongly it turns out, but still he will act according to his principles. And his principles are wrapped up with the very institution that so many people now feel he betrayed. It's a disillusionment of somebody that really believes in the army. He's somebody that thinks that military leadership is a sacred position.
He wants the army to be better. Right. The military is huge for him, right? It represented something. There's got to be a better word than huge, but it represented something very powerful to him even before he joined. And to his sense of himself as a man, to his relationship to his country, to all sorts of
kind of big identity questions that were floating around for him. And it's still really important to him. He still kind of wants his day of reckoning with those values. That's in a way why he hasn't taken the more pragmatic route through all of this, which would just be to sort of stick your hands out and say, whatever you guys say, like guilty, just let's get over with. Yeah. Yeah.
I think he doesn't want to cross the line of saying, I had no point. Which is not to say that Beau wants all this attention on him now. He wasn't seeking this big an audience. And by the way, he's not asking to be some kind of like Paul Revere. He just wanted, he didn't, Beau never wanted the discussion that's happening now, right? His whole goal was to talk to, it was like an inter-family dispute. He wanted to talk to people in the military. Right.
There was actually a reporter that was sent to, that was like embedded or something with his unit that was hanging around there. And it's like he pulled the reporter aside and said, hey, get a load of this. This will make a great story. He didn't do that. He wanted to be heard within the military. So obviously that didn't happen. And obviously he behaved in a way which runs counter to like every single military precept ever.
ever known since the dawn of time, which is, you know, you don't walk away from your brother. So he's not a great messenger for his message, but that's also what makes it kind of interesting. In Beau's case, no one saw it coming, him walking off like he did, because it's so unthinkable. But a few people say they did start to see signs that Beau wasn't totally okay.
At the September hearing in Bo's case, Greg Leatherman, Bo's weapons squad leader, testified that at some point he noticed something was up with Bo. Quote, it started to kind of feel that he wasn't adjusting to the deployment like the rest of the guys were, unquote. Leatherman said he wasn't incredibly alarmed, but he figured he ought to say something to one of the higher-ups about it, just in case. One day he's on a patrol somewhere southeast of Sharana, and he finds himself sitting next to his first sergeant, Pablo Jimenez.
Quote, and so I told First Sergeant that, you know, I thought that Sergeant Bergdahl should chat with somebody, you know, whether it be combat stress or a chaplain or even if it were just, you know, the company commander, just sit down and, hey, man, how's everything going? Bo's lawyer asked Leatherman how Jimenez responded to his suggestion. I'm just going to read you that part of the transcript. Answer, First Sergeant said that he didn't want to, he didn't want one of his guys to tell him what was wrong in his company. So it was not my place to tell him if he had problems inside of his company.
Question. I think when we interviewed you, you had even more colorful language of what he said. Yes, sir. Could you tell us that? Sure. He said, fuck off. He said, shut the fuck up. No one needs to hear what a fucking E-5 has to say about a guy in my company. And I said, roger, First Sergeant.
In his report, General Dahl includes a statement from Jimenez, who says he doesn't recall this conversation with Leatherman or any conversation like that, and that Bo, quote, showed no red flags or emotional problems as far as I could tell, unquote. Bo's friends said from his messages and letters home, they could tell he wasn't very happy with how things were going in Afghanistan. And in retrospect, you can sort of see his thoughts churning, plans forming.
On June 27th, just three days before Beau left Mast, he wrote a letter to his parents, venting, in which he sounded pretty disgusted with how the army was operating in Afghanistan. He wrote a more loving letter to a girl he was romantically involved with. He wrote group emails. One was titled, Who is John Galt? His friend Chad was on that email. I saw it and I was like, oh, Ayn Rand. Okay, here we go. You know?
John Galt is a character from Atlas Shrugged. The very first line of the book is, "Who is John Galt?" And after about a thousand pages, you finally learn that John Galt is this genius industrialist who sort of single-handedly has shut down the world's economy in order to fix it. He stops the machine. In the book, he finally reveals himself, delivering, I kid you not, a 60-page speech laying out his philosophy. Or rather, Ayn Rand's philosophy.
And honestly, just as an exercise, you can grab almost any sentence from that John Galt speech and apply it to what Beau ended up doing. For instance, quote, a code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality, unquote. And now, just for kicks, Sturian say the Bushido Code, the part that teaches that it's your duty to try to right a moral wrong, regardless of whether you'll succeed. That's maybe a potent cocktail if you're Beau. Here's the text of Beau's June 27th email.
