S1E1: Afghanistan's Most Wanted

Nobody joins the infantry to be the bad guy. Nobody joins the army after September eleventh to be the bad guy.

The war in Afghanistan has been made a lot more complicated by that massacre of seventeen civilians.

I wish, you know, things would be different. I saw the aftermath firsthand. You know, the idea of hurting a kid, of killing a kid.

Come on, in the middle of the night, Robert Bales left his combat outpost alone and murdered sixteen Afghan civilians in cold blood.

Nine of them were children.

Maybe I am wrong, but you have to understand the way it went down.

The United States has formally apologized for the killings, and the families of the victims were paid a total of seven.

Before they even announced my name. The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, he said, you know they're gonna give me the capital punishment. That's a pretty outstanding thing. I thought I was doing the right thing.

The soldier is to face multiple murder charges, but we are learning compelling details about his troubled life and his four deployments to war zones.

You can continue to get blown up, and you continue to get shot at, and you can't do anything about it. Had I not been in the Army, had I not been through the countless engagements. I don't think there's a way possible that I could have done anything like that had it not been for all the experiences laid up to it.

The United States Army are going to have to look at this again.

Are we pushing our troops too far, too fast?

And are they exposed to too much combat?

You get post traumatic stress disorder from being in a car accident, and so you imagine what it would do to you if you're dragging parts of your friend's bodies around.

The head trauma of the PTSD come back, and you say, almost how could it not have happened? How could I not have done this?

His wife, Carolyn said, what has been reported is completely out of character of the men I know and admire.

If you've met you at love and most people are blown away at how real he is, how caring he is.

In a deal, Bailes pleaded guilty to premeditated murder.

The judge then asked him, what was your reason for killing them? Bals replied, there's not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did I understand.

Why I'm here?

You know, I know our by mistakes.

I know.

Because my nightmares tell me every day.

My name is Mike McGinnis. This is the war within the Robert Bayles story. Between the years of twenty twelve and twenty thirteen, the story of US Army staff Sergeant Robert Baylees was well covered by the mainstream meeting.

Let's get you chucked up?

Get on all right, Yeah, I'm by as long as he's okay.

Yeah, oh man, thanks for having me.

Several years ago, Robert Bayle sat down for a series of exclusive interviews with a documentarian, Paul Plowski. He's the guy with the deep voice in New Jersey accent.

Just through and just on top. All right.

Well, if I say something stupid, you look good. The other voice is John Mayer, Bail's appellet lawyer Mars, trying to help Baals get home to his wife, Carrie and their two kids.

Any other situation is this To manage from the state forward, You're always going to have the tractors critics, but it's not critic account.

Bales and mahar are having one of their regular attorney client meetings. Paul is sitting in and asking questions. They're in a private office of the United States Disciplinary Barracks and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Military Prison has been Bail's home for the past ten years. Unless something dramatically changes, he'll never leave.

He's already have supporters in those value what you did. In those recognize, understand, can see that way, passed it. Whatever they have to do to get the mindset to support right, that's what we need to cast.

In total, Paul collected eighteen hours worth of commentary from Bales. They discussed his case, what transpired on the night of the murders, and plenty of other revelations. Until now, nobody has heard the unfiltered story straight from the source. As for me, I spent sixteen years in the US Army, serving as an infantryman, spending thirteen of them in the eighty second Airborn in March of twenty twelve, I was in Afghanistan, about thirty miles from Bob Baals when he

Everything we did was you're in bal splatoon, like that's how you identified yourself.

Robert Bayales's prominent legal team.

Whether or not Bob Bales shot and killed those seventeen people, he pled guilty to that to save his life, had guilty to that to take the death penalty off the table. This case smacks of institutional bias.

Experts who attest this state of Bales's.

Brain Baile's deployment is merely a symptom of a broken army. Its leadership was fully aware that it was scraping the bottom of the barrel and sending injured and ill service members overseas.

Bals's wife Carrie.

