Speaker 1: There was been a recruiter, an army recruiter when I
Speaker 1: worked at Bank of America who wanted me to come in.
Speaker 1: Was like, hey, man, you come over and fill out
Speaker 1: some paperwork for me.
Speaker 2: Before Robert Bales enlisted in the military in two thousand
Speaker 2: and one, he was working in financial services as a
Speaker 2: broker dealer, but when two planes crashed into the World
Speaker 2: Trade Center, the twenty eight year old felt compelled to
Speaker 2: make a change.
Speaker 1: September eleventh happens, and I'm literally in watching it happen.
Speaker 1: That morning when we were long oil contracts and oil
Speaker 1: and gas futures, the price shot way up. So the
Speaker 1: guy I'm working for is happy. He's like, man, we're
Speaker 1: going to make tons of money off this. You know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make tons of money. And like the whole
Speaker 1: time is sitting here and I'm like, man, I can't
Speaker 1: do this. I was like, this is just morally wrong.
Speaker 1: And I hear my dad talking to me, Man, life's
Speaker 1: more than about money. Life's more than about money, you know.
Speaker 1: I went back to that army recruiter and I enlisted
Speaker 1: and join the army. And if you're not the first
Speaker 1: guy in line stand up for America.
Speaker 3: What's wrong with you?
Speaker 2: Previously, I'm the war within.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Norwith, Ohio, blue collar town.
Speaker 3: We didn't have much money.
Speaker 4: He was really popular before he turned thirty.
Speaker 1: Nobody joins the army after September eleventh to be.
Speaker 3: The bad guy.
Speaker 1: I think that people like Bobby Baals are probably inherently broken.
Speaker 5: He started publicly becoming a little bit more unhinged.
Speaker 3: Part construe dark Hole, all report over there.
Speaker 6: He starts looking for people like who is here? Who isn't.
Speaker 7: I was interviewing a little girl and she said to me,
Speaker 7: I saw many soldiers with lights, and they came and
Speaker 7: they killed myself.
Speaker 2: I'm Mike McGinnis. This is the war within the Robert
Speaker 2: Baal story. In the mid nineteen nineties, long before his
Speaker 2: days as a soldier, Robert Bales went to Ohio State
Speaker 2: University with dreams of playing for the famous Buck Guys
Speaker 2: football team. After failing to secure a spot on the roster,
Speaker 2: he searched for a different way to spend his free time.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe I had a chance to play at
Speaker 1: Ohio State. I didn't, you know, But when I got
Speaker 1: up there, the school wasn't in yet, so I needed
Speaker 1: to find a job, right, so I started interning at
Speaker 1: Smith Barney.
Speaker 2: At the time, Smith Barney was one of the nation's
Speaker 2: premier wealth management firms during the rise of Wall Street.
Speaker 2: It was basically a household name, due in part to
Speaker 2: a classic commercial.
Speaker 8: Smith Bonnie is among a handful of top investment firms
Speaker 8: singled out for their work in research. Smith Barney they
Speaker 8: make money the old fashioned way.
Speaker 2: As a college kid, Bales was enticed by the opportunity
Speaker 2: to work in this prestigious industry.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to be successful. I really wanted not
Speaker 1: to have to worry about money the way my mom
Speaker 1: and dad did. And I want to be able to
Speaker 1: take care of him. And so I started working at
Speaker 1: Smith Barney for a broker there and just doing terrible
Speaker 1: work really, you know, phone calls and envelope stuffing things
Speaker 1: like that. One day there's this other broker that shows
Speaker 1: up and he's trying to do business with Smith Barney
Speaker 1: and he is one part owner and a small broker
Speaker 1: dealer in Columbus, Ohio, and he had had some real
Speaker 1: success very early. So the guy's probably thirty five years old.
Speaker 1: You know, he's wearing the rolelegs, you know, he's living
Speaker 1: the life, you know. So here I am this blue
Speaker 1: collar kid with no money, and it's not only attractive,
Speaker 1: it's where I want to be. So I started working
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 2: Was decided to drop out of Ohio State before graduation
Speaker 2: to pursue his Series seven exam and become a registered
Speaker 2: securities trader between the years of nineteen ninety six and
Speaker 2: two thousand. He advanced in this cutthroat field.
Speaker 1: If you go to work in a broker dealer, you're
Speaker 1: gonna work hard. And so if I'm going to start
Speaker 1: at the bottom or something, I want to make sure
Speaker 1: that when I climb to the top of that ladder,
Speaker 1: it's where I want to be.
Speaker 3: What that guy saw.
