Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl wrote before his disappearance of his disillusionment with the military and the world at large in Facebook posts spotted Wednesday by the Associated Press.

Bergdahl used the social media service under the name “Wandering Monk” and, according to the AP, his account was suspended by Facebook on Wednesday “for a violation of its terms.”

In his final post on May 22, 2009, weeks before he disappeared from his unit in Afghanistan, Bergdahl detailed a five-day mission that was only supposed to span eight-hours. The mission took longer than anticipated when vehicles became disabled from roadside bombs, forcing Bergdahl’s group to camp near a small mountain town in Afghanistan.

The mission turned chaotic, and violent, when the group embarked on its return trip to the base.

From the AP:

When the convoy finally started back to the base, they traveled along a creek bed in a long, deep valley lined with trees and boulders. Again one of the vehicles hit an improvised explosive device, according to Bergdahl’s post, and as the soldiers tried to hook the vehicle to a tow strap they began taking fire from people hidden on the hillside.

Enemy combatants “begain to splatter bullets on us, and all around us, the gunners where only able to see a few of them, and so where firing blindly the rest of the time, up into the trees and rocks,” Bergdahl wrote.

When a machine gun mounted on the truck carrying Bergdahl quit working, he had to hand over his own weapon to the gunner.

“I sat there and watched, there was nothing else i was allowed to do,” he wrote.
No one was killed in the encounter, but Bergdahl was frustrated by the danger and the situation.

“Because command where too stupid to make up there minds of what to do, we where left to sit out in the middle of no where with no sopport to come till late mourning the next day. … But Afghanistan mountains are really beautiful!” he wrote.

Bergdahl’s close friend Kim Harrison shared some of his personal writings with the Washington Post this week to dispel the narrative that he was a scheming deserter.

According to Harrison, who used her former married name in the Post’s story because she was concerned about her safety, Bergdahl suffered from some psychological problems.

She said Bergdahl is “the perfect example of a person who should not have gone” off to war. The Post reported that Bergdahl was discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2006, two years before he enlisted in the Army.

Days after Bergdahl wandered off base, Harrison said she received a box filled with Bergdahl’s journal and other items.

In a journal entry before his deployment, Bergdahl wrote that he was worried.

“The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are,” he wrote. “I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.”