Quote, His friend Nick read that email, along with everyone else. Were you just like, uh-oh?
Or did you think, like, oh, this is just Beau, like, sorting through? This is Beau being Beau. Oh, really? Yeah, these are the kinds of things he would say. Kim Harrison was on those emails, too, and had gotten other messages from Beau, and she was starting to worry. She said she could tell he was frustrated, that he thought his situation was dangerous, that he was trying to hold himself together. Here's this, you know, he's writing these things, these notes, sending emails, he's sending all these cryptic things. He's in a state of mind that was obvious to me,
you know, mentally where he was at, it was stretched. It was on that precipice. Do you know what I mean? Where a person can make bad choices, like really bad choices. I don't think, you know, it's not suicidal or that kind of thing at all. It was just...
He's frustrated, he's on edge, and not really completely logical in his right mind. But is this what you understood at the time that— Yes. Or are you saying this in hindsight now that you've talked to him more? No, no, no. This was clear to you at the time? It was really clear, yeah. A few days later, some Army people show up at her door to tell her Beau is missing. And just a day or two after that, a box arrives at her house from Beau. He'd sent it from Afghanistan—
It's got his computer, his iPod, his Kindle, a journal, and a copy of Atlas Shrugged. It's been pretty widely reported that at Beau's military hearing, his lawyer said this carefully phrased but also somewhat vague thing regarding Beau's mental health. He said a, quote, neutral army psychiatry board has now concluded that back in June 2009 that Sergeant Bergdahl possessed a severe mental disease or defect, unquote. This past week, I finally found out what he meant by that.
In May of last year, Beau's defense team asked for what's called a 706 sanity board, a mental health assessment in connection with the charges against Beau. An Army forensic psychiatrist, a well-regarded doctor named Christopher Lang, met with Beau and gave a diagnosis, schizotypal personality disorder, that he said Beau would have had as of the time of the alleged misconduct. And I'm guessing this, too, will be part of Beau's defense at the court-martial proceeding.
Dr. Valdivinos, the Sears psychologist who knows Bo, said that when he heard this diagnosis, he thought, yeah, I think they hit the nail on the head. It very much fits some of the things that he struggles with. It permeates a lot of what's going on. You see this a lot play out through his life, from development through his teenage years to his young adulthood. It really does tell the story of Bo, unfortunately, you know.
Again, Beau gave Valdivino's permission to talk about this with me. He described the basic characteristics. Folks who were diagnosed with simple type of personality disorder are generally folks who would rather be loners. You know, they sort of lack close friends. They incorrectly interpret events. You
including feeling like external events have personal meaning to them. You know, they dress in peculiar ways, sort of eccentric, you know, belief in sort of special powers, you know, perceptual alterations, persistent and excessive sort of social anxiety, you know, which Beau really struggles with.
Beau's grand ideas about his future, about his capabilities, the romantic adventures he wanted to make happen. Baldivino says those all fit the profile. He said for anyone with a psychiatric illness like this, symptoms tend to get worse when you're under stress.
One of the major symptoms is paranoia and the potential to misinterpret situations. And Baldivino says it's not a stretch to say that's probably what happened when Beau was deployed to Afghanistan, where it's actually dangerous. It's obviously stressful. Beau's not super tight with the guys in his unit. He starts to think his battalion commander is against them, might even send them on a suicide mission, which is very paranoid thinking. And that all leads to a decision that isn't
well, entirely sane. By that point, I think the paranoia of it all kind of pushed him over the edge and he said, I'm doing it. When you start thinking about the idea of him being Jason Bourne and, you know, him doing special operations, it sort of fed into that whole narrative that, you know, I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to go and bring the help and not really thinking through the ramifications of walking off a base into basically into the Taliban. And
for most of us, it would be an absolute, sort of an absolute boundary for us to say, hey, even if I'm frustrated with my command, even if I'm frustrated with this mission, frustrated with the Army, there's still something, I think, biologically that's going to keep us from, you know, literally walking off a base. Right, like just self-preservation at that point would kick in. Exactly. You know, and so for him to actually do that, you have to think through, like, wow, how could he have done this? You know, and
When you look at the whole total picture, it starts to make sense. Valdivinos thinks that what happened with Beau at the Coast Guard, what happened in Afghanistan, that's all of a piece. The Army knows about this diagnosis. At the September hearing, the Army prosecutor, Major Margaret Kurtz, gave a preview of the Army's thinking on the subject. She read aloud one of the key points from the psychiatrist Dr. Lange's report.
