Ray,
One of the things the U.S. Army is poor at doing IMO is understanding group dynamics, especially when someone does something seemingly irrational like walk off a FOB. And this is ironic, I think, given our emphasis on leadership, et. al. We have a serious problem of groupthink and we have an ideological predisposition to focus almost exclusively on individual agency to the exclusion of structural incentives and restraints. Apparently Bergdahl's comrades were aware of his odd behavior prior to the deployment - why didn't they or the leadership do something about it? I've also read that the unit had some problems of its own. Combine that with the isolation of being deployed, and then further ostracized within your own unit, and it's not surprising that he did something 'irrational'. He probably regretted it from the moment he was captured. That's just speculation on my part.
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