He's not just my husband, he is my best friend. My goal is to get him hold so that we can be a family.

Their fifteen year old daughter, Quincy.

I think that we have a great relationship.

Of course, he can't be involved physically, like he's not at home and I don't wake up seeing him every morning.

And even the Afghan families whose lives were forever changed by Baals' actions.

When the American troops came and night, they committed brutal atrocities on us. You see, they took my whole families away from me.

August twenty twenty one marked the official end the US Afghan War. Almost immediately after the Americans evacuated, Kable fell and the Taliban reclaimed control of the country. After two decades of conflict and tragedy, Almost everything is as it was after all. Geopolitically, Afghanistan is known as the land where history repeats itself.

Afghanistan, it's known as the Graveyard of the Empires. Whether it was a British Empire, and then the Soviet Union and now the Americans.

Kathy Gannon lived in Kable, Afghanistan for thirty five years, working as a journalist for the Associated Press.

And it's not that Afghanist don't like foreigners, because they do like foreigners. They like foreigners very much, but they do not like foreigners who come in to subjugate them. Then the resistance has historically jailed together and they have resisted that attempt by whomever to impose their will on them.

History tells us that if you're a global superpower trying to conquer Afghanistan, you're probably not going to win. So I did the US.

Invade, You were attacked on nine to eleven. That's very my name to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan didn't topple the Twin Towers. It was Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda who committed that unthinkable act. But the Bush administration wanted to find bin Laden and he was hiding in Afghanistan. The Taliban ruled the country at the time, and they refused to cooperate with the search.

The US government Post nine eleven said to Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban hand over Osama Bin Lauden closed down all the training camps that might exist in Afghanistan and continue to exist, and we won't go in.

That's what we want.

From you, and we wanted from you. Now, willo Omar returned with you, give us the evidence of Osami's involvement in nine to eleven, and we will.

Try him here.

Now.

Saudi Arabia should have been real one that America should have gone to because all the hijackers were soundly for Pete six. But with Sadiya Abia I Vandosam bin Hunt to be tried and vound guilty and Sadia Arabia the greement and uprising. So on October seventh, two thousand and one, the US at Town, Afghanistan.

Ten years later, in twenty eleven, Seal Team six finally took out Bin Laden he was in Pakistan, but the war in Afghanistan continued. The US had already deposed a government propped up a new one. They couldn't just leave whenever they wanted.

I think the situation in Afghanistan was and remained so complicated, and Robert Bales is a depiction of the complexities of this.

Conflict, decorated journalist yealde Hakim was also on the ground in Afghanistan at that time.

It was a twenty year war that was fought twenty times every year. The policy seemed to shift and no ground was ever gained, and no real understanding outside of Cardboll of what the games were. And I am sure for Robert Bales that platoon, the servicemen who were there, that would have crossed their minds.

Daily, what are we doing here? Why are we fighting this war?

And that kind of conflict between your duty and what you think you're fighting for, and then all of the misunderstandings around that. And I think that's what war brings.

So here's the thing. Every time we go through this and we talk about it, all the events are led up to that night, I feel it again on my chest right and You're like, how the hell could anyone do that? How the hell could I go that far off track? And then I go back and I relive those days up to that, and I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe I was still alive.

To drew that.

I understand how I got where I was as I stepped back weeks months coming back to the United States, not being surrounded by the culture of the environment. You know, it's a heinous act that is very difficult to judge with American eyes in America. When you're in the middle of Afghanistan, in the birthplace of the Tablat, where every day you're in a firefight, when every day you think that you or your friends are going to be shot or killed, you look at things differently.

The year was twenty ten, two years before the incident. Bob Bales was finishing his third tour in Iraq. Like many soldiers who saw that much combat, who was mentally exhausted.

I thought I was just gonna have some time to kind of relax a little bit, reset, retool, and to be honest with you, I thought about being a recruiter and wanted to move down to Tampa just take a break, man. I mean, you know, in nine years, I'm deployed, you know, three times in nine years, you know, I mean.

