S1E9: Command Climate

The case to be heard in oral argument is Bales versus Commandant is mar Whenever you're reading.

Good morning, your honors, it's a pleasure to begin here with you again.

On September twenty third, twenty twenty one, Robert Bales's attorney, John Mayer, delivered an oral argument to the US Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado. Over four years had passed since their case was dismissed by the Armies of Pellate Court, but that loss hasn't dissuaded Mayr not yet.

This is a case, although it's a very tough case admittedly, where the accused pled guilty to killing seventeen Afghan civilians.

There are two.

Fundamental, completely constitutional implications to show why the military courts did not give full and fair consideration or adequate consideration. And here's why, if I could break them down briefly. Mefloquin it has now been determined by the United States FDA to cause long term psychonic effects.

I want to focus on your medical win argument as I understand it from the Court's opinion below. There was no testimony at all that he was prescribed mefloquin, that he took methlicalin In fact, I don't think he ever said that he took methlaloquin.

I respect to disagree judges.

Okay, on which one of those do you disagree?

It?

Previously on the War within and Iraq, I see what looked at me, the purple ghosts.

The best explanation for these delusions is chronic and mefic invoice.

I started having headaches after my second tour.

If you get a traumatic fright injury, you kind of lose parts of yourself and you become really disinhibited.

You know about the time that bails the shit out of that jingle truck driver.

Right is running around with a chicken with the fucking head coo.

And I think you have to carry a little bit of a swagger to say, and I'm gonna be all right. Not only are gonna be all right, We're gonna kill that bastard.

I'm Mike McGinnis. This is the war within the Robert Bayles story. For the past seven years, Robert Bales and John Mayer have been trying just about everything in order to give the convicted war criminal who sentenced to life, a second chance, but thus far, the American legal system has not looked favorably upon them. In twenty seventeen, they lost their appeal with the army. Since then, they've tried to make the argument in various civilian courts.

First, we find ourselves in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas, essentially saying that the military got it wrong. We lost in the District Court in Kansas, so we filed an appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which sits in Denver, Colorado.

At the time of our interview with him, mar was still waiting to hear back on a decision from the judges in Colorado. The attorney expressed cautious optimism that the powers that be would give their case a fair look.

At the very conclusion of the case, I should judge, you know, how do we let this lie?

You got to get to the merits of the case.

And I believe, not to quote him, but in other words, Judge or Bial noted, he says, well, I believe he might be right. You know, if the government ordered Bails to take a poison, he took the poison, and he was an otherwise acquitted himself beautifully under fire and under duty for the previous forty eight months in infantry combat a close quarters combat. What explains this departure and behaviors?

On May eleventh, twenty twenty three, the Colorado Court announced its decision against Staff Sergeant Bales. If you ask Mar, the reasons for this rejection are complicated. For starters, Batals waived some of his rights when he pled guilty. But there's another, potentially more controversial explanation for what's happening here.

If there are.

Soldiers out there that may have committed a sexual assault, if they're soldiers out there who have done physical assault, you know, or attempted murders that are convicted right now, and ultimately it turns out that they were ordered to take meflquin. Well, it's a very strong precedent to undo a lot of convictions. I think the United States would probably want to avoid a victory. You're not going to open up the floodgates, but they're also going to have an eye on the horizon, saying holy.

Cow, Manars made this point again and again. The US military protects itself. That's why when he takes on a case like this, he doesn't always count on winning the legal battle. But there are multiple ways to advocate for a man like Robert Bales.

Most of the time when we catch an appeal, we begin with a multifaceted approach.

It's not just the court.

We're going to try to do everything that we can to get the word out.

In twenty twenty, that strategy even included asking President Donald Trump for a full, unconditional pardon. At the time, Bob expressed that he felt a pardon was the only way he'd ever leave prison.

I believe the legal system is so screwed up in the country that the Supreme Court is not going to hear this case. The only chance I have is the same guy who's an outsider to the government right now, and I believe that's President Trump.

He's the only hope I have. It wasn't a total long shot. Mahner has been successful at getting clients released by Trump during his tenure in office. As his presidential term drew to a close, Bales's request for a harden put his name back in the headlines, which was news that his former colleagues, like Private Gavin Jones, were not thrilled to receive.

And I'm like, holy shit, that blew me away that if he was just gonna I'm not gonna say weezel out of it, because trust me out.

