American Cipher Read online

  THREE

  ADJUSTMENT DISORDER

  If Bowe knew his father was going to be home, he made plans to be out. Bob’s tough-love Christian doctrine felt like a prison, his high standards impossible to satisfy. Bowe didn’t like how his father treated his mother either. She should stand up to him, Bowe would tell his friends, and he was doubly angry when she stood by and defended Bob’s demands. Years later, when Bowe would cite the unhappiness of his childhood and the tyranny of the household, his family would feel hurt and confused. His sister didn’t share his feelings, and his parents did not understand.

  Bob and Jani knew that most teenagers turn on their parents at some point. But with Bowe it was extreme. He was bullheaded about seemingly irrational things, like refusing to sleep on a mattress. He told his mom that he didn’t believe in such comforts. He would sleep on the floor. At home, nothing seemed to go his way. When foxes and coyotes came at night for the family’s pets, it was always Bowe’s kittens that turned up dead in the morning. They lost more cats to violent deaths than they could count.

  When he could no longer stand it, he packed his wilderness kit—compass, knives, water, food, journal—and fled into the backcountry. He rode the dirt bike he bought with his own money, brought a sleeping bag, and if he wanted to spend the night under the stars with no one around for miles, that’s what he did. He escaped into his imagination too, writing stories in his journal that occupied his mind for days. Alone in the mountains, he felt calm and safe.

  Bowe had a driver’s license, and his parents told him he could borrow their trucks to drive to work. But he preferred riding his bike, sometimes pedaling forty or fifty miles a day. He spent hours in Ketchum’s Community Library, where the valley’s other drifters sat alongside the retired New York executives who came to read the Financial Times in front of a stone fireplace. He lost himself in historical epics about ancient civilizations and adventures on the high seas, and he checked out books and DVDs on martial arts, wilderness survival, and Bear Grylls, the former British Special Air Service soldier who turned complicated survival scenarios into slick videos.

  Bowe knew his social skills were lacking, so he signed up for an afternoon fencing class at the Sacred Cow, a mixed-use yoga and dance studio in a Ketchum building owned by the actress Mariel Hemingway. (On his way to class, he pedaled past Hemingway Elementary, the school named after Mariel’s grandfather Ernest, who killed himself with a shotgun in the mudroom of his Ketchum home on July 2, 1961.) At fencing, Bowe made new friends, including Shane and Kayla Harrison, whose mother, Kim Harrison, was an old friend of Mariel’s.

  Shane and Kayla weren’t like other kids Bowe knew. They were homeschooled but not religious. They lived in Idaho, but they didn’t go camping and shooting, and they never went to church. One year their mom took their homeschooling on the road, backpacking through the old cities of Europe and searching for coffee shops where they spent their days reading and talking and writing.

  As exotic as the Harrisons were to him, Bowe was an equal novelty to them. He was chivalrous and polite to a fault. He didn’t drink or show any interest in drugs. Where others would swear, he said “gosh” or “good grief” and had a goofy sweet smile. Kim and Kayla doted on him.

  On days when he arrived early to fencing, he watched the end of the Sun Valley Ballet School classes that shared the Sacred Cow studio. He saw the concentration on the girls’ faces as they struggled with positions requiring strength, balance, and flexibility. One day he asked the teacher, Anna Fontaine, if he could sit in on a class; he told her he might even want to give it a try. He was seventeen years old, tall, wiry, and strong—the perfect build for a lifter, she thought. First she put him with the other teenagers, but when he didn’t know the basics, Bowe volunteered to start with a beginner class. With deep focus and an uncanny devotion that made him a teacher’s favorite, he stood at the barre practicing his plie and releve in a line of nine- and ten-year-old girls in tutus.

  Before earning his GED, Bowe signed up for summer-school courses at the public school in Hailey. He loved his teacher, but when he saw a bully harassing a smaller kid, he confronted him—with his fists. The bully had it coming, and the teacher turned a blind eye to Bowe’s vigilantism, but he told his mom he’d seen enough of public school.