That's a lot. At the same time, the US was in the middle of a military surge in Afghanistan. They needed all the manpower that could muster and began asking decorated Iraq vets to redeploy. So it was less than a year before Bob Bales was tapped to lead a squad for Tour number four. By then, he had already seen over three full years of deadly combat. Bales might have been an old pro, but the people placed under his command weren't nearly a season. Take Private James Alexander Man, I.

Have been waiting ten years to talk about this. I'm shocked at nobody's come forward before.

As Robert Bales was getting home from his third year in Iraq, James was going into basic training. He was in for a rude awakening.

Twenty ten. I went to the recruiting station and I was like, I want to be in the action. I wanted the hardest job that you guys could give me. And so they were like perfect infantry, you know, and I was like, okay, perfect sounds great, you know, like another another dumb one signed up kind of thing.

Going into enlistment. What did you think about the Afghan War? Because you know, you said you joined in twenty ten, we'd already been in Theeeder for nine years. What were your feelings about the war, you know, going into it? Did you think it was a good war?

I'm trying to think of when we got been laden March of twenty eleven.

I think, yeah, that's what was May of twenty eleven.

Yeah, and so that's when I first joined the unit. So I thought like, okay, boys, war's over. We've done our thing.

For me.

The whole purpose was we're going to go to Afghanistan. We're gonna make this place inhospitable so that terrorists can't go there and we could protect the homeland, but also there's real problems there that we can help, like the women and children of Afghanistan and all that stuff. I thought that we by going there, we'd be doing some level of good.

Bales is a platoon star when you first get there, right, Yeah, what kind of platoon sergeant was WASI?

Bales was mom, dad, brother, uncle, sister, everything, Every single part of that platoon was him. He had been there for quite a while, I think, but more so, he had really good relationships with all of the other squad leaders and so he kind of ran the thing as he wanted to. And his job basically was to take the toughest mission, and that's the mission that we got.

Bales and his squad were deployed to Panjue, Afghanistan. The region is known as the birthplace of the Taliban. There are no easy deployments in such a kinnectic area.

On that fourth tour, you know, we're heading to Bellum by Afghanistan, and we know it's bad.

You know.

We talked to the SF guys back in Candhor and they're like, oh, where are you going, And we're like, oh, we're going to Belibay and they're like, oh, man, good luck. You know, it's one of those things like oh, you got cancer.

Good luck.

Their base was known as VSP Belumbai. In the military, everything is shortened to an acronym. Special Forces becomes SF, Improvised explosive device becomes IED, so VSP is short for Village Stability Platform. They tended to be placed in areas where the Taliban had a major presence.

This is one of my all time great stories. We were getting the brief and there's an SF major who's giving us the brief and he's very young. So this SF major is pointing at this board is a map of Afghanistan and basically pointing at the different vsps that we're all going to go to. And each VSP has different icons next to it, and some of like you know, small arms fire icon and you look at Bellabay and it has all the icons, just all of them, and

Check understand that originally I didn't want to go, but you have one or two choices. You either cowered out or you cowboy up. And nobody wants to go to war with a pussy. So put my head down and went as hard as I could, trying to live as much life at home as you possibly could, making sure my wife and kids knew I love them, making sure the guys told their families that, hey, you know, understand that we are being told that this was a completely

They were different.

They're good warriors. Let's just say it like that. I hate them.

Don't get me wrong.

I don't like them. I don't want to say anything positive about them. But they grew up fighting and they knew what they were doing. So going into this, you know, I don't want to tell you I was scared, but I was scared of death, not just for myself, but for all these new guys.

James Alexander was one of those new guys. Gavin Jones was another. Sporting a thick mustache in an acoustic guitar. Gavin presents himself more like a guy who would have been protesting Vietnam decades ago and that way. In others, he couldn't have been more different than his squad leader Bails.

