A federal judge this week vacated the desertion conviction of former US Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was convicted in 2017 of desertion for leaving his post in Afghanistan. Bergdahl was then captured by Taliban forces, tortured, and imprisoned for four years before being freed by a prisoner exchange in 2014.
Since his release, Bergdahl has become something of a figure of hate among some conservative activists and politicians. Donald Trump repeatedly attacked Bergdahl, calling him a traitor and deserter. Some of the rightwing ire over Bergdahl’s case stems from the fact at least three soldiers were seriously injured attempting to recover Bergdahl from his captors. This, however, has nothing at all to do with whether or not Bergdahl is a traitor or a deserter. If Bergdahl’s carelessness led to his capture in a hostile environment, he can be required under civil law to make restitution to those who funded his rescue, or were injured attempting to carry it out. (This all ignores the issue of whether or not the US military had any business being in Afghanistan at all.)
This sort of restitution is common in other circumstances. For example: when careless hikers get lost in the woods and trigger expensive search-and-rescue operations. These people often are expected to pay back at least some of the cost of their rescues.
The larger issue here is over issues like treason and desertion.
First of all, it’s obvious that Bergdahl isn’t even a traitor by the standards of the US constitution. That would have required him taking up arms against the US government or helping the Taliban. He certainly has not been convicted of any such thing.
On top of this, of course, is the fact that treason isn’t a real offense. If someone engages in violent acts against agents of the US government, then the perpetrator is guilty of those violent acts against specific persons, and nothing more. He’s not guilty of the added ”crime” of treason which is based on the fantasy that people owe some kind of loyalty to the governments under which people just happen to have been born.
And then there is non-crime of “desertion.” Unlike any other line of work, employment contracts in the military are not like normal contracts that can be bought out or renegotiated at any time. The requirement that soldiers must sign over their natural right to leave their job is, as Murray Rothbard notes, a type of slavery.
Rothbard goes on to explain the reality of the non-crime known as “desertion” in more detail:
Conscription is quite obviously the most blatant example of slavery in American life, and happily many voices from both Left and Right are now being raised to call for abolition of this unmitigated despoiler of liberty. But there are other critical and pervasive examples of slavery on the American scene that have, for some reason, gone unnoticed even among dedicated libertarians.
One vital example is the armed forces itself. For even a volunteer army practices slavery on a grand scale! It is true that a volunteer army draws its recruits by free choice of the men who enlist. But what happens after they enlist? Suppose that a man enlists in the army for five years. Suppose that after two years he becomes fed up with the regimentation of military life and decides to quit for a better job? Can he do so? Certainly not! In every other occupation in society, a man may quit his job whenever he wants to, and either take another job or quit working altogether. Surely this right is fundamental to a free society; without the right to quit, a man is a slave, even if he originally took the job purely voluntarily. But an enlistee in the armed forces is not allowed to quit before his term expires. If he tries to, he is court-martialed and jailed under harsh military law. This is forced labor and involuntary servitude, however one looks at it.
There are other occupations, too, where a man may sign a contract to work for a term of years; he may, for example, sign on for five years as a geologist to work in Arabia. But he is allowed to quit; he may be considered a moral leper if he thus breaks his contract, he may be blacklisted by other firms hiring geologists, but he is not incarcerated for doing so.
Contrast, then, the armed forces with a very similar kind of occupation: the local police force. A man is free to quit the police force any time he wishes; why then should he not be free to quit the army as well? The armed forces will be centers of slavery not only so long as the draft exists, but even further, so long as a man is forced to stay in the army for any length of time after he decides he would rather call it a day.
No man is free if he does not have the right to quit his job. No one denies this right in every occupation — but one: in the armed forces, where this quitting is called “desertion” and met with imprisonment or even the firing squad.
If we would call ourselves a free country, this system must be abolished.