I'm sure the guy does.

Have a traumatic brain injury, but that doesn't, you know, still cover you from being a fucking total piece of shit.

To be honest, it did really rub.

Me the wrong way, and I was surprised that people's memories were got short.

The idea that Bails should be vindicated of his crimes or granted clemency is just crazy to me.

That's James Alexander, another private who's served under Bales.

Here's the guy who has killed people in the past, and he may get a pardon.

I don't need to sleep like that.

In the end, Trump never granted the former staff sergeant of pardon, and as of twenty twenty three, it remains questionable whether another president has the potential to be as sympathetic to Baiales's plight.

We're not necessarily asking president for pardon anymore, and that's our sensitivity and assessment of this administration. Is there not necessarily going to be as amenable to good order and discipline in the military. I don't believe mister Biden or Miss Harris would ever do it.

With Bob's chances at freedom shrinking with each passing year, it can be challenging to hang on to a sense of hope, and yet his wife, Carrie Bales, still can't help but try.

My goal is to get him home right so that we can be a family. There's nothing more precious than time. So for me, it's about yes, I believe that punishment was in order, right, I get them, It's.

Just how long?

How long do we need to make him suffer?

Based on all of that, we now know it's just time to let him come home, let.

Our warriors hold.

We let all of them go from Gimo. You know, we let the terrorists go and not to go back to wherever.

They were from.

So why are we keeping our own American soldiers away from their families?

Of course, my dad being in prison affects my everyday life, my mom's every day life, my brother's every day life, and really our family every day life in a.

Hole in recent years, carrying Bob's teenage daughter Quincy has joined the cause, doing what she can to help her father.

I think that as I get older, I want to be more involved kind of with sharing the story more because people think that this whole story is outlandish and crazy. But I think that once people finally get some facts and can see it in front of them, then that's really important. So I'm going to start helping run social media. My goal is to just start getting it out there.

That advocacy includes speaking at events such as a political convention that took place in Louisiana in the summer of twenty twenty two.

In Louisiana, our trip that we took, get a table set up, we had information, we had papers, We kind of stood at the tables, and we just educated people. People would come up to us ask this question. If I have a voice, then I should share it.

If you're a convicted murderer who wants your case to be reviewed, it can help if the American public is on your side. Just ask Adnan Sayed, the subject of the popular serial podcast. After over twenty years of imprisonment and renewed attention from the media, Sayed was released from his incarceration. Balsers tried to tell his story his way once before. In twenty fifteen, two years after his conviction, he spoke with journalist Brendan Vaughan for a piece that would run in GQ magazine.

The first I've heard of the Conda Har massacre, as it was pretty quickly dubbed, if I remember correctly, it was on the front page of the Times, and I just immediately my I just went right to it. It raised questions about the state of mind of our soldiers and the impact of fighting such a long war. I mean, there was definitely a sense, as I recall it, you know, of why are we still there? What is the impact on our soldiers of being still there? What is the

In the immediate aftermath of his attacks. Bales' saga was covered extensively by the media, but then it left the news cycle, and talking to a magazine writer like Vaughn, Robert Bales had a natural motive for bringing his name back into the zeitgeist.

He wanted to tell his story in a way that he felt like he had been unable to get it out prior to that. It was pretty clear that he wanted the article to humanize him. We talked about a lot of different things, not just what he did in Afghania, but his life, his upbringing, his wife, his children, his jobs. But there was definitely a heaviness to the way that he came across.

He was a pretty serious presence on the.

Phone, and what he had done was pretty serious, and he didn't deny any of it, so he talked about it in a really direct way. Every time I got off the phone. It was still just chilling to have talked to somebody that was convicted of his massacre.

Many of the topics covered in this podcast also come up in the written piece, an id explosion several days prior to the murders, growing paranoia at the VSP. Bails's explanation for what he had done has also remained constant up to a point.

He firmly believed that the people that he was going after were Taliban.

They were not innocent civilians, all of them.

He didn't say that the children were, that the women were, but that the men involved were, and that he felt that these people represented a threat to him and the other soldiers on his base.

At no point in the GQ piece is the term methyl queen even referenced. Nobody ever told Vaughn that the drug could have been important to the story.

The anti malarial drug that he was on.

I was aware of it.

It was a thing that was really kind of deep in the background.