He seemed all right, like in the beginning, a little weird like, for example, I know, even before we shipped off, he took us aside and had a conversation with about men.

You know, war as hell.

I know it gets weird out there I've had plenty of other deployments in Iraq, basically saying that like, if you need to make that shot and they're so in you that doesn't need to be shot, you can make that shot and know that we've got your back on that. So basically saying that we can do whatever we want as long as we can claim that we're protecting someone, or basically a blank check.

Stuff like that, basically big boy rules, as he would put it.

I just assumed that was just like a normal talk anyone was gonna give, you know, assuming that you're infantry, like you know, you're probably gonna do questionable things in order to make sure that your buddy, the guy next to you comes home. So I didn't really think too much of that conversation at the time, besides the fact like, hey, I'm not to go to like Afghanistan about to go into war like this, you know, weird shit happens.

In early December of twenty eleven, Bails and his squad shipped off for VSB Ballumbay. There's another quirk you should know about the military's naming system. It can be kind of like the book nineteen eighty four where the Ministry of p sandels war and the Ministry of Love deals with torture. In other words, if you were going to a village stability platform, you could expect the environment to be pretty unstable.

Our mission was Village Stability Operations, and you know what that means is effectively, you send smaller units out into the rural population to live with the locals, live like the locals in an effort to build trust and confidence and rapport.

As the person tasked with overseeing the soldier station at VSP Bellam by Special Forces, Captain Danny Fields was in charge of stabilizing the area. It was a green berry on his third tour, a rising star by all accounts.

Once that local populace trust you, essentially you partner with them to secure their own area. BEFOREVSO or Village Stability Operations was a thing, typically you had the military would all be located on a big base, right and they would go out and do maybe an overnight mission, kill some bad guys, and then come back. Problem with that is, well it's a vacuum. Bad guys would come right back

A little bit, and then go back home.

So Vso kind of flipped that on its head. Where you live with the locals like the locals.

Private Alexander didn't get a full sense of what living like the locals really meant until he was on the ground and panishway Afghanistan.

Probably the moment I knew that I made the biggest mistake was the trip out. So we're leaving Camp Brown and they're driving us to bell and Buy. The guys in the back of the truck were like, make sure you put your seat belt on. There's IED's everywhere, and I'm just like, uh shit, okay. And so we start, you know, we're going out. We're turning down roads and we keep making like different turns, and I'm looking out of these bulletproof windows and I just see poverty on

I don't think people can understand what it's like to be in a situation like we were in Belumby like it's you know, a lot of military people, you know, they have a picture of these huge facilities with massive security compound, and that's not what Belumby was. It's a piny little place. Fifty Americans could have been overran at any point, and you're always on guard.

Yeah, I was terrified when you got there.

And of course we were getting engaged like two times a day for a pretty long time.

When Gavin says getting engaged, he means getting shot at. It's another important military phrase to know and remember, Gavin and James, these guys were complete rookies being shipped to one of the deadliest locations of an endless war. Bails group wasn't all alone out there. Their mission was really to support the elite Special Forces also stationed there.

The way he was to us, it's an SF operation, right, We're there to help those guys out first and foremost. Now, the SF dude's briefed us all on what a BSO is supposed to mean, you know, giving logistical support to village elders and leaders in order to help out their infrastructure. You know, because poor people are what the Taliban take advantage of. So we figured that a less hungry Afghan would be less eager to help out a Taliban.

Yavin is describing a military philosophy called counterinsurgency. Politicians in the media like to call it winning hearts and minds. If you want regular Afghan civilians to support the US instead of the Taliban, then you have to develop relationships with that population. You're not allowed to shoot somebody just for looking at you sideways.

The idea with the villos stability platform. As you go into these villages, you find the elders, you have them assign local police force. We train the local police force, we arm the local police force. Then we tie them back to the district. The district has now tied to the central government. The mantra is when the hearts and minds right, But people don't understand what that actually meant. Winning the hearts and minds doesn't mean that I want

People that are playing those sides. Absolutely, there's absolutely buildiers that are playing tho sides, so somebody could absolutely be a Throe and you never know.