  The following summer, Kim bought an old cabin in downtown Ketchum with plans to build a sophisticated coffee and tea shop like the places she and her kids had discovered in Europe. They would teach people the differences between oolong, lapsang, and sencha; there would be a café and creative performances. Everyone was welcome. It would be “a community place,” Kim said—something different and new for teens tired of pumping quarters into the Big Buck Hunter up the road at Lefty’s Bar & Grill.

  Kim was a Wiccan, so she named the place Strega, Italian for “witch.” As the scope of the cabin remodel quickly exceeded their abilities and budget, Bowe volunteered to do the work for free. After a day ripping out drywall and sawing lumber to build the ornate tea bar, Bowe would ride his bike nearly twenty miles home—past the hospital and the trailer park, the millionaire’s enclave at Gimlet, the mid-valley country club, and the convenience store that used to sell porn. He hung a right at the UPS distribution center where his dad went to work each morning, crossed the Big Wood River, and climbed for miles on gravel and dirt to the house where he no longer wanted to be. Kim made him a deal: As long as Bowe worked at Strega, he could sleep there too. Every night he unrolled his sleeping mat, and each morning he packed it back in his green ammo box, as if he were never there.

  If the move bothered Bob, he didn’t show it. He shrugged it off, framing it as a natural, if somewhat sudden, step in his son’s maturing process, like going off to college. Jani took it harder. It was a rupture in the family, a rejection without explanation. But Ketchum was a revelation to Bowe. Leaving the silence of the canyon and his father’s rules, he moved into a kind witch’s tea shop tucked between modern art galleries that sold six-figure paintings to second-home owners from Brentwood and Chappaqua. Strega shared an alleyway with the Board Bin, a punk-inspired skate and snowboard shop and cradle of the local counterculture. The valley’s newspaper, the Idaho Mountain Express, was two blocks north. Two blocks south was the Davies-Reid Tribal Arts building, a South Asian imports bazaar stacked with rugs and shawls woven in small indigenous factories in Peshawar and Swat in Northwest Pakistan.

  Comfortable in the woods, Bowe was a naïf in town. Ketchum had an energy that was bigger than its three thousand people, and he studied the daily habits of European ski instructors and art gallerists who spoke many languages and traveled the world. It was also a ski bum town where freak flags flew. The newspaper deliveryman was an Air Force veteran and a tinkerer named Mickey, and when Mickey ran for local office (which he did every election) he campaigned by riding around town in extravagant patriotic regalia on an electric tricycle he built for himself.

  Strega was a hit with college kids home on break and cliques of twentysomethings who worked at Ketchum’s restaurants, bookstores, and galleries. Bowe joined Kim’s gaggle on an oversized, unstructured staff. He sat on a stool by the stove and studied the rich kids and self-styled artists for clues about how to act. Mariel Hemingway used the kitchen to test recipes for her gluten-free cookies. Bowe tried goth—Kayla painted his nails black, and he let his blond bangs hang over his eyes. Kim was hands-off, the cool mom of the whole gang, and the place ran like an artists’ commune with teens journaling in leather-bound notebooks and talking about their feelings. Profits were an afterthought. As the lunch orders stacked up, the cooks sent their friends running to the store for bread and tomatoes.

  Compared to the binary codes of right and wrong at his parents’ house, Kim’s world held multitudes. She talked about her Hollywood days doing design work for Oscar-winning blockbusters like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Toy Story. She spoke the mystical languages of many faiths and filled the store with the spiritual
accoutrement of Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, tarot cards, and astrology. The bulletin board that hung by the door was jammed with business cards from massage therapists, reflexologists, energy readers, energy healers, Ayurvedic advisers, doulas, and yogis. Bowe still checked in with his parents, who always invited him for church on the weekends. Jani was worried. Her son’s faith, which she thought had been strong, seemed to be washing away in a muddled New Age flood.

  Kim decided that it no longer made sense for Bowe to sleep at Strega, so she invited him to move in with her family. They had an extra room in their house, a funky artist space with a riotous overgrown garden in the front yard, marbles and mosaics embedded in poured concrete floors, and a bathroom covered with her own dark versions of classic Portuguese tilework. Houseguests were encouraged to express themselves on a chalkboard wall, and Bowe became a regular at boisterous family dinners with Kim’s brother, Mark Farris, and a rotating cast of friends.

