June 29, 2023 • 42 mins
In the opening episode of THE WAR WITHIN, you'll meet Robert Bales, an American soldier convicted of murdering 16 civilians one night during the War in Afghanistan. Deploying in 2012 to a region known as the "Birthplace of the Taliban", Staff Sergeant Bales and his squad found themselves in constant, overwhelming danger... which fostered unease and paranoia in the ranks.
THE WAR WITHIN was produced Bungalow Media + Entertainment, Check Point Productions, and Mosquito Park Pictures, in association with iHeart Podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Nobody joins the infantry to be the bad guy. Nobody
joins the army after September eleventh to be the bad guy.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The war in Afghanistan has been made a lot more
complicated by that massacre of seventeen civilians.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Come on, in the middle of the night, Robert Bales
left his combat outpost alone and murdered sixteen Afghan civilians
in cold blood.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Nine of them were children.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Maybe I am wrong, but you have to understand the
way it went down.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
The United States has formally apologized for the killings, and
the families of the victims were paid a total of seven.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
The United States Army are going to have to look
at this again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Are we pushing our troops too far, too fast?
Speaker 4 (01:47):
And are they exposed to too much combat?
Speaker 6 (01:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
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?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
His wife, Carolyn said, what has been reported is completely
out of character of the men I know and admire.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
If you've met you at love and most people are
blown away at how real he is, how caring he is.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
In a deal, Bailes pleaded guilty to premeditated murder.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Why I'm here?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
You know, I know our by mistakes.
Speaker 7 (02:39):
I know.
Speaker 8 (02:41):
Because my nightmares tell me every day.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
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.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Let's get you chucked up?
Speaker 6 (03:21):
Get on all right, Yeah, I'm by as long as
he's okay.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, oh man, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
Just through and just on top. All right.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
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.
Speaker 9 (04:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
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,
(04:49):
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
committed what's now known as the kandaharm Masaker. I never
knew Staff Sergeant Bales, but I know this world. I
know what it's like to deploy three, four, five times
(05:09):
to fight the enemy. I was certainly no pacifist out there.
But I'm also not the kind of veteran that thinks
America is always the good guy. Sometimes we are, sometimes
we aren't. In a situation like Robert Bals, kanaharm Masker
exposes the moral ambiguities that so many soldiers face admit
the fog of war. Over the next twelve episodes, we're
(05:31):
going to take a deep dive and explore one of
the most controversial, impolarizing war crimes in recent memory. Our
team has conducted exhaustive interviews with Robert Bayle's fierce as
supporters as well as as big as detractors. You will
hear from the soldiers who's served on that faithful deployment.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Everything we did was you're in bal splatoon, like that's
how you identified yourself.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Robert Bayales's prominent legal team.
Speaker 9 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Experts who attest this state of Bales's.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Bals's wife Carrie.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Their fifteen year old daughter, Quincy.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I think that we have a great relationship.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Of course, he can't be involved physically, like he's not
at home and I don't wake up seeing him every morning.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
And even the Afghan families whose lives were forever changed
by Baals' actions.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
When the American troops came and night, they committed brutal
atrocities on us. You see, they took my whole families
away from me.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Kathy Gannon lived in Kable, Afghanistan for thirty five years,
working as a journalist for the Associated Press.
Speaker 7 (07:33):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
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.
Speaker 7 (08:09):
Invade, You were attacked on nine to eleven. That's very
my name to Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
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.
Speaker 7 (08:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
That's what we want.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
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.
Speaker 9 (09:01):
Try him here.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Now.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:41):
I think the situation in Afghanistan was and remained so complicated,
and Robert Bales is a depiction of the complexities of this.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Conflict, decorated journalist yealde Hakim was also on the ground
in Afghanistan at that time.
Speaker 10 (09:59):
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,
(10:20):
that would have crossed their minds.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Daily, what are we doing here? Why are we fighting
this war?
Speaker 10 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
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
(11:07):
those days up to that, and I'm like, oh my god,
I can't believe I was still alive.