In other words, mental illness or no, Beau should be held responsible for his actions. The other day I checked back in with Mark to see if the diagnosis made him think differently about anything. I guess it's an interesting data point. I don't know that it's the North Star case,
Mark feels like he already knew walking off was not a rational thing to do, so putting a label on Beau's way of thinking didn't really change much for him. I told Mark that for me, the diagnosis made me let go of any lingering doubts I had about the truthfulness of Beau's account. Like all the details that didn't add up, well, yeah, if you're paranoid and doing some magical thinking, of course the details don't add up. It makes me believe him, that he really was in his mind trying to raise an alarm.
Mark already believed Beau, though. So aside from a legal defense, Mark wasn't sure the diagnosis made much of a difference. And he worried, in fact, that once they heard the diagnosis, people, maybe people like me, would disregard everything Beau was saying about his military experience. I do think that for you, the diagnosis, it makes him more credible to you, but it also means you take him less seriously, I think, as a kid with opinions, you know? Yeah.
No, I don't think that's quite right. I think his assessments in a general way of like, I think we can all agree, like the war in Afghanistan has not been a success, right? I guess I more think he was kind of right by accident. Oh, right. Yeah.
What does that mean, right by accident? Like he sort of happens to be right, but he's not specifically right in the particular instances he's necessarily giving as examples of the overall failure. But he's responding to real data points, right? I mean, he's not thinking that stuff just from his log cabin in Idaho. I guess, but I mean, again, I know we've sort of argued about Omna before, but I feel like, you know,
His beef with Amna, remember, isn't like we never should have gone up there in the first place. We never should. You know what I mean? His beef really, at the end of the day, his biggest complaint is this feeling of...
Our commander doesn't care about our welfare. And in fact, it was to the point where he was maybe going to send us on a suicide mission to get rid of us because we were bad for his reputation. Like that's not, no. I mean, there's a lot of different judgments that are stacked on top of each other. And the last one is just deeply paranoid and you can reject it on its face. I don't think there's a commander in the U.S.,
armed forces who would do anything remotely like what Beau is suggesting. Okay, so that I just think is just... But the other... But the judgments that precede that, that maybe this commander has other priorities besides purely the welfare of his soldiers, I think that's clearly on the face of it true because they did put American lives at risk to retrieve equipment. Yeah.
And that is part of the calculation of war. And you can talk to people and up and down the chain of command and they'll say, yeah, shit like that happens all the time where you weigh someone's life against a piece of equipment. And that may be an everyday calculation, but that doesn't make it any less fucked up, especially if you're the kid that is whose life is being weighed to get the equipment back. Yeah.
Here's where Mark and I diverge a little. He links Beau's personal experience more directly to the problems of the war than I do. He wants to be careful to separate what Beau's saying from who Beau is. In a case like this, though, that's the rub. And Mark sees that. I keep going back to something that somebody said to me a long time ago, which was like, I kind of agree with everything he said, but I still want to punch him in the face, you know? It's like that line from The Big Lebowski. You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole.
I've heard something akin to that sentiment from a bunch of the soldiers who served with Beau. That's Daryl Hansen. Does the fact of his, what he describes as his good intentions, matter to you?
I want to be careful not to suggest all the soldiers we talked to are in lockstep here. Some of them, even when we talked to them last summer, said they'd already forgiven Beau and moved on. Others said they'd never get over it.
In the past week or two, my producer Dana and I checked in with about a half dozen soldiers to see if anything they'd heard from Bo so far on the podcast had made them feel differently. Some said they still thought he was lying about why he left. Others said they believe him now and are trying to forgive what he did, but they just can't quite get there. Here's Ben Evans. He may have had the greatest intentions in the world, but yeah, I just don't, I can't, yeah, I just don't.
Yeah. I talked to John Thurman for a while recently. John's mother is a therapist, and like a lot of veterans, he's also had counseling to help him deal with the after effects of deployment. So I thought he'd be a little more touchy-feely on the question of Beau's mental health. I wanted to know if a diagnosis would help John, not to say that what Beau did was okay, but whether a diagnosis would help John forgive Beau, just personally. I got pretty pushy with John about it. He was a really good sport.