Speaker 1: In me was an aggressive nature, to be tenacious to
Speaker 1: the point of, you know, telling you what I think
Speaker 1: and putting it all on the line. And I think
Speaker 1: that he saw a little bit of just you know,
Speaker 1: the hunger, you know, the real hunger to do something
Speaker 1: other people aren't willing to do. My thought process here,
Speaker 1: I saw not only the money, but I saw what
Speaker 1: I could do with the money and help people. Like
Speaker 1: I know it sounds kind of crazy, but you know,
Speaker 1: who's more important than a guy's taking care of the money.
Speaker 2: When someone in bails his position and is elevating your
Speaker 2: net worth, there's no better friend to have. But when
Speaker 2: their investments aren't making money, it's a different story. Early
Speaker 2: on in Bob's tenure as a trader, his firm embarked
Speaker 2: on a new strategy we.
Speaker 3: Called a bunch of people.
Speaker 1: Met a bunch of people, and through one of those people,
Speaker 1: they were talking about individual community bank stocks. So they
Speaker 1: were very thinly traded, but they were moneymakers, and they
Speaker 1: were great investments, and they were great investments over time.
Speaker 1: So we would come in and buy out these blocks
Speaker 1: of these small community bank stocks, and we would piece
Speaker 1: them out instead of to five people in town, and
Speaker 1: piece it out to twenty five people or fifty people
Speaker 1: in town. And we did very well with this, and
Speaker 1: so these were super stable, consistent investments. And this is
Speaker 1: a time when the dot com thing was going on,
Speaker 1: so everybody's flying these high flying dot com things, and
Speaker 1: in my mind, I'm building a business. It's going to
Speaker 1: be here for the next fifty years. And I'm a
Speaker 1: young guy. I'm aggressive, but at the time I totally
Speaker 1: believed in what we were doing.
Speaker 2: At twenty six years old, Bales was managing over twenty
Speaker 2: two million dollars of client funds when his company's previously
Speaker 2: sound model took a downturn.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, we bought a bank out of
Speaker 1: West Virginia. On paper, it was the number one community
Speaker 1: bank in the country. The book value was one hundred
Speaker 1: dollars more than a share price. I bought stock in it.
Speaker 1: I put my family's money into it, I put friends
Speaker 1: money into it, and in September of nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: they shut the bank down.
Speaker 2: Full disclosure here. We reached out to a bunch of
Speaker 2: people in the hopes of better understanding what happened with
Speaker 2: this West Virginia bank, Bob's old boss, some form of clients,
Speaker 2: third parties, nobody took us up on our invitation to talk.
Speaker 2: What follows is Bob's version of what trans fired.
Speaker 1: And what this bank was doing was they were fraudulently
Speaker 1: keeping their books. They were cooking the books for lack
Speaker 1: of a better way to do it. They were packaging
Speaker 1: up loans and selling the loans off, leaving the loans
Speaker 1: on the books, and basically inflating what they were doing.
Speaker 1: So the company we worked for basically shut down.
Speaker 2: That West Virginia Bank was the first national bank of Keystone.
Speaker 2: It was supposedly quite profitable, with assets totally over a
Speaker 2: billion dollars until a regulatory agency discoveredy five hundred and
Speaker 2: fifteen million dollar discrepancy on their books. The US government
Speaker 2: would later close the bank, drawing intense scrutiny towards the
Speaker 2: brokers who touted it as a good investment.
Speaker 1: I had purchased for a client this bank stock and
Speaker 1: the bank went out of business. What I did that
Speaker 1: was wrong wasn't that I purchased the bank and it
Speaker 1: went out of business. It was my client was in
Speaker 1: the hospital at the time and I didn't get his authorization.
Speaker 1: What I did do, and this is not mitigating because
Speaker 1: I contacted his wife. I'd taken this guy from two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars to two million dollars. He's not going
Speaker 1: to tell me no, right Like, let's be honest about it.
Speaker 1: If I did that for you in five years, would
Speaker 1: you tell me no? Anyway, I put him into this
Speaker 1: bank and lost money, lost a lot of money. There
Speaker 1: was an arbitration suit against me, lost my brokerage.
Speaker 2: License in May of two thousand. Bails and his Bosses
Speaker 2: were sued by Gary and Janet Leebschner, an aging couple
Speaker 2: that had invested with the firm. The suit aledge that
Speaker 2: the company systematically pressured elderly customers into buying stock in
Speaker 2: the First National Bank of Keystone, falsely implying that the
Speaker 2: bank would soon go public. Decades later, Bail still has
Speaker 2: a hard time reconciling what happened.
Speaker 1: I was greedy to like I literally thought we were
Speaker 1: gonna make millions of dollars off this investment. And I
Speaker 1: thought it would be enough to where I didn't have
Speaker 1: to work like that anymore. You know, I think it
Speaker 1: would have changed my life.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It was a true feeling of letting people down, you know,
Speaker 1: like people work twenty years, thirty years for this money
Speaker 1: and you lose them that money.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: I mean, they trusted me, you know, and think about that.