Speaker 11 (11:12):
To drew that.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
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
(11:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
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
(12:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Have been waiting ten years to talk about this. I'm
shocked at nobody's come forward before.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm trying to think of when we got been laden
March of twenty eleven.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
I think, yeah, that's what was May of twenty eleven.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
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.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
For me.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Bales is a platoon star when you first get there, right, Yeah,
what kind of platoon sergeant was WASI?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
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
(14:20):
the toughest mission, and that's the mission that we got.
Speaker 4 (14:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
On that fourth tour, you know, we're heading to Bellum
by Afghanistan, and we know it's bad.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
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.
Speaker 6 (14:55):
Good luck.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
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
(15:38):
it has all the icons, just all of them, and
he saved it for last, and I'll never forget. He
kind of pointed at it and was like, this is
VSP Ballaby. It's a big fuck you to the Taliban.
That's why it's there. This is their home, this is
their spiritual place. And we set up this VSP at
the end of the line as a big like we
are not leaving kind of situation like, Okay, I'm going
(16:01):
to the place where the Taliban really want to take Okay,
good to know, thanks sir.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
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
(16:26):
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
different fight. The Taliban was a completely different monster than
anything we had experienced in Iraq. And when in Iraq,
(16:48):
you know there were a lot of ambush There's a
lot of firefights here and there, but they would always flee.
These guys, the Taliban would engage, flank and maneuver.
Speaker 6 (16:59):
They were different.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
They're good warriors. Let's just say it like that. I
hate them.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
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.
Speaker 12 (17:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
You know, war as hell.
Speaker 12 (17:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Stuff like that, basically big boy rules, as he would
put it.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
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
(18:58):
be pretty unstable.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
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.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
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
(19:49):
some bad guys, and then come back. Problem with that is,
well it's a vacuum. Bad guys would come right back
into that spot. The local population didn't have any trust
because they felt that the American forces were just going
to show up, damage some things, get rid of some
bad guys for.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
A little bit, and then go back home.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
So Vso kind of flipped that on its head. Where
you live with the locals like the locals.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
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,
(20:41):
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
a scale that I've never seen before. And as you
got further further from the city, you would see just
outposts with blown up vehicles next to him, and we
kept going past those, like, oh my god, where are
(21:02):
we going.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
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
(21:27):
any point, and you're always on guard.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Yeah, I was terrified when you got there.
Speaker 12 (21:33):
And of course we were getting engaged like two times
a day for a pretty long time.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 12 (21:59):
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
(22:20):
would be less eager to help out a Taliban.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
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.
(23:11):
Winning the hearts and minds doesn't mean that I want
the Afghani people to like me. I want them to
like the idea that they're going to be better off
with me in control than the Taliban. But this is
the heart of Taliban country. This is where bad people live, other.
Speaker 6 (23:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
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,
(24:02):
at least in a somewhat ethical manner. Unlike traditional militaries,
they hide in plain sight.
Speaker 6 (24:11):
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
were going to take over the USP down Bind. They
(24:31):
were going to wipe out the Americans, and luckily we
stopped down and they were gone the next day.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
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,
(24:58):
and so it's like, Okay, these dudes are all around
and we can't even figure out who is right and
who is wrong. As far as the civilians, how like,
their general reaction was just go go like we don't
need you moreover, like you're causing more problems. I can't
go into my field because you guys might shoot me
because you don't know who I am.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
They call them sticking points. In therapy, you replay these
sticking points over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:11):
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
(26:33):
targeted and hit by an ID.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
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
(27:22):
of a secondary incoming attack.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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
(28:03):
don't go towards an explosion, they go away from.
Speaker 6 (28:06):
It at this point. But what are you potentially suspecting,
you know, observing this.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
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,
(28:31):
you can see the shine of the shovel. But he
definitely has something in his other hand. Right, So he's
moving and he's got something in his hand. But I
can't take the shot because I don't know for sure.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Asbury, they took his leg off. He's a good guy.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
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
(29:55):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
Soldier X was part of the group that gathered for
drinks after the event.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
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
(30:29):
problem right then and there.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
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
(30:51):
things closing in on you, over and over and over again,
and there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
Until you're engaged. We have to wait for the enemy
to punch us in the mouth before we can do anything.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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.
Speaker 11 (31:57):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
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.
