Army suicide testimony: Sergeant taunted Danny Chen with slurs 
 
 An African American soldier, Pvt. Marcus Merritt, testified Wednesday that Holcomb addressed him with a racial slur and threatened to "kill me and put me in a body bag and send me home.’’ Merritt said he became suicidal after enduring punishment and humiliation from Holcomb. 
 
 In their opening statements, prosecutors had said testimony would show that soldiers taunted Chen with racial slurs, kicked him and pelted him with rocks in merciless hazing in the weeks before the private’s suicide. 
 
 Holcomb, 30, is the first to face court-martial in a case that has focused renewed attention on allegations of hazing and racism in the Army, where Asian Americans are a distinct minority. Courts-martial for the other seven soldiers, including an officer, are scheduled for later this year. 
 
 Military prosecutors elicited the testimony in the second day of the proceedings to buttress charges that Holcomb hazed and hounded Chen, a Chinese American, into committing suicide at a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan on Oct. 3. Holcomb, one of eight soldiers charged in connection with Chen’s death, faces charges of negligent homicide, assault, reckless endangerment and other counts. 
 
 FT. BRAGG, N.C. -- Sgt. Adam Holcomb bombarded Danny Chen, a shy, 19-year-old Army private, with racial slurs and bloodied Chen’s back by dragging him across rocky ground for disobeying a platoon rule, several former members of Holcomb’s platoon testified at his court-martial Wednesday. 
 
 U.S. Army Sgt. Adam Holcomb, right, is the first of eight men facing prosecution… (Raul R. Rubiera, The Fayetteville…) 
 
 "He was in my face constantly,’’ Merritt testified when asked why he had contemplated suicide. "All the stuff he did had a long-lasting effect on me.’’ 
 
 Under cross-examination, Merritt conceded that he knew Holcomb wasn’t serious about killing him. But he also said he feared the sergeant, telling a military psychiatrist he wanted to kill Holcomb. 
 
 Holcomb’s immediate superior, Staff Sgt. Darren Holt, told the military panel of 10 officers and non-commissioned officers that he confronted Holcomb after the sergeant dragged Chen across sharp, baseball-sized rocks in late September. Holcomb was angry that Chen had ignored posted rules to turn off power to a water heater after taking a shower. 
 
 Holt said he told Holcomb that physically abusing a soldier was wrong and reported the incident to superiors. "I verbally counseled him [Holcomb] . . . and made it clear that was unacceptable,’’ Holt said. 
 
 Chen shot himself under the chin in a base guard tower a week after the dragging incident, according to the Army. 
 
 Chen’s death outraged some Chinese American activists in New York City’s Chinatown, where Chen grew up with his immigrant parents. Several activists are attending the court-martial, along with journalists from China. 
 
 Holcomb’s military lawyers have said Chen killed himself because his parents had disowned him for joining the Army instead of attending college. They have portrayed Chen as an incompetent soldier who endangered his platoon and required constant discipline for such violations as sleeping on guard duty or reporting for his guard post without his helmet. 
 
 Defense lawyers have also said that nicknames -- even those with racially tinged overtones -- were common "terms of endearment’’ in the small, tight-knit platoon. One African American platoon member, they said, encouraged soldiers to call him "Black Mamba.’’ 
 
 Under cross-examination by the defense, former members of the platoon conceded that most discipline meted out by Holcomb was justified by Chen’s failure to follow orders or regulations. Such "corrective training,’’ especially in combat zones, is an accepted way to improve soldiers’ performance, according to testimony. 
 
 Several soldiers testified that Chen never gave any overt indication that he was contemplating suicide. The platoon medic, Spec. Zachary Bolin, who treated Chen’s back abrasions at Holcomb’s request, said Chen denied suicidal thoughts when Bolin asked him about it. ||||| Army Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl was fed up. He was five weeks into a deployment in southeastern Afghanistan and frustrated with his mission and his leaders. He and his fellow soldiers weren’t going after the Taliban as aggressively as he wanted, and his sense of disillusion added to the disgust for the Army that he had begun developing while still in basic training. 
 
 Looking to make a stand, Bergdahl hatched a plan: He would run away from his platoon’s tiny outpost in Paktika province late on June 29, 2009. He would stay away from the Army a day, maybe two, and then reappear about 
 
 19 miles away at a larger installation and demand to air his grievances with a general. He knew that the region was crawling with insurgents, but he had “outsize impressions of his own capabilities,” according to an investigating officer, and was determined to create enough chaos to get the attention of senior commanders. 
 