You know, we all experienced the same thing and we didn't walk off. I know. I know. But you're saying we all experienced the same thing and we drove on. Yeah. And what I'm saying to you is you didn't experience. Well, yes. We didn't see it from his lens. You know. Yeah. He was he was getting scared by it. Yeah. And you weren't. Right.
Like you're not perceiving danger in those reprimands, and he is. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I don't think there was danger in those reprimands. I know, dude. I know. We're not arguing whether he's correct. We're not arguing whether he's correct. Yeah. I really, really, really try to see it from his side, through his lens. And I understand that he and I have very different brains. Perception or not.
I mean, I still can never forgive him. I can't. And it's on principle. He broke that intimate bond that we all share with each other. That's not something you can ever come back from. I don't care where your head was, Beau, you still fucking did it. You walked off and you betrayed us. It's like you stopped there. Yeah, it stops there. And that's just that. That's the infantryman in me taking over.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool civilian from a family of civilians. My father was in the Army in World War II, but he didn't deploy overseas. The only war stories I remember him telling me were about, like, carousing in Denver. Sorry, Dad. So it wasn't immediately obvious to me why some of the people Beau served with were not even just mad. They were hurt, deeply hurt in some cases.
What I understand now is that that bond, that brotherhood they feel, it's not just a cliché. Well, it is a cliché, but it's also profoundly true. I think about it this way: In my life, who would die for me, really? My mom, maybe. Who would I die for? My kids.
And so imagine you're in a platoon. You become so close, so fast to all these guys around you. You recognize each other's cough or their silhouette in the dark. You would die for the other guys in your platoon. Even if you don't like them, you'd do it. And they would die for you. It's not even hypothetical. It happens all the time. And because of that, personalities aside, these guys become family to one another.
If you walk away like Beau did, you break the promise you all have made to each other. You undermine the whole enterprise. Your family starts to crumble when you need it most. And that's what the soldiers say happened during the search for Beau. Beau's friend Chris Ingalls said it was like the soul of their platoon just dwindled. People shrank into themselves. Even afterwards, 2nd Platoon felt like they were blamed for Beau leaving, that they were sort of banished from the larger family of the battalion.
A sergeant everyone told us they just loved, a guy named Larry Hine, was moved out of the platoon and replaced by a commander who was, to put it gently, much stricter. After helping with Afghan elections in August of 2009, the platoon went on to a town called Madakan and embedded with Afghan security forces. And they did well enough there that they got commendations and a visit by General McChrystal. But still, overall, a lot of them just felt robbed, like their whole deployment lost its meaning.
When I talked to Daryl Hansen again a couple weeks ago, he said after hearing the podcast, he'd soften some toward Bo. I don't have as much hate as I do towards him. Okay. Even though the world knows Daryl Hansen would have shot him, which I still would have. I wouldn't shoot him today, but I would have at the time. But today I'd probably shake his hand and be like, dude, think about next time, you know, for what you do, think about it a little bit more, you know? Was it worth it?
Almost all the soldiers we talked to said they still thought Beau should go to court-martial. And Mark, though he thinks it's taking too long, also said it makes sense for Beau to go through the military justice system. After all, Mark says, the United States did put a lot of time and money and energy into getting Beau back. And that's as it should be. We did take extraordinary measures. Next time on Serial.
Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas, and me in partnership with Mark Boll, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research by Kevin Garnett. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Copy editing by Anahita Lani. Emily Condon is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Meyers, and Mark Phillips.
The show is mixed by Kate Balinski. Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Other serial staff, Seth Lind, Elise Bergersen, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks this week to Jonathan Menjivar and Rich Orris of Strange Bird Labs for his great work keeping our website going strong. Check it out. There is lots of stuff on that website right now. The address, SerialPodcast.org. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode. But first...
Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
unimaginable torture. Starting as an act of rebellion, he wrote to the Pope, President Bush, MLK, and others. For the first time, hear these letters that celebrate the strength of human spirit and that ultimately bring catharsis to Mansoor. Letters from Guantanamo is free with membership at audible.com slash Guantanamo. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.
Coming up on the next episode of Serial. I had previously had discussions with Somali warlords, Haitian dictators, and Afghan insurgent leaders. So given that range of contacts, I didn't find anything unusual about these. The Taliban are like simple, straightforward people. Do you want a deal or not? He's done more serious time than anyone could possibly imagine. I mean, the release video and holy shit, there's Beau again.
The old strategy to win this with money, to win this with soldiers, with military might, was doomed.