Speaker 11 (32:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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
(32:58):
a great idea to do if you want to deny
the enemy some cuterraine. But the way that we were
going to do it, We're going to stop in an
area where we've already taken mortar fire, right outside of
the Taliban stronghold, and we're gonna cut a tree down.
Like that's the plan.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
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,
(33:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Private Alexander was responsible for signal intelligence, which means it
was listening in on the Taliban's conversations.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Balls is like running around with a chicken with a
fucking head coff.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
And that's when you start taking the fire.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
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,
(35:30):
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
to count people back in the VSP. So at this
point I lose it. I jump out of the truck,
I go to the other side. I grab the private,
(35:52):
I pull him out. I screamed at him and I
threw him down. I kind of threw him back away
from it and he fell down. Look, man, we got
guys that are moving to try to kill us. You know,
this isn't a game to sit here and try to
teach you how to drive a truck. This is life
or death. People are trying to kill us.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
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?
Speaker 11 (36:30):
You know?
Speaker 6 (36:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:16):
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,
(37:37):
why the hell is he doing this?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
He was just seeing it differently.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
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.
(38:28):
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
abnormal event using rational, normal logic. What it's impossible to do, right,
(38:51):
It's abnormal situation calls for an abnormal solution, or at
least an abnormal understanding.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
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,
(39:20):
watching your friends be wounded and possibly killed, your mind
will go to dark places.
Speaker 6 (39:29):
At the time.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
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?
(39:55):
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,
I would do things differently. But at the time, you know,
if you're going to die anyway, right, you have to
(40:20):
go out and try to stop that.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Threat coming up on the war within.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
I meant Bob and I just remember how fib from
this guy was.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
He quickly separated himself as one of those people.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I got to knock on my door.
Speaker 5 (40:51):
The guard at the gate says that somebody left the
base and that missing person was Robert Bales.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I just remember thinking, man, I hope I die quick.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
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
(41:30):
podcast was written and produced by Max Nelson and hosted
by me Mike McGinnis. Editing was done by Anna Hoberman,
sound design and mix by John Gardner. Teddy Gannon was
an archival producer, Leila Ahmadzai was an associate producer, and
Peter Solataroff was production Assistant Special thanks to Liz Yelle Marsh,
(41:51):
Nicole Rubin, Marcy Barkin, Zach Burpy, and Meerwi Satah, as
well as all of the people who were interviewed for
the podcast. Listen and subscribe to The War Within on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Nobody joins the infantry to be the bad guy. Nobody
joins the army after September eleventh to be the bad guy.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The war in Afghanistan has been made a lot more
complicated by that massacre of seventeen civilians.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Come on, in the middle of the night, Robert Bales
left his combat outpost alone and murdered sixteen Afghan civilians
in cold blood.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Nine of them were children.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Maybe I am wrong, but you have to understand the
way it went down.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
The United States has formally apologized for the killings, and
the families of the victims were paid a total of seven.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
The United States Army are going to have to look
at this again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Are we pushing our troops too far, too fast?
Speaker 4 (01:47):
And are they exposed to too much combat?
Speaker 6 (01:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
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?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
His wife, Carolyn said, what has been reported is completely
out of character of the men I know and admire.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
If you've met you at love and most people are
blown away at how real he is, how caring he is.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
In a deal, Bailes pleaded guilty to premeditated murder.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Why I'm here?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
You know, I know our by mistakes.
Speaker 7 (02:39):
I know.
Speaker 8 (02:41):
Because my nightmares tell me every day.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
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.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Let's get you chucked up?
Speaker 6 (03:21):
Get on all right, Yeah, I'm by as long as
he's okay.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, oh man, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
Just through and just on top. All right.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
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.
Speaker 9 (04:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
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,
(04:49):
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
committed what's now known as the kandaharm Masaker. I never
knew Staff Sergeant Bales, but I know this world. I
know what it's like to deploy three, four, five times
(05:09):
to fight the enemy. I was certainly no pacifist out there.