 Those were among the details that emerged in a preliminary hearing here late last week. The soldier, carrying just a disguise, a knife and some provisions, was captured by insurgents by 10 a.m. the following morning, beginning four years and 11 months of captivity and torture by the Haqqani network, a group affiliated with the Taliban, according to Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the senior officer who carried out an investigation of Bergdahl’s actions and interviewed him at length. 
 
 [Bergdahl’s attorneys raised mental health issues] 
 
 The case against Bergdahl, who is charged with desertion and misbehaving before the enemy, is the most closely scrutinized desertion prosecution in the military in decades — perhaps since that of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, a soldier who became the only American executed for desertion since the Civil War. The officer overseeing the Bergdahl hearing, Lt. Col. Mark A. Visger, is expected to make a recommendation in the coming days to U.S. Army Forces Command, at Fort Bragg, N.C., about whether Bergdahl should be court-martialed. 
 
 Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was captured by Taliban and held for nearly five years. So why is he facing a court martial? Here's what happened, explained in 70 seconds. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post) 
 
 Bergdahl, now 29 and a sergeant, was recovered in May 2014 in a controversial swap in which the White House approved the release of five Taliban detainees from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They are now in Qatar. 
 
 Emotional testimony has underscored the relentless brutality that Bergdahl had to endure, as well as the chaos caused by his disappearance and the lingering resentment of some of his comrades. 
 
 The case has also raised questions about the Obama administration’s handling of it, which included inviting Bergdahl’s parents to speak at the White House after the soldier was recovered, with national security adviser Susan E. Rice saying he served with “honor and distinction.” 
 
 [Bergdahl will require lifetime of care for injuries suffered in captivity] 
 
 The White House has since concluded that it badly misplayed the optics of Bergdahl’s release, according to administration officials. Bergdahl’s parents were in Washington the day he was recovered, and a quick decision was made to include them in a Rose Garden announcement, with little thought given to the ramifications of making Bergdahl appear to be a hero, the officials said. 
 
 Bergdahl joined the Army a few years after washing out of initial training for the Coast Guard. The Washington Post reported previously that it was for psychological reasons, but Bergdahl’s lawyer and Dahl were more specific in the hearing: The future Taliban captive was diagnosed with depression and sent home after he was found in distress in a Coast Guard barracks, sitting on a floor with blood in his hands, possibly from a bloody nose, Dahl testified. 
 
 “He wasn’t ready for it,” Dahl said of life in the Coast Guard. “He was overwhelmed, found himself in the hospital and was released.” 
 
 1 of 33 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Taliban-held U.S. soldier released in exchange for Afghan detainees View Photos U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. service member known to be held hostage in Afghanistan, was handed over on May 31 by members of the Taliban in exchange for five Afghan detainees held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. officials said. Caption U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was handed over May 31 by members of the Taliban. U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is seen in this undated photo. Courtesy of Kim Harrison Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Bergdahl received a waiver to enlist in the Army. He was physically fit and well regarded for his work ethic, but quickly became disenchanted with his fellow soldiers and the Army’s training program. Among his gripes: He couldn’t believe higher-ranking soldiers wanted him to lock his wall locker to prevent theft and saw pre-deployment training at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., as “lame,” Dahl said. 
 
 Bergdahl was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, of Fort Richardson, Alaska. There, he took offense to a motivational speech made by the senior enlisted soldier to the entire battalion. The command sergeant major said in jest that, like other soldiers, he liked to pillage and plunder, but Bergdahl took it literally, Dahl said. 
 
 In Afghanistan, there was another misunderstanding, Dahl said. Soldiers from Bergdahl’s unit weren’t all wearing their whole uniforms one day, a violation that upset then-Lt. Col. Clinton Baker, Bergdahl’s battalion commander. 
 
 Baker launched into a tirade to get his point across, kicking rocks in the process. Bergdahl was convinced that Baker had disturbed an Afghan grave, a suggestion that perplexed the others present, Dahl said. 
 
 The general found that Bergdahl’s childhood living at “the edge of the grid” in Idaho in relative isolation hurt his ability to relate to other people. As a result, he was an extremely harsh judge of character and “unrealistically idealistic,” Dahl said. 
 
 “I think he absolutely believed that the things he perceived were absolutely true,” he added. 
 