  Farris and Kim’s grandfather had been a union organizer in Chicago and Los Angeles, and in their home, “socialism” was never a bad word. As the wine flowed, Kim and Mark and their friends let loose on George W. Bush, the lies used to sell the Iraq War, and the inherent evil of the American Right. Mark was an industrial designer with the sensibility of an artist and the only guy at the table who could speak Bowe’s language about tactical gear, motorcycles, guns, and outdoor adventures. They took Bowe in without asking who or what he was running from.

  “He was obviously struggling to feel comfortable, but he was also obviously a really sweet guy,” Farris said. Kim tried to help him build a new emotional foundation. “He learned basic things with me, like he was not going to get in trouble if he ate all the peanut butter,” she later told Army investigators. She thought she was enriching him in ways his parents hadn’t. She believed that Bowe was socially underdeveloped because his parents never taught him how to discuss his feelings.

  Jani and Sky had a bad feeling about Kim. Who was this person, they wondered, indoctrinating an impressionable boy with her own worldview? Kim seemed intent on encouraging his worst instincts about his own family, magnifying the negative moments until they defined the entire relationship. The Bergdahls didn’t like it, but they knew that Bowe needed to leave the house at some point. He was a work in progress, and he needed to figure himself out on his own terms.

  Where the new adults in his life saw a vulnerable and kind young man, his peers saw a stranger side. At the gun club one afternoon, he jumped from a thirty-foot platform onto hard ground, laughing as he walked away from his stunned coworkers, apparently uninjured. As his social confidence at Strega grew, so did his antics. He didn’t talk much, but when he did it was in great detail about weaponry and martial arts to people who he couldn’t see weren’t interested. He tore phone books in half and told his new friends that he liked to test out burning his hands on the kitchen stove. Why? they asked. To make them tougher, Bowe said. He would disappear into the bathroom and emerged in skin-tight compression shirts with sheathed knives strapped to his body.

  “It was like, ‘Great, you do that.’ Our friends just let him do whatever,” said Kyle Koski, one of the Strega crew. “What he actually did with it all, I have no idea. But he looked prepared for something.”

  Bowe discovered zazen, a meditation discipline that teaches students to control their thoughts, and he devoted himself to it with his usual absolute dedication. He modeled himself on Bruce Lee, the Kung Fu legend who wrote, “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Despite the social appeals of Strega, and despite Kim’s gravitational pull, he hungered for a greater purpose. Along with Bear Grylls, he had been fascinated by a series of British military history books that his parents had lying around the house as collectibles, and in his heady teen years, he began to see himself as a warrior and a protector.

  He bought a samurai sword, which he carried around Ketchum “for protection,” he said. When his friends asked about the rows of cuts on his arms, he explained them away with different stories to different people. The cuts on his face were from a trip to New York City, he claimed, where he had gone walking around bad neighborhoods to find people to start knife fights with, and the scars on his arms were from experiments with self-surgery. No one called it “cutting.” He never saw a therapist. He was training, he said. He started stashing his weapons in Strega’s hidden crannies: throwing knives, a garrote, a medieval flail, and in case of a holdup, a gnarled Irish shillelagh under the cash register. Strega’s manager, a hip Michigander named Chad Walsh, told Bowe one day that he was giving him a new job as head of security. Strega didn’t need a bouncer any more than a person in Ketchum needed a sword for protection, but they all liked Bowe, and Chad wanted him to feel included. On open mic nights at the café, when the college kids tested out their free-form poetry, Bowe stood by the door, scanning the crowd for trouble that never came.

  * * *

  —

  IN A REMOTE MOUNTAIN town where the nearest shopping mall is a seventy-mile drive away and the U.S. Postal Service mail is notoriously slow, everyone knows their UPS man. “Seeing the UPS truck was like Christmas all the time,” said John Shaw, a federally licensed firearms dealer who depended on UPS for receiving regular heavy shipments of rifles, pistols, shotguns, and ammunition at his home in Hailey. When “Shooter Shaw” moved west from his native Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid-nineties, his legend as a self-taught champion marksman was already made. Bob knew whom the gun deliveries were for before they even met.