Though lots of soldiers were taking this medication at the time, there was nothing unique about Bails having taken it. He didn't emphasize it at all. I mean, he might not even even mentioned it at the time. That doesn't mean it's not true. I don't know, but the one thing I can say for sure is that it was a very minor factor. Back in twenty fifteen, the GQ article was titled Robert Bale Speaks, Confessions of America's most notorious war criminal.

After it was published on October twenty first, twenty fifteen, it was up to the public to determine and how they felt.

I think that the piece was received as something that had never been told fully because the versions that had been told had never incorporated Bails's version in a meaningful way. But it was widely read, and I certainly got a lot of like appreciative feedback about it that you know, I'm glad the story is out there.

Not long after the story was released, John Marr joined the staff Sergeant's defense team.

I think that in a full three sixty treatment of the issues. But the GQ article didn't have the information that we have. That's because we weren't on the key shit and we hadn't discovered it, we hadn't worked it.

Not everybody loved the piece. Private James Alexander felt that it was skewed towards Bob Bailes's perspective and away from the facts.

Bails writes an article for GQ that isn't vetted. We didn't get talked to at all. There are people enlisted in the article. For example, at the time he was my roommate. Doc Orciello was never contacted about the article, but there he is in the pages of GQ. I could go point by point on the GQ article and like refute some of the stuff.

The article was to be clear like fact checked to within an inch of its life. I mean, it was very very thoroughly fact checked over a period of weeks. It might have even been more than a month that the fact checker just worked it every day. We addressed it with attribution as much as we possibly could, by making clear what came from other places and what came from Bales himself.

It was fortunate timing that my counterpoint came out in the Daily Beast shortly after the GQ article came out.

Captain Danny Fields, the senior man at VSP Bellmby, also spoke to a journalist to express his point of view on the Candahar massacre.

I wanted an outlet.

I think anyone in that situation would probably feel they'd ask the question, could I have done something to have prevented that? You know, looking back, maybe I did it because it was kind of a defense of myself.

Many of the soldiers in and the Canahar masker really care about how the incident and their involvement in it is remembered and perceived. Yes, they want to make sure that the American public knows the whole story, But in certain instances they also seem to be delivering messages specifically to their former colleagues in the US military.

Bals wanted to make it really clear how sorry he was to his fellow soldiers for the dishonor that he had brought upon them in his mind, and for the tragic errors that he made in both judgment and action and perpetrating this massacre. He expressed far more emotion for the soldiers that he felt he let down than the people that he killed.

We've established that prior to March eleventh, twenty twelve, Robert Bales was known for being an elite soldier. We spoke with Nick Beasley, a former executive officer who oversaw Bales's platoon in Afghanistan, and gave a very positive review of this performance. As a noncommissioned officer also known as an NCO.

Bob is the best NCO I ever worked with as far as getting stuff done and understanding the intent. He understood war better than people that wore uniforms in our unit. But the bomb I knew that the bomb I know that still exists. Cares deeply about his soldiers, and that was one of the things we had heard that he was worried about his soldiers safety. I think everything he did came from a place and a desire to take care of his ment.

I was the guy that people turned to bring their loved ones back home.

This reputation as a warrior and a protector. That's always been a point of pride for bails.

I still remember a guy's wife on my last tour coming up and getting me a hug before before we left, and she's like, you know, bring them back home, you know. And they asked First Arm Bigham why they sent people where they sent and he said, you know, they said bell and By was bad, and I sent my best guy to bellum By.

This idea that Baiales was the best has been central to his defense strategy, both legally and in the press. For instance, Bailes claims that he was so highly regarded that he was responsible for preparing his own soldiers for combat in Afghanistan.

I'm given pretty much free reign to choose my training.

You know.

I still have to follow rules and regulations, but at the end of the day, I'm given a lot of latitude to plan my own training.

James Alexander was one of the soldiers being trained by Bailes. He didn't feel like their squad was ready for battle.

We did not have experience. I went through SRP with Baals, but you're ready in this protocol. So he was right next to me and he's like, Oh, you don't have to go to this one.

Oh you don't have to go to that one.

But again, this is his fourth deployment, so I'm like, maybe he's giving me some inside knowledge here, like maybe he just knows, like it's his all bs.

It's like check the block training.

But it's still as a brand new soldier, I'm putting my faith in Rob Bails versus the process.

