Richard Oppel

In the months after Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was freed from Taliban captivity, senior Army officials struck a far milder and more sympathetic tone than Army commanders who are now pursuing charges that could send him to prison for life.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was released by the Taliban in exchange for five former leaders of the militant group held in Guantanamo Bay, will face charges of desertion and endangering U.S. troops in an Army court-martial.

Twenty minutes after Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his remote Army outpost in Afghanistan in the middle of a summer night, carrying little more than vacuum-packed chicken, knives, water and a compass, he began to realize just how dire his predicament was.

The stream of incidents this year — including an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado that left three dead last week and a shooting at a community college in Oregon that left 10 dead, including the gunman, in October — has intensified the debate over the accessibility of powerful firearms.

In the military's case against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the charge of desertion, with a maximum penalty of imprisonment for five years, is the lesser count and the easier one to prove, legal experts say.

As hard-won territory falls to insurgents in Iraq, a Talkeetna veteran and his compatriots remember the fallen friends who lost their lives in the fight to secure regions now under the control of Sunni militants.