  Shaw had plans to open an Idaho outpost of his Mid-South Institute of Self-Defense Shooting, the successful shooting academy he founded in northwest Mississippi and developed into one of the top military and law-enforcement training centers in the country. In Hagerman, Idaho, he bought a spectacular piece of property with panoramic views of the Snake River and Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, where he built a gun lover’s Shangri-La.

  Bob was generous with local hunting tips and welcoming in ways the Southern transplant never forgot, and, in the late nineties, Shaw counted Bob as one of his first Idaho friends. Their families had dinner dates in Hailey, where Shaw met Jani, Sky, and Sky’s boyfriend, Michael Albrecht. The son of a social worker in a family of devout Christians who moved frequently from job to job, Albrecht had also been homeschooled. When Shaw met him, he had recently earned his high school degree from a Bible school in North Dakota and had earned a spot at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was planning a career as a Navy pilot.

  “It sounded like a great all-American family to me,” Shaw said. He spent hours with Bowe at the Blaine County Gun Club, Shaw’s favorite local range. “I noticed his work ethic,” he said. “That got my attention for sure. He liked to work. This day and age you sure don’t see kids doing that. Even then you didn’t see kids doing that. That was a little unusual, just how dedicated he was.”

  Shaw preferred shooting when his friend’s son was working. Of all the kids who pulled trap there, Bowe knew the most about how the targets flew and how much lead to give each clay. “It was a pleasure having somebody like him with me,” Shaw said.

  John Shaw had an idea for Bob: “If [Bowe] really likes shooting this much, we could use that help back in Memphis.” Mid-South was a place where SWAT and SEAL teams went to train, but there were also twenty acres of grass that needed mowing, as well as ranges and target machines that needed maintenance and upkeep. Shaw knew Bowe was a hard worker who didn’t have a solid plan for his future. He could live right on the range, he told Bob. He could see a different part of the country, where he would meet new people, including some of the best-trained operators in the U.S. military. Bob liked the idea, and in spite of the tension between them, Bowe still sought his father’s advice. Shaw had seen something in him, and Bob encouraged his son to take the job.

  John Shaw’s Mid-South is in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, on the Delta, just east of the massive riv
er. It is flat, hot, wide-open country—the opposite of Hailey, Idaho, in almost every way, except for its even greater isolation. Bowe stayed in a small room in a building next to one of several shooting ranges surrounded by miles of cornfields that backed up to a narrow creek called Dead Negro Slough. Poor black communities lined Route 61 north to Memphis. To the south was Tunica, where the gold windows of the Gold Strike Casino Resort were the most notable features in an otherwise featureless landscape. The job was tedious. Shaw and his manager at Mid-South, an Alabamian named Ross Sanders, agreed to give Bowe the same initiation as every other new hire: “Three months of manual labor before you even get a gun in your hands,” Shaw said. Sanders handed Bowe a weed whacker and a paintbrush and put him to work, which he did well, earning their trust. Some employees in years past had turned out to be thieves. High-end weapons and expensive tactical equipment had gone missing. But Shaw knew that Bob had an honor code, and he never doubted Bowe. “I don’t think he would ever steal from anybody,” Shaw said. “I don’t think he cared about anything with materialistic value.”

  When he saw Bob in Hailey, Shaw passed along the report from Sanders: Bowe was happy with the work. He was reclusive, but a reliable part of the team and seemingly dedicated to Shaw’s mission. Kim Harrison heard a different story. Bowe called her and vented about the people he didn’t like and parts of the job that were terrible, like having to shoot stray dogs that roamed onto the property. She had thought the job was questionable from the start, a strange and isolated pursuit surrounded by, as she saw them, a bunch of gun nuts. The lone bright spot, Bowe told her, was the time he spent with Delta Force and SEAL teams who came for training between deployments. On calls with his parents, Bowe talked about the elite soldiers he was meeting and his goal of joining them one day. But when Bob asked for details, Bowe said he couldn’t talk about it. It’s classified, he said. Top secret.