And that's the issue. It's like he thought he was above the process.

It was really interesting to see how unprepared we were to go into ball and body and also how unprepared.

Our leadership was.

I mean, those guys were like they had no clue where we were going, what we were doing.

You know what we should even be.

Training for the job was just to get in there and you'll get OJT on the job training, and so like that's what it became.

Private Gavin Jones was brand new to the military in twenty twelve. Like Alexander. He remembers that the special Forces at the VSP prepared him for combat more than his own infantry leaders.

And C's never really taught me anything. I really didn't really know.

It's basically all the SF guys that would teach us like as we went. In fact, I received more firearm training from those SF guys than I ever did from Bails.

Combining unproven guys like Gavin with elite special forces is not a common practice in the US military. This dynamic allowed infantry troops Jones, Alexander, and the unnamed Silver Acts to enjoy a much more relaxed environment than usual on their deployment.

You're backing up SF guys, and those guys procedurally do whatever they want to do, so you know you are following fairly.

I was blessed to have a super dope deployment in that regard.

There was no real uniform standard, grew facial hair. It just it wasn't your typical shape every day make sure uniforms pristine. It was, Hey, we know, will come in this hellhole and we're gonna throw some clothes and go to work.

I'm eating steaks in the middle of in the middle of nowhere, like this is I'm eating better here than I was back home, and we haven't earned any of those rights. We tried to grow beards, you know, and tried to fit in, but the reality is those guys were so far and above and away like more competent in the jobs that we.

Were in the armed forces. The culture is set by the people at the top of the chain. At VSP Bellam by Joe's like Alexander were under the command of Robbert Bales along with his fellow leaders.

But became like an incredibly toxic environment. Uh, incredibly toxic as far as the NCOs. I didn't trust him as far as I could throw them. And so that was kind of the situation that I think Fields was kind of dealt. I'm sure he was pissed because he's expecting, you know, some great NCOs that are here, and he got essentially what seemed to be sort.

Of the bottom of the barrel.

Man.

We had one guy that all he could do was PT.

That was it.

I mean, he was a fantastic runner, and that made him a fantastic leader, right, And it was like there's a complete disconnect here between like being able to run and being able to lead guys. There was another guy who flat out was drunk almost all the time, would show up late to PT almost all the time because he was drunk, right, Like, we had guys that were, you.

Know, outwardly racist James Alexander is half black. He was one of the only people of color on the American side at the VSP.

Bals is a racist.

I was singing in the shower and you know, singing hip hop music, and he's like, who's that nigger in there singing? You know, like okay, first of all, we're using words like okay, what are you using the the er?

Okay? Nice?

Nice, you know, and it's like this was you know what he would say, but when he saw it was me, he was like, oh sorry, It's like cool, fuck, You're sorry.

How about that fails.

He'd have his off the cuffs remarks about like minorities and like people of color.

He thought might have been like joking in that sense.

I know for Frank McLaughlin was a stands of racist shit around and Bals would say some shit too, but again, yeah, they'd dress it up with vail of.

Comedy or you know, camaraderie if you will.

He was menacing with it.

He was just a at times, he's a really menacing, mean bastard. And unfortunately he also had the ability to abused power because he's in an authority position.

Speaking as a former infantryman, hearing that a soldiers made racist comments, that doesn't exactly shock me. Prejudice runs rampant in the US military. Many soldiers like to treat the service like a locker room. As Captain Fields can attest.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that, you know, some things might have been said. Not that I'm condoning it, but I think that's very normal in the military.

People say a lot of stupid shit. Did I hear any of that?

No.

David Wesley, a black veteran who served two tours with Bails, refutes this idea that Bails discriminated against African Americans.

The army is very racist, but Bob wasn't racist, not though some of the people that he chose to be friends with were, But Bob wasn't that way. I was one of like nine people in the Italian that were black, and so you can imagine what that was like.

But Bob made sure it wasn't like that with him.

I remember when I brought my brother to the barracks, Bob was there, was his roommate in his roommate said something stupid because he was shit faced drunk.

That was along the racial line.

But Bob kind of mushed him into the chair and was like, bro, shut the fuck up.

Still, James Alexander knows what he heard and what he saw. He's confident that Bales felt superior to other races, not just Black Americans, but Afghans too.

