Afghanistan. Twenty twelve, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was leading a squad of American infantryman in a region known as the birthplace of the Taliban. He was on his fourth poor Beauty and considered to be an elite soldier until one night, for some reason, Bales left his combat outpost, walked to two nearby villages and opened fire. All told, sixteen Afghan civilians were killed that night, many of them were children. Robert Bales is a murder.
It's straight up a war crime.
Hearing the name Robert Bales sends chills down my spine. The reaction from the US government was swift and severe, provoking universal condemnation and the life sentence Fort Leavenworth Correctional Barracks military prison. Since then, the story of Robert Bales has faded from the public eye until now.
Maybe I made a mistake, maybe I am wrong, but you have to understand the way it went down.
Over the years, We've conducted a series of exclusive interviews with one of America's most notorious war criminals. They paint a complex portrait of a man changed by the global War on Terror.
Nobody joins the Army after September eleventh, to be the bad guy, you know, the idea of hurting it kid, of killing a kid come on.
Questions remain around Baal's mindset and motivations that fateful night, questions he seeks to answer.
It comes into question, how could anyone do that? How could I go that far off track? And then I relived those days and I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe I was still alive too to.
That The war within the Robert Bayles Story. It's an investigative podcast that unpacks one of the most controversial events in American military history. You'll hear from soldiers have served on that deployment.
I get woken up very early in the morning and it's like, everybody, get up, go to your battle station.
Someone is missing. Robert Bales's fiercest defenders. He saw he saw the Taliband get ready to attack. My goal is to get him home right so that we can be a family. His biggest detractors. He committed brutal atrocities on us. He took my whole family away from me. And experts who uncover explosive information on this polarizing.
Case, Bail's deployment is merely a symptom of a broken army, scraping the bottom of the barrel and sending injured and ill service members overseas.
It's all here in twelve episodes that will be both gripping and revealing.
I understand why I'm here.
I know because my nightmares.
Tell me every day.
Listen to the War within the Robert Bailes Story starting on June twenty ninth, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.