Those with him that night may be the most confused. Bergdahl told them that night that he wanted to be an assassin. He would go to Pakistan or India, join a local gang, and work his way up, eventually bumping off the leader. Somehow this story ended with him in the Russian mob.

“He would say off-the-wall things,” one of Bergdahl’s platoon mates recalls. None of them took him seriously. “We say the damnedest things when we’re overseas, we’re just talking, conversing.”

But then the next morning, Bergdahl was gone, and they all wondered if there had actually been some truth to the conversation.

Looking back at his asking what would happen to his fellow soldier’s gun if it vanished, they figured he didn’t want to snatch it and take it with him, and get his fellow soldier in trouble.