When you come from a you know, a time that Beals did, in a place that he did, racism is kind of sort of a way of life, and so it gave Bails the ability to be like, you know, i may be a lot of bad things, but at least I'm not black.

At least I'm not an Afghan.

People always think that, you know, they automatically assume that I just like Muslim people, right like that that's an assumption. You know, I'll get letters from people and they'll say stuff like that, and I would like to think, and I know it's true that we as American soldiers help more Muslim people than we heard. You know, how many people would we take food too, how many people we

Some of Bales's comments across our eighteen hours of interviews seem to indicate that he wasn't always comfortable as an American immersed in Afghan culture. Here he is talking about the Muslim prayers that were regularly chanted around I rock in Afghanistan.

They call the prayers.

They're they're scary originally because you don't know what it is, you know, allah far. You know, in my mind, it immediately clicks some negative connotation, and maybe it's a fear for me.

Maybe it's whatever it is.

But you know, you hear the call to prayer, yeah, which is played over the speakers, it's.

It drowns out every other sound around.

It's something that I feared just because it was different.

This any fear is problematic for a soldier who's supposed to be allied with certain factions of Afghans. But even then that's like Panhue podcast host Curtis Grace will argue that a certain degree of racial profiling is necessary to being a good soldier.

If there was any ever kind of negative feelings towards the Afghan people, it's because we knew that a good portion of them were trying to kill us.

I know a lot of guys struggled with this idea.

Is like, well, fuck the civilians, they're all future Taliban or they're already Taliban. And I struggle with that a little bit too. Nobody's one hundred percent good on either spectrum. It's just like, are the civilians really all Taliban? Obviously the answers no, but it's kind of hard to say that.

Part of Bales's mission in Panjue was to distinguish the innocent Afghans from the enemy Taliban. This was a major adjustment for the staff sergeant. We spent several years on the offensive under shock and all guidelines in Iraq.

You know, we did a thing where we gave thirty family food for thirty days. So we'd take them rice and grain and other things and we'd take them out there like cooking oil, and we would hand it out in these local villages, humanitarian aid kind of thing. But the truth is I really didn't trust them at all. You know, they're being kind to us, Are they really being kind to us? Are they really just going to stab me in the back?

Sol Drax theorizes that his senior and CEO had a skewed perspective about what their squad was trying to accomplish in Afghanistan.

Thank you often to this final one, Amy isback. I think all he saw was, man, I just want to go and beat this badass and kick down doors when I'm going to take care of business and do is just because we're badass, just because we want to go and hurt people. We have an angle in mind of establishing this place to be a good place. I don't think Bill saw that.

It was incredibly disheartening to see the risks that were taking for no reason.

Our first patrol, he had us trying to kill a guy on a bike. There's a guy on a bike rolling.

Up and he's like, shoot that guy, and we're like, uh no, no, not letting this dude. Then he starts calling us faggots for not also firing our weapons.

Did not shooting your weapon, You're a fag. I understood that at any time we could do whatever we wanted on a battlefield, and it was only the politicians, the officers, whoever is creating these rules are engagement that we're holding us back.

He really really wanted to be involved in the kill.

He really wanted to kill.

Any other time we would engage someone, he would be the first one there. He would be the one trying to make the shot among the lower enlisted. I mean we're brothers, shared experiences, the things you go through. We were above and beyond tight and that's because we all had a common enemy. And it wasn't the Afghan, it was Bails.

Luke Coffee is another veteran who co hosts the Panchway podcast with Curtis Grace. He has plenty of experience with NCOs who fit the mold of Robert Bales.

I think that people like Bobby Bails are probably inherently broken, and they're like the specific kind of personality that can squeeze into the power structure and within that minute power the squad leader, you have a little bit of wiggle room to be a real toxic casshole to the people underneath you.

We were all the victims of our NCOs, essentially their application of leadership, their inability to do the right thing. Like there were small things that happened over and over again where it was the joes, you know, the lower enlisted, were the ones that would band together and get stuff done.

It wasn't long before the Special Forces took notice of the strange dynamic on the base. As Gavin Jones recalls.

They weren't as patient, shall I say, with Bails and just some of his maneuvers and the way he went about things or just a weirdo vibe.

I don't think they invited him into club. Cool guy.

And after Bails on a whim hunch n Afkan truck driver, the SF began to marginalize his role and weaken his power.