But I'm also not the kind of veteran that thinks
America is always the good guy. Sometimes we are, sometimes
we aren't. In a situation like Robert Bals, kanaharm Masker
exposes the moral ambiguities that so many soldiers face admit
the fog of war. Over the next twelve episodes, we're
(05:31):
going to take a deep dive and explore one of
the most controversial, impolarizing war crimes in recent memory. Our
team has conducted exhaustive interviews with Robert Bayle's fierce as
supporters as well as as big as detractors. You will
hear from the soldiers who's served on that faithful deployment.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Everything we did was you're in bal splatoon, like that's
how you identified yourself.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Robert Bayales's prominent legal team.
Speaker 9 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Experts who attest this state of Bales's.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Bals's wife Carrie.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Their fifteen year old daughter, Quincy.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I think that we have a great relationship.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Of course, he can't be involved physically, like he's not
at home and I don't wake up seeing him every morning.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
And even the Afghan families whose lives were forever changed
by Baals' actions.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
When the American troops came and night, they committed brutal
atrocities on us. You see, they took my whole families
away from me.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Kathy Gannon lived in Kable, Afghanistan for thirty five years,
working as a journalist for the Associated Press.
Speaker 7 (07:33):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
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.
Speaker 7 (08:09):
Invade, You were attacked on nine to eleven. That's very
my name to Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
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.
Speaker 7 (08:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
That's what we want.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
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.
Speaker 9 (09:01):
Try him here.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Now.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:41):
I think the situation in Afghanistan was and remained so complicated,
and Robert Bales is a depiction of the complexities of this.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Conflict, decorated journalist yealde Hakim was also on the ground
in Afghanistan at that time.
Speaker 10 (09:59):
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,
(10:20):
that would have crossed their minds.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Daily, what are we doing here? Why are we fighting
this war?
Speaker 10 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
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
(11:07):
those days up to that, and I'm like, oh my god,
I can't believe I was still alive.
Speaker 11 (11:12):
To drew that.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
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
(11:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
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
(12:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Have been waiting ten years to talk about this. I'm
shocked at nobody's come forward before.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm trying to think of when we got been laden
March of twenty eleven.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
I think, yeah, that's what was May of twenty eleven.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
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.
Speaker 6 (13:37):
For me.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Bales is a platoon star when you first get there, right, Yeah,
what kind of platoon sergeant was WASI?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
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
(14:20):
the toughest mission, and that's the mission that we got.
Speaker 4 (14:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
On that fourth tour, you know, we're heading to Bellum
by Afghanistan, and we know it's bad.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
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.
Speaker 6 (14:55):
Good luck.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
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
(15:38):
it has all the icons, just all of them, and
he saved it for last, and I'll never forget. He
kind of pointed at it and was like, this is
VSP Ballaby. It's a big fuck you to the Taliban.
That's why it's there. This is their home, this is
their spiritual place. And we set up this VSP at
the end of the line as a big like we
are not leaving kind of situation like, Okay, I'm going
(16:01):
to the place where the Taliban really want to take Okay,
good to know, thanks sir.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
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
(16:26):
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
different fight. The Taliban was a completely different monster than
anything we had experienced in Iraq. And when in Iraq,
(16:48):
you know there were a lot of ambush There's a
lot of firefights here and there, but they would always flee.
These guys, the Taliban would engage, flank and maneuver.
Speaker 6 (16:59):
They were different.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
They're good warriors. Let's just say it like that. I
hate them.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
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.
Speaker 12 (17:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
You know, war as hell.
Speaker 12 (17:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Stuff like that, basically big boy rules, as he would
put it.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
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
(18:58):
be pretty unstable.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
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.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
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
(19:49):
some bad guys, and then come back. Problem with that is,
well it's a vacuum. Bad guys would come right back
into that spot. The local population didn't have any trust
because they felt that the American forces were just going
to show up, damage some things, get rid of some
bad guys for.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
A little bit, and then go back home.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
So Vso kind of flipped that on its head. Where
you live with the locals like the locals.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
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,
(20:41):
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
a scale that I've never seen before. And as you
got further further from the city, you would see just
outposts with blown up vehicles next to him, and we
kept going past those, like, oh my god, where are
(21:02):
we going.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
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
(21:27):
any point, and you're always on guard.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Yeah, I was terrified when you got there.
Speaker 12 (21:33):
And of course we were getting engaged like two times
a day for a pretty long time.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 12 (21:59):
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
(22:20):
would be less eager to help out a Taliban.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
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.
