Dear Attorney General Sessions, I write to you on the account of Bowe Bergdahl. I am here to ask you to not prosecute Bergdahl. Im asking you to choose a side between humanity and legality. Part of what makes us human is the ability to say the word, “no”. In bees, the worker bees are worked to their ultimate doom. In humans however, we have said “no” to these conditions and changed them. I am asking you to side with humanity, to say no, and to not prosecute Bergdahl. Bergdahl has suffered and been punished enough. His suffering of being tortured, in a cell, being beaten, in a cell, and being neglected, in a cell, among other things. At what point in humanity can we say that enough is enough, and that he has suffered too much. My case for …show more content…
Under the Carter amnesty, thousands of Americans came home to the U.S. free from any prosecution for their prosecutable offenses (Shafer). Draft dodgers are not too far off from military deserters and I believe this could could serve, not as a legal precedent, but as a moral precedent to the U.S.A showing amnesty towards people thrown into tough situations and making the wrong decision. As is the case with Bergdahl, the draft dodgers made mistakes, but those mistakes made them suffer the consequences (Karlinsky). Carter let them go because they had already suffered their consequences. Bergdahl has suffered far more than any draft dodger during Vietnam. He’s lost nearly a decade of his life, and should not lose any more. Perhaps part of why Carter pardoned the draft dodgers is because after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, America realized it was to …show more content…
Bergdahl first attempted to join the Coast Guard, However when a major psychological breakdown forced him out of boot camp, he moved to the army. Now the question must be asked, after a major breakdown, why was Bowe Bergdahl allowed to join the army at all? This can be seen not as the Army’s fault, nor Bergdahl’s neither, but the Coast Guard’s. The Coast Guard classified his discharge from boot camp as an “uncharacterized discharge” and importantly not a psychological discharge, the latter would have kicked off a mental health evaluation if he tried to join another branch (Why Was Bergdahl In The Army In First Place?). After identifying this could have been an internal problem, Bergdahl, just trying to serve his country did not know the danger he was putting himself in and should not be responsible for his actions. In World War Two, the United States Military turned away 549,099 men who volunteered for the service (Karpinos, Glass). It was the U.S.’s responsibility to turn away under-qualified volunteers for the army. The military itself should be held accountable for its own failure to identify that Bowe Bergdahl was unfit to