Of One of the men stationed at VSP Belembay, gave an interview for this podcast, but ultimately declined to sign an appearance release for unknown reasons. As a result, we've obscured his voice and identity and will refer to him only as Soldier ex Soldier X recalls one of the reasons why the Taliban was such a challenging enemy to defeat, at least in a somewhat ethical manner. Unlike traditional militaries, they hide in plain sight.

I know, we had a couple of local guys that would help us like laundry and make a lot of our meals and stuff like that. And there was local Afghans and had a great relationship with them, our Afghan Army counterparts. We thought we had a great relationship. I think for the most part we did. We intercept the simmunication all night and they were plotting on how they

We had to established who's who and who are the players. Who is you know, a friendly guy. The guy that lived near us was called peg Leg. For the longest time, we're thinking this guy is like a friendly dude, and come to find out he actually was giving information to the Taliban. We hired workers onto our base to help build stairs. Two brothers. Turns out they were talented, right, and so it's like, Okay, these dudes are all around and we can't even figure out who is right and

To recap, here's the lay of the land. The Americans don't trust the Afghans, and the Afghans don't trust the Americans, even though the Americans are supposed to protect the Afghans. All the while the Taliban continuously attacks the VSP and everyone in it. The situation was becoming untenable.

They call them sticking points. In therapy, you replay these sticking points over and over and over and over again.

It's March fifth, twenty twelve, six days before Robert Bales becomes a war criminal. It starts off as a routine patrol of a local village quickly takes a turn.

We had just done a patrol to the district center. It was really just kind of a logistics patrol. So we went to go meet up with our B team and they were probably dropping off some mail, giving us some AMMO and things like that. On our way back, we were, you know, just a few hundred yards from the front gate at Belenby, and our rear vehicle was targeted and hit by an ID.

I was outside when I heard it, and I've never heard anything like that before. It was gut wrenching the sound of that metal. I mean, it was unbelievable.

I think there's totally five or six that were in that vehicle, so that vehicle was pretty well destroyed. No one had any serious injuries, nothing visible anyway. But because of TBI protocol and the severity of the damage in the vehicle, I opted to make the decision.

To men of back everybody. I wanted him to go get checked out. I need explosions can cause traumatic brain injuries or TBIs, so in essence, this bomb sidelined the truck's worth of fighters in response a quick reaction for US mobilized from VSP Bellumbai to respond to the possibility of a secondary incoming attack.

I am looking directly at the blast light and there's smoke everywhere. It's slightly obscured by very high walls, but I can basically see where the vehicle is. I can also see the Taliban members that had started to gather over some period of time to basically do what would be a complex ambush.

I'm getting guys up at different battle positions. One of the guys calls me up to the roof. I go up to the roof and he's pointing out a farmer that's walking. So I put the scope on the guy and I'm noticing him, and he continues to walk towards where the ied goes off. In hindsight, the things that always happens when IDs go off as people flee, they don't go towards an explosion, they go away from.

It at this point. But what are you potentially suspecting, you know, observing this.

Person, Well, he looks out of place. You know, these guys had called me up there for the reason that they felt he was out of place. So as I'm looking at him, this is all hindsight too. Farmers aren't clean. You know, this guy's in a clean white mandras burka whatever. He's carrying a clean shovel. You know it's shining, you know, you can see the shine of the shovel. But he definitely has something in his other hand. Right, So he's

That's kind of insertaincy for you. If we're going to win hearts and minds, we can't just shoot somebody unless we know for a fact that they're a threat.

I asked him nyvy eod to start sweeping around one of the tires so that we could recover the tire and it couldn't be used later on. So he was sweeping around the time and on his way to do that, he stepped on an anti personnel mind ended up losing his leg below the knee.