Bails beat the shit out that jingle truck driver right like his first like words are like, oh man, like what are they gonna do to me?

You think I was gonna be okay, Like, don't say anything to the guys. What are we gonna tell them? He was talking about the guys, talking about the SF crew.

If I remember.

Correctly, that's when some of the SF guys started questioning us about Bails, about like.

Hey, is that guy like all right, like what's up with him?

That's when he started publicly becoming a little bit more unhinged, being a lot more insecure about his position. He felt like he was being excluded from certain meetings. I'm sure that he was, so yeah, there's probably just aided into his decline.

In contrast to some of the infantry joes, Denie Fields, the SF captain didn't speak critically of Baals as a soldier during our interview.

Bill's was just.

Kind of a normal person.

Nothing really stuck out to me that he was much different anyway generally.

You know, I didn't have a lot of interaction.

With Bals, but there was nothing that really surfaced, that was brought to my attention that would have made me consider that he needed to be removed from that position or that he was not fit for that position.

As he sits in Fort Levenworth's prison, Baals doesn't speak negatively of Fields in the SF, even though he didn't always agree with their decisions during combat.

I'm not going to talk negative about those guys because I think they looking back on it, I think they had a front mission set. They didn't want to be that aggressive.

They wanted to.

Kind of sit back, and they had us saying, you know, ten fingers, ten toes, everybody comes back home alive. But they had set an example that we were going to let the towelban flee and we weren't going to kill them, which emboldens them.

As the top dogs at the VSP. The Special Forces had the leeway to make unilateral decisions, some of them were allowed to potentially jeopardize their own safety. James Alexander explains that.

We had SF guys that would walk out at night alone to try to build rapport with the locals. This guy, he was ANSF guy, obviously spoke the language and he looked the part, you know. He would walk around in the village and he would come back with intel.

This is major. According to Alexander, Bails was not the first person to leave the base without warning during this deployment. What's more, Executive Officer Beasley posited that there were ways for the SSA to make impromptu actions seem like planned official business. While in Afghanistan.

We actually had one of our officers that went out to a site where there was an SF guy doing black ops, where he would go out and do whatever he wanted. He'd come back and he'd ride to the off order and say, hey, we're going to go do this, but it had already been done. He killed all the people he needed to kill and came back.

I mean, I've talked with journalists before and they'd been like, yeah, I mean, we can't talk about this because the DoD will be like, shut the fuck up.

There was all kinds of other activities going on. I mean, ESF guys.

Would go support seals that were doing direct action missions in the area.

I was just it was surreal.

We spent a lot of time parsing through the possible reasons that Bales would have walked off the VSP. Was it a methlicuin hallucination mixed with alcohol, steroids, sleeping pills, and a history of TBI or could he have simply been trying to emulate the soldiers above him before everything went horribly wrong. Let's flash back to March tenth, twenty twelve, two hours before the cand of harm massacre begins.

I go see the guy that is if responsible for the VSP and I pretty much tell him. I'm like, hey man, we need to go do something. And he said, basically, you know, mind your own lane. It saysn't your business, go to sleep, worry about your lane.

This is our lane. Screw you.

But I think I can get out there, see what it is, make a difference and get.

Back in the infantry. Individuality is discouraged. Follow orders, listen to your superior officer or Robert Bayale seemed to struggle with conforming, which ultimately may have led to his undoing.

When you are in the army, you all look to say, you all act to say across the board, and so I personally kind of fought against that. I didn't like that. Why can't I do everything that everybody's doing, plus be myself a little bit? I understand now why it's done the way it's done.

Coming up on the war within.

Before Bob, when the army, he was in the stockbroken business.

I really wanted to be successful. We bought a bank out of West Virginia, and in September of nineteen ninety nine they shut the bank down.

Was a charge of war, sums of money for people, and the ultimately lost it all.

When September eleventh happened. It was a way to give back. People weren't doing the right thing around him, and he had to take blame for that.

If I'm conducting an investigation and all the witnesses say the exact same thing, I got a problem.

The crimes that were committed at each location were vastly different.

Sometimes people misplace events in trauma. They can't quite figure out the sequence of events.

Bob didn't do this on his own. He had help.

The War Within the Robert Bailes Story as production of Bungalow Median Entertainment, Checkpoint Productions and Mosquito Park Pictures in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series was created by executive producers Paul Polowski 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 Hoverman,