 [Bergdahl’s writing reveal a fragile young man] 
 
 Bergdahl could have gone to a number of people in his chain of command with concerns about his platoon. But he thought that they were in the Army for the money, or otherwise incapable of responding, Dahl said. 
 
 In some ways, the soldier did consider others before running away from Observation Post Mest, Dahl said. He told Dahl that he picked the night he disappeared in part because he knew another platoon already would be on the way in the morning to relieve Bergdahl’s, thus providing additional manpower to deal with his vanishing. He didn’t want to take his 5.56mm squad automatic machine gun with him alone outside the wire because he figured it would draw attention, but also decided against stealing a 9mm pistol because that would have gotten a fellow soldier in trouble, Dahl said. 
 
 Bergdahl’s disappearance was noticed around dawn, when he was due to take a guard shift. Capt. John Billings, his former platoon leader, testified that he was in shock that one of his men could have vanished, and initially thought his soldiers were pulling a joke on him. Reality eventually set in, though, and he informed his company commander, then-Capt. Silvino Silvino. 
 
 “I felt sick to my stomach,” said Silvino, now a major. “I didn’t know what was going to come after that. . . . I instructed him to go look high and low, and everywhere he could.” 
 
 Coalition forces across eastern Afghanistan altered their operations that summer looking for Bergdahl, exposing soldiers to additional and dangerous missions. That remains a sensitive point, amid allegations from Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers that at least six U.S. troops died because of his actions. Dahl said he examined a variety of evidence, and found nothing that connected the deaths directly to Bergdahl. But the search-and-rescue operations undoubtedly altered security in the region, military officials said, and plunged the units involved into hastily planned missions. 
 
 Baker, the former battalion commander, recalled that one platoon conducted 37 consecutive days of operations — long enough that new socks and T-shirts had to be delivered to the soldiers, since theirs were rotting on their bodies. 
 
 Bergdahl, meanwhile, was already in Pakistan. He was relentlessly beaten in captivity with rubber hoses and copper cables. He repeatedly tried to escape, said Terrence Russell, an official with the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, who interviewed Bergdahl after his return. 
 
 Bergdahl was moved to at least six different locations, including one referred to as a Taliban prison. After escaping once for nearly nine days, Bergdahl was put in a 7-foot cage, blindfolded and left there for most of his last 3½ years in captivity, Russell said. 
 
 Bergdahl has been accused often of cooperating with the insurgents or even seeking them out, but Russell said there is no evidence to support those claims. The Haqqani network forced him to make videos that were released online. 
 
 Russell grew visibly agitated while describing the conditions Bergdahl faced, wiping tears away at one point. While the sergeant has been accused of many things, Russell said, he was “an organization of one,” with no fellow prisoners who could keep his spirits up. 
 
 “He did the best job he could do,” Russell said, “And I respect him for it.” 
 
 Bergdahl’s attorney, Eugene Fidell, argued during closing arguments at the preliminary hearing that his client should not be court-martialed for either of the charges he now faces. There is probable cause, Fidell acknowledged, to charge him with a lesser offense, being absent without leave for one day, but the moment he was taken captive, Fidell said, that designation should have ended. The maximum penalty for being AWOL for one day is 30 days of confinement. 
 
 An Army prosecutor, Maj. Margaret Kurz, said that Bergdahl’s actions hurt the Army, his fellow soldiers and the mission in Afghanistan, and he must be punished. 
 
 “One does not just walk away into the Afghan wilderness,” she said, “and then return as though nothing happened.” 
 
 Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 Bergdahl’s former officer: ‘Absolute disbelief that I couldn’t find one of my men.’ 
 
 In sparse prose, Bergdahl details his captivity for the first time 
 
 Bowe Bergdahl, once-missing U.S. soldier, charged with desertion ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 The platoon was, an American military official would assert years later, “raggedy.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 On their tiny, remote base, in a restive sector of eastern Afghanistan at an increasingly violent time of the war, they were known to wear bandannas and cutoff T-shirts. Their crude observation post was inadequately secured, a military review later found. Their first platoon leader, and then their first platoon sergeant, were replaced relatively early in the deployment because of problems. 
 
 But the unit — Second Platoon, Blackfoot Company in the First Battalion, 501st Regiment — might well have remained indistinguishable from scores of other Army platoons in Afghanistan had it not been for one salient fact: This was the team from which Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl disappeared on June 30, 2009. 
 