(23:11):
Winning the hearts and minds doesn't mean that I want
the Afghani people to like me. I want them to
like the idea that they're going to be better off
with me in control than the Taliban. But this is
the heart of Taliban country. This is where bad people live, other.
Speaker 6 (23:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
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,
(24:02):
at least in a somewhat ethical manner. Unlike traditional militaries,
they hide in plain sight.
Speaker 6 (24:11):
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
were going to take over the USP down Bind. They
(24:31):
were going to wipe out the Americans, and luckily we
stopped down and they were gone the next day.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
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,
(24:58):
and so it's like, Okay, these dudes are all around
and we can't even figure out who is right and
who is wrong. As far as the civilians, how like,
their general reaction was just go go like we don't
need you moreover, like you're causing more problems. I can't
go into my field because you guys might shoot me
because you don't know who I am.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
They call them sticking points. In therapy, you replay these
sticking points over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:11):
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
(26:33):
targeted and hit by an ID.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
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
(27:22):
of a secondary incoming attack.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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
(28:03):
don't go towards an explosion, they go away from.
Speaker 6 (28:06):
It at this point. But what are you potentially suspecting,
you know, observing this.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
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,
(28:31):
you can see the shine of the shovel. But he
definitely has something in his other hand. Right, So he's
moving and he's got something in his hand. But I
can't take the shot because I don't know for sure.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Asbury, they took his leg off. He's a good guy.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
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
(29:55):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
Soldier X was part of the group that gathered for
drinks after the event.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
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
(30:29):
problem right then and there.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
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
(30:51):
things closing in on you, over and over and over again,
and there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
Until you're engaged. We have to wait for the enemy
to punch us in the mouth before we can do anything.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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.
Speaker 11 (31:57):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
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.
Speaker 11 (32:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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
(32:58):
a great idea to do if you want to deny
the enemy some cuterraine. But the way that we were
going to do it, We're going to stop in an
area where we've already taken mortar fire, right outside of
the Taliban stronghold, and we're gonna cut a tree down.
Like that's the plan.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
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,
(33:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Private Alexander was responsible for signal intelligence, which means it
was listening in on the Taliban's conversations.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Balls is like running around with a chicken with a
fucking head coff.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
And that's when you start taking the fire.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
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,
(35:30):
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
to count people back in the VSP. So at this
point I lose it. I jump out of the truck,
I go to the other side. I grab the private,
(35:52):
I pull him out. I screamed at him and I
threw him down. I kind of threw him back away
from it and he fell down. Look, man, we got
guys that are moving to try to kill us. You know,
this isn't a game to sit here and try to
teach you how to drive a truck. This is life
or death. People are trying to kill us.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
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?
Speaker 11 (36:30):
You know?
Speaker 6 (36:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:16):
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,
(37:37):
why the hell is he doing this?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
He was just seeing it differently.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
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.
(38:28):
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
abnormal event using rational, normal logic. What it's impossible to do, right,
(38:51):
It's abnormal situation calls for an abnormal solution, or at
least an abnormal understanding.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
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,
(39:20):
watching your friends be wounded and possibly killed, your mind
will go to dark places.
Speaker 6 (39:29):
At the time.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
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?
(39:55):
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,
I would do things differently. But at the time, you know,
if you're going to die anyway, right, you have to
(40:20):
go out and try to stop that.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Threat coming up on the war within.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
I meant Bob and I just remember how fib from
this guy was.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
He quickly separated himself as one of those people.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I got to knock on my door.
Speaker 5 (40:51):
The guard at the gate says that somebody left the
base and that missing person was Robert Bales.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I just remember thinking, man, I hope I die quick.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
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
(41:30):
podcast was written and produced by Max Nelson and hosted
by me Mike McGinnis. Editing was done by Anna Hoberman,
sound design and mix by John Gardner. Teddy Gannon was
an archival producer, Leila Ahmadzai was an associate producer, and
Peter Solataroff was production Assistant Special thanks to Liz Yelle Marsh,
(41:51):
Nicole Rubin, Marcy Barkin, Zach Burpy, and Meerwi Satah, as
well as all of the people who were interviewed for
the podcast. Listen and subscribe to The War Within on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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