Ex-POW held by Taliban 'wanted to be Jason Bourne'
The US soldier who was held five years by the Taliban says he walked off his base in Afghanistan because he wanted to prove he was like fictional CIA movie spy Jason Bourne.
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl went missing from his outpost in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. He was captured by insurgents and released in May 2014 in a controversial swap for five Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
In March, he was charged with desertion and "misbehavior before the enemy."
He is currently an active duty soldier with a clerical job in Texas while he waits to learn whether he could be jailed for life.
In telephone calls with Hollywood screenwriter and producer Mark Boal, who wants to make a movie about Bergdahl, he recalled the horrors of captivity and what motivated him to walk off base.
Excerpts of the calls have been released in partnership with US hit podcast Serial, which returned Thursday with a second season, this one devoted to Bergdahl's story -- why he walked off base and examining the consequences.
"Doing what I did was me saying I am like Jason Bourne," Bergdahl told Boal in one call, referring to the CIA assassin played by Matt Damon in a string of Hollywood action thrillers.
"I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing, that I could be what it is that all those guys out there who go to the movies and watch those movies, they want to be that."
"Serial" has interviewed former soldiers deployed with Bergdahl and the Taliban, promising that the second episode would present the Taliban's version of events.
Bergdahl said at times he was held in basement-style rooms with no light.
"There's times when I'd wake up and it's just so dark, like I would wake up and not even remembering like what I was," he said.
"It's like you're standing there screaming in your mind.
"You're standing in this blackened, dirt room that's tiny and just on the other side of that flimsy wooden door that you could probably easily rip off the hinges is the entire world out there, it is everything that you're missing."
Serial's first season was a blockbuster hit that resulted in a Maryland court giving its subject -- a man convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 1999 -- a chance to appeal his sentence.
The podcast is a mix of investigative journalism, first-person narrative and dramatic story telling.
Its first season was downloaded over five million times on the Apple iTunes store. The second season is available at serialpodcast.org.