Asbury, they took his leg off. He's a good guy.

You know.

We weren't super close, we weren't, you know, but he was an American, he was he was family. As far as I'm concerned.

If you've ever seen the hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner's character the guy who disabled bombs, that was Asbury. Bailis took what happened to him pretty personally.

Not having shot the guy. You know, it's hard to it's hard to say, man. I mean I feel responsible a little bit. I feel responsible that, you know, Asbury lost his leg and that I could have stopped that guy that was actively turning that ied on and I just didn't have the ability to squeeze a trigger at that time. You know, later that night, you know, we kind of all got to get there, had some drinks, kind of commiserate, if you will.

Soldier X was part of the group that gathered for drinks after the event.

Bills and I talked a lot throughout the deployment, so with the seed thing, he definitely expressed frustrations that we want aggressive enough as a team. We sat back, we assessed, and we work in our more methodical approaches to identifying who may have wavebid. Bills wanted to go out and be aggressive. You want to go out and solve the problem right then and there.

You know, it's getting worse, bro, Like, it's getting worse like I've seen this before, right, Like I saw this when we were in Iraq. You know, you see the bad guy and you know what he's going to do, but you can't do anything about it. Right, you know what's going to happen. You feel it. You feel these things closing in on you, over and over and over again, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it.

The tree that was used as a marker, there's a lot to talk about this this tree and how they mark the targets and all that, and there's some confusion about what actually happened next.

The Taliban er smart fighters detonate IDs from a distance, and they can hurt Americans without putting themselves and harms away. But if they're so far away, how do they know when to initiate the id. Some thought that a tree was a trigger to staging the attack.

The reason the tree was such an important thing is that the tree was the largest terrain feature in a wide area. So we believe that the tree had been used as a trigger point. So once the truck gets to a certain place somebody from a distance can see and set off a command wire to destroy the truck.

He decided that I have to get rid of this tree, this tree as a security threat. That makes a certain amount of sense. I suppose if he's afraid that the tree is going to be used again as a marker to blow up American soldiers.

That's the voice of writer Brennan Vaughn. In twenty fifteen, he interviewed Bob Bales for a GQ piece titled Confessions of America's most Notorious War Criminal.

In Bals's telling to me, he just felt moved to do it as some kind of, I don't know, symbolic way to make him feel like he had gotten rid of the thing that he blamed himself for playing that role in The Soldier who Lost his leg.

Baiales is like, you know, getting adjutude. His temperature is blown, really fixating on this after effect because now this whole ego thing that he has of no one's getting hurt under my watch and all that stuff. I'm gonna get you guys home. He starts talking about he wants to destroy the tree the marker, right, which, militarily speaking, that's a great idea to do if you want to deny

On Thursday Marche three days before the Canahar massacre, bails in a squad leave VSP Bellam Bay and head to the scene of the crime to cut down a tree. Now, these are military guys, not loggers, so they didn't really chomp it down. Actually they blew it up.

So we wrapped a bunch of dead cord around the base of the tree and dead cord the tree. Well, there are two six foot adobe walls on each side of this, and the tree falls awkwardly, so we have to flip it around in the six foot wall, which became very difficult to do. During this period of time, from the north, we start getting signal intelligence hits that are saying we're getting ready to move into ambush positions. You know, somebody take the shot.

Private Alexander was responsible for signal intelligence, which means it was listening in on the Taliban's conversations.

So I know where all of the Taliban chatter is in the area, and so I'm just like ducking down and then I'm listening constantly and it's just chatter. I realize, oh my god, they're really closed. Okay, they're right here. These guys are right here, these guys are right here.

It's becoming increasingly aware to all of us that we're about to get ambushed and we're stuck in this adobe wall. We can't really go forward and leave this blocking this road. We're only blocking ourselves in. We have to get this tree off this road.

Balls is like running around with a chicken with a fucking head coff.

And that's when you start taking the fire.

