(More about Neptune… “Neptune: The Ultimate Nullifier”… is HERE)
Many of you out there will have already formed a very strong opinion about the Bowe Bergdahl situation, and about the man himself. To many, he’s a traitor. To others, he’s a conscientious objector. To some he’s a victim, and others he is a villain. Personally, the more I look into this matter, the less I am actually sure what to believe. And if you know nothing about the Bowe Bergdahl case… you may understand it better than a lot of commentators seem to. Read on…
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One should always try to be objective about a person when looking at their birth chart. For those who have read my previous blog entries about Kanye West or Kim Kardashian, you know I don’t always have an easy time doing that. But if Kim or Kanye were clients of mine, I would set that aside and have an objective look at them.
If you’ve formed an opinion about Bowe Bergdahl, I ask you to set it aside for now.
THE MAN: Bowe was born March 28, 1986, time unknown, Sun Valley Idaho. Even without a time of birth, an interesting pattern stands out in his chart: Jupiter in Pisces, trine Pluto in Scorpio, square Saturn in Sagittarius, and sextile Mars and Neptune in Capricorn. Jupiter represents one’s philosophy of life. Bowe’s Jupiter is sextile Neptune and trine Pluto, so we can tell that whatever it is he believes, he’s going to believe it strongly. Jupiter square Saturn, however, will tend to complicate things: achieving his philosophical life goals might be difficult, or might involve “going against the grain.” Although we don’t know his time of birth, there is a good chance that Bowe’s Moon is conjunct Pluto, which would only strengthen the pattern in his chart.
Sun square Neptune indicates that the father figure in his life might be a bit unusual. In fact, his parents lived “off the grid” on a 40 acre farm, where Bowe and his sister were home-schooled for six hours a day, with a heavy emphasis on ethics and morality. When other kids were all playing video games, Bowe and his dad were discussing Thomas Aquinas.
Bowe had an appetite for adventure, as one might expect from Mars conjunct Neptune and Mars sextile Pluto. He tried and failed at the age of 20 to join the French Foreign Legion. He eventually enlisted in the US Army, and was assigned to Afghanistan.
And then, thanks to Saturn, things started to fall apart. After that, Neptune just made things weirder.
THE BREAKDOWN: In 2008 and 2009, as Bowe experienced his Saturn Square and transiting Saturn opposite his Jupiter, his worldview started to take a beating. His unit began experiencing serious lapses in morale. He saw an Afghan child being run over by an American truck. His last e-mail home said, in part, “I am sorry for everything here. These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks.”
He made comments to more than one member of his unit about wanting to simply wander off. And then on June 30, 2009, as the transiting Sun was trine his Jupiter, trine his Pluto, and quincunx his Saturn… that’s exactly what he did.
Within 24 hours he had been captured by the Taliban.
THE AFTERMATH: American officials disagreed on how to handle this matter for years. There were opportunities almost immediately to arrange his release in a prisoner exchange, but nothing came of it for five years. Various officials disagreed about how to handle the situation, and the only thing the American government appeared to agree with was keeping the story as quiet as possible. Bowe may have willingly wondered off of his own accord, but he was not a willing prisoner of the Taliban, having escaped at least once only to be recaptured.
So, is Bowe Bergdahl a conscientious objector? Perhaps. But he should have known that there were ways for him to express that without simply vanishing, which resulted in the eventual deaths of six other US soldiers searching for him… although that’s being questioned now too. Is he a traitor? He had apparently said many negative things about the United States, but he certainly wasn’t a willing prisoner of the Taliban, and didn’t intend to join them. Was it right for the United States to trade in five high profile Guantánamo prisoners for Bowe? That’s hard to say. On the one hand, the United States has an official policy of “leave no man behind,” and there was never an official finding of desertion or wrongdoing on Bowe’s part… if that would have made a difference to whether or not he should be “left behind.” On the other hand, the five prisoners the US gave up were, allegedly, “high-value” prisoners who were responsible for possibly thousands of deaths. And I say “allegedly” because it’s not as if any of those prisoners have ever received a proper trial.
So where does this leave us? Is Bergdahl a traitor, a conscientious objector, a pawn, a mentally ill young man, a victim of PTSD, a guy who made a mistake whose situation rapidly spun out of control, a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the war in Afghanistan, someone who overestimated his ability to make it on his own in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, or a fall guy?
Honestly: the more I look into the matter, the further I am from any one opinion on the subject, and the more I am convinced that anyone who does have a firm opinion on the matter is probably missing the point… whatever the heck that point is even supposed to be. His case has become a Rorshach Test for those who have an opinion about the war in Afghanistan, and some commentators who once said that America wasn’t doing enough to get him back now say America should have done nothing at all.
Saturn has done plenty to Bowe Bergdahl… and now it’s Neptune’s turn.
To me, the story of Bowe Bergdahl is now turning into a classic Neptune transit. And as Neptune prepares to station and go retrograde on top of Bowe’s Jupiter, and will spend the next two years activating his Mars/Jupiter/Saturn/Neptune/Pluto complex, I have genuine doubts that this story will ever make any kind of complete sense that a majority of people can agree upon, and I very much doubt that Bowe will be able to make a lot of sense of it either. Many of you there will have already formed a very strong opinion about the Bowe Bergdahl situation, and about the man himself. To some he’s a victim, and others he is a villain. Personally, the more I look into this matter, the less I am actually sure what to believe.
So now… Bowe and all of us will have the next two years to see Neptune work its weird magic.
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