 In the years since Sergeant Bergdahl’s capture by the Taliban, and even more since his release last week in a contentious prisoner exchange for five Taliban fighters, much has been written suggesting that he was a misfit soldier in something of a misfit platoon that stumbled through its first months in Afghanistan and might have made it too easy for him to walk away, as his fellow soldiers say he did. 
 
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 Indeed, an internal Army investigation into the episode concluded that the platoon suffered from lapses in discipline and security in the period before Sergeant Bergdahl — a private first class at the time who was promoted while in captivity — disappeared into Paktika Province, two officials briefed on the report said. 
 
 But their problems in many ways reflected those of the Pentagon’s strategy writ large across Afghanistan at that moment of the war. The platoon was sent to a remote location with too few troops to seriously confront an increasingly aggressive insurgency, which controlled many villages in the region. The riverbeds they used as roads were often mined with improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s; simply getting supplies or traveling back to their home operating base could be a nerve-racking ordeal. 
 
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 American combat fatalities in Afghanistan in 2009, the year the Second Platoon arrived, would double from the year before. By year’s end, President Obama would tear up the military strategy that had spread American troops thin across the rugged country and order a major surge of troops. 
 
 As they settled into their wartime routines in the spring of 2009, the soldiers of Second Platoon knew that they controlled little more than what they could survey from their outposts, several members of the platoon said. Their heavily armored trucks, known as MRAPs, protected them from the buried explosives they encountered, but the fear those mines instilled was real. 
 
 To pass the time on long trips outside the wire, some in the platoon would make wagers on when a roadside-bomb attack might come. “We’d take bets on this one stretch of road, how many I.E.D.s are we going to hit, or who is going to get hit,” said Josh Cornelison, the platoon’s medic, describing it as the sort of humor that came only from soldiers who have already been through a bomb blast. Mr. Cornelison was one of several members of the platoon who spoke about the deployment. He and another soldier who spoke on the record have been discussing Sergeant Bergdahl widely in the news media. But other members of the unit who spoke on the condition of anonymity offered similar accounts. 
 
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 His former platoon mates gave sharply contradictory accounts of how Sergeant Bergdahl viewed the war, and America’s proper role in it. 
 
 To many of those soldiers, Sergeant Bergdahl was viewed as standoffish or eccentric, smoking a pipe instead of spitting tobacco, as so many soldiers do, and reading voraciously when others napped or watched videos. But he was not isolated from his platoon mates, some said. And while he was, like other soldiers in the platoon, often disappointed or confused by their mission in Paktika, some of his peers also said that Sergeant Bergdahl seemed enthusiastic about fighting, particularly after the platoon was ambushed several weeks before his disappearance. 
 
 “He’d complain about not being able to go on the offensive, and being attacked and not being able to return fire,” said Gerald Sutton, who knew Sergeant Bergdahl from spending time together on their tiny outpost, Observation Post Mest Malak, near the village of Yahya Khel, about 50 miles west of the Pakistani border. 
 
 Mr. Sutton said he had struggled to square the popular portrayal of Sergeant Bergdahl as brooding and disenchanted with the soldier he knew. “He wanted to take the fight to the enemy and do the mission of the infantry,” he said, adding, “He was a good soldier, and whenever he was told to do something, he would do it.” 
 
 Mr. Cornelison made it his job to get to know the men he might someday have to save. He said Sergeant Bergdahl was cagey, never telling anyone his full personal story, sharing a snippet with one soldier, another snippet with someone else. 
 
 “He got excited during certain parts of fighting, but for the vast majority of the time, he was disillusioned when we had to be boots-on-the-ground infantrymen,” Mr. Cornelison said. However, he said, Sergeant Bergdahl showed more interest in humanitarian activities, like passing out food or medical supplies to Afghan villagers or helping Afghan soldiers repair their buildings, and seemed disappointed that the Army was not more like “a kind of Peace Corps.” 
 
 At the time Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared, the platoon was straddling a moment of changing American military strategy and intensifying Taliban violence. The United States had fewer than 60,000 troops in the country at the time, with units like Blackfoot Company stretched across some of Afghanistan’s most dangerous and unforgiving terrain. By the end of 2009, Mr. Obama would acknowledge the shortcomings of the strategy and call for a “surge” in American forces that, by 2011, would number about 100,000. 
 