Right the morning, fire starts happening, and it's you know, I mean, water's like pretty damn closing. It's definitely incoming. I look up in all of the SF guys first sprinting into balling body, and so I get up and I start sprinting into.

We end up finally getting the tree trunk turned around attached to the vehicle, and we drag it back to Fell and by him, Well, I'm in the truck that's trying to turn into the VSP. So the kid driving the truck didn't understand what the guy on the ground was telling him to do. So I'm screaming at this kid, turn right, turn right. It's clear that you have to turn right. So the private keeps coming straight and he runs into the wall, almost hitting the soldier that's trying

I think that he stopped bringing the tree back was going to be like, let me show my guys. This is important in how we're kind of taking the situation down. I understood what he was trying to do. He's trying to show him like, hey, this was a marker. This was out there to mark the ID and we're going to do this as a ceremonious thing. Did I agree with it?

You know?

Did I think it was dumb? Yeah? But was it so egregious that that I dwelled on it? You know, I think a lot of younger guys dwelled on it as this crazy psychotic thing. I'm like, I don't know, maybe he's trying to motivate you.

So crisis averted for the time being. But now there's a massive tree trunk and a tiny VSP Fast forward to Saturday, one day before the Canahearm massacre. Bales goes to work on that tree.

Saturday morning, We're up and we've got every moving. When I start going to work on this tree, other guys, when it's just tall to the burn pit, put out that we could use it for firewood. So I start whacking at this tree early in the morning with a hand axe and you know, working on it pretty much six eight hours, nine hours.

He then decided that it wouldn't do to just burn it, that he had to actually chop it up into all these small pieces. That makes no sense. I mean, that's just that's completely nonsensical. There's no reason to do that, And that certainly occurred to a lot of the people that were watching him do it on the base, like, why the hell is he doing this?

You think about this tree, and he had this infatuation with it because again, it was the only thing that he could control. From that situation, we had one of our soldiers who couldn't walk right because he was so messed up from this idea attack, and the only thing that Bails seemed to care about was the tree. The ultimate level of projection.

Right, These are all things that really, I think indicated somebody who was becoming unmoored and kind of untethered to the world that everybody else around him was seeing.

He was just seeing it differently.

By that point, you can't explain this irrational activity looking at it from normal eyes, right. You can't try to solve something that is abnormal looking at it rationally and normally. This is an abnormal situation. You know, it's abnormal to get blown up, it's abnormal to get shot at, it's abnormal to have to deal with us on a daily basis. What's going on with everyone is trying to explain this

There's a reason the Department of Defense has millions in looking into the effects of war on the human brain. War alters the mind. It alters your emotional output. Me personally, after dealing with being shot at, after being blown up, watching your friends be wounded and possibly killed, your mind will go to dark places.

At the time.

I don't think people understand it's not a matter of if you're going to die, or if your soldiers are going to die or be injured or lose a leg or whatever it happens to be. It's about when it's about happened next patrol. Does it happened next week? Does it happen tomorrow? Are we going to get over on tonight? And you sit there and you're like, if I'm going to die anyway, if it's going to happen anyway, would I not rather be on the offensive than the defensive? Obviously, hindsight,

Threat coming up on the war within.

I meant Bob and I just remember how fib from this guy was.

He quickly separated himself as one of those people.

That wanted to How did I get from being the good guy, being the leader of my group, being what I think I was, a very good soldier, to being in prison for the rest of my life.

I got to knock on my door.

The guard at the gate says that somebody left the base and that missing person was Robert Bales.

I just remember thinking, man, I hope I die quick.

The War Within the Robert Bailes Story is production of Bungalow Median Entertainment, Checkpoint Productions, and Mosquito Park Pictures in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series was created by executive producers Paul Pulowski and David check. Executive producers for Bungalow Media and Entertainment are Robert Friedman and Mike Powers. The podcast was written and produced by Max Nelson and hosted by me Mike McGinnis. Editing was done by Anna Hoberman,