 The one major firefight that Sergeant Bergdahl experienced happened in May 2009, after his platoon was marooned several days on a mission near the village of Omna, his fellow soldiers said. As they traveled down a mountain, the lone route they could use, Taliban fighters unleashed what soldiers call a “complex attack,” blowing up an improvised explosive device within the column of trucks, then firing on it with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and automatic weapons. For more than half an hour, turret gunners returned fire, while the rest of the platoon took shelter inside armored vehicles. To their surprise, no soldier suffered significant injuries. 
 
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 Mr. Cornelison, the medic, recalled watching as three militants were killed during that fight. “When you see a human being almost split in half from a .50-cal, it’s one of those things you are going to remember,” he said, referring to the machine guns on their trucks. 
 
 Over the course of its yearlong deployment, the platoon would lose none of its two dozen soldiers. But their battalion lost men, and many soldiers have blamed the search for Sergeant Bergdahl for some of those deaths. 
 
 Yet two of the biggest dramas the platoon faced in the short time before Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared had nothing to do with combat, according to several members of the platoon. 
 
 Their platoon commander, who some described as less than inspiring, was relieved weeks into the deployment, replaced by the platoon’s sergeant first class, who was popular and respected by the troops. Then, a few months later, the sergeant found himself in trouble after pictures appeared online showing some in the platoon wearing bandannas and cutoff T-shirts. Such garb was not uncommon at remote combat outposts, but it angered and embarrassed commanders, and it helped lead to the sergeant’s dismissal soon after Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared. 
 
 Just how and why Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared remains a mystery to his fellow soldiers. 
 
 They say they do not remember his leaving behind any note or explanation. They said they were unaware that he had previously wandered off the base, as the internal Army review reported. 
 
 And they vehemently disputed reports that implied he had seen a vehicle from his unit run over an Afghan child, which Sergeant Bergdahl had apparently told his parents in an email before his disappearance. That never happened, his fellow soldiers said. 
 
 Mr. Sutton said the one time he remembered Sergeant Bergdahl talking about leaving, it seemed clear — at least then — that he was joking. 
 
 “He said, ‘What would it look like if I got lost in the mountains?’ ” Mr. Sutton recalled him saying. “ ‘Do you think I could make it to China or India on foot?’ I genuinely thought he was just kidding.” 
 
 How he slipped off the base is another matter of debate. The observation post was rectangular, shaped like a horseshoe, perhaps 150 yards long by 100 yards wide. One end backed up to a hill near where a contingent of Afghan National Police was staying and was not fully encircled with concertina razor wire; Sergeant Bergdahl had been increasingly spending time with the Afghan policemen, who helped provide security for the back of the outpost. 
 
 Six soldiers were supposed to be keeping watch throughout the night — one each in the platoon’s five MRAPs, and one in a post up the hill. 
 
 Sergeant Bergdahl spent his last night inside the main part of the outpost, and some soldiers have theorized that he could have left the base through the rear section that was not covered with razor wire, walking past the Afghan police officers he had befriended. 
 
 The outpost, one soldier said, “was meant to keep people out, not to keep people in.”
– Playing "Taps" on a well-worn bugle, the emotional recitation of "A Soldier's Creed," and calling each other racial slurs one day per week: all time-honored customs in the US Army? That last practice is, at least in one platoon, according to a black staff sergeant who tells the Army Times that he's filed an equal-opportunity complaint against his platoon leader at Alaska's Fort Wainwright for "[encouraging] 'Racial Thursdays' as a way to build morale and camaraderie," the Times notes. The soldier from the 2nd Platoon, C Company, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment tells the newspaper that although epithets were never hurled his way, he was told upon arrival that the special day was a "tradition" in which soldiers "can say any racist remark you want without any consequences." "It's degrading to the soldiers," the staff sergeant says. "We've had soldiers almost fight over the crap that's going on here." A junior enlisted soldier anonymously backs up the NCO's claim, telling the Times that "you didn't have to participate, but they'd remind you." He recalls a Latino soldier being called a "wetback" and "border jumper" before almost getting into a scuffle when the others wouldn't stop. The Alaska unit is the same one in which 19-year-old Pvt. Danny Chen served before killing himself in 2011 after being deployed. Chen, who was Chinese-American, reportedly had rocks thrown at him and was called names like "Dragon Lady" and "Egg Roll" in the weeks before his death in Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2012. A spokesman for the Alaska unit tells the Army Times an investigation into the recent claims is underway and that "there is absolutely no connection between this current investigation and the case of Pvt. Danny Chen. Treating all soldiers with dignity and respect is something this command takes extremely seriously." (Prince Harry once got into hot water with the UK military for using a racial slur.)