Speaker 1: They believed in me enough to give their labor to me,
Speaker 1: and I screwed it.
Speaker 2: Up with the arbitration process. In his own fate and
Speaker 2: Limbo Biles decided it was time to get out of
Speaker 2: Ohio and turn over a new leaf.
Speaker 1: I really loved Florida. I figured if I had to
Speaker 1: start over, I'm going to go to Florida because it's
Speaker 1: son had fun right. So I had a total of
Speaker 1: four hundred dollars cash, I had a car that was
Speaker 1: paid off. I jumped in my car twenty seven years old.
Speaker 3: Drive to Florida.
Speaker 1: Ended up meeting some people from a first Investors group
Speaker 1: of West Palm Beach and started working trading oil and
Speaker 1: gas futures. Like I still thought I could get up,
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm in an industry where I can
Speaker 1: make money. Once I make the money, I can go
Speaker 1: back and take care of.
Speaker 3: This, you know.
Speaker 1: And so that was my thought process. And once I
Speaker 1: make the money here, I'll come back and take care
Speaker 1: of these people here, and then, you know, obviously September
Speaker 1: eleventh kind of changed my mind.
Speaker 6: It's SAT fifty two here in New York. We understand
Speaker 6: that there has been a plane crash on the southern
Speaker 6: tip of Manhattan. We understand that a plane has crashed
Speaker 6: into the World Trade Center. We don't know anything more
Speaker 6: than that.
Speaker 9: I have another one.
Speaker 10: Another plane just hit right.
Speaker 11: Oh my gosh, another.
Speaker 3: Plane had just hit hit another building.
Speaker 9: Were right into the middle of it. Explosion was definitely
Speaker 9: looked like it was on purpose.
Speaker 2: Sitting in Leavenworth. Documentarian Paul Pulowski asked Bales whether, at
Speaker 2: such an uncertain moment in his life, America's response to
Speaker 2: the nine to eleven attacks presented a different path forward.
Speaker 10: After everything you've been through, obviously, you know, give banked
Speaker 10: about where were you kind of seeking some purpose?
Speaker 3: You know, that's a that's a good question.
Speaker 1: You know, was I seeking purpose in my life? And
Speaker 1: I would say most definitely when September eleventh happened, it
Speaker 1: was a way to give back feeling of trying to
Speaker 1: make it right, you know, trying to make something right,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Hell, I couldn't do anything
Speaker 1: else right, I may as well try that.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Bales was already serving in Iraq by the time the
Speaker 2: arbitration really came in. When all was sudden done, the
Speaker 2: defendants were fined one point two million dollars in damages.
Speaker 2: At that point, the trading firm had already filed for
Speaker 2: bankruptcy and had been expelled from the industry. The elderly
Speaker 2: couple never got the retirement funds back.
Speaker 1: I sure don't think I would have lived in my
Speaker 1: car if I had a million dollars sitting back somewhere.
Speaker 1: I sure, don't think I would have went in the infantry.
Speaker 2: The rationale behind Baals' decision to enlist after nine to
Speaker 2: eleven was complex. Yes, he believed it was his patriotic
Speaker 2: duty to fight terrorism, but in his mind he also
Speaker 2: had debts that he somehow had to repay.
Speaker 3: She told me about it. He could screw up really
Speaker 3: God previously and made some core decisions.
Speaker 2: The soldier ex repalls a conversation where Bailes confided in
Speaker 2: him about this scandal.
Speaker 12: From his past.
Speaker 3: He essentially talked about how he was in charge of
Speaker 3: large sums of money for people, and he ultimately wat
Speaker 3: I stood all rust a whole bunch of people's party.
Speaker 3: He was like, I'll have to do something different with
Speaker 3: my life because I felt so bad at this.
Speaker 2: Bob also discussed the situation with soldier David Lesley when
Speaker 2: they served together. In his retelling of it so many
Speaker 2: years later. One comment stands out.
Speaker 9: I remember him telling me a little bit of his story,
Speaker 9: and what I gathered the most from what he was
Speaker 9: saying was that they were people who weren't doing the
Speaker 9: right thing around him, and he had to take blame
Speaker 9: for that as well.
Speaker 3: He wanted to make sure everyone was protecting, contacting.
Speaker 2: It's a point that Robert Bales has made repeatedly. He
Speaker 2: put upon himself the safety and security of his peers
Speaker 2: and his loved ones. He bore the burden for the
Speaker 2: well being of a lot of people like Wade, his
Speaker 2: next door neighbor with special needs.
Speaker 1: Wade half falling down a flight of steps, broke his hip.
Speaker 1: And so I took a year off before I went
Speaker 1: back to Ohio State. And so it was a lot
Speaker 1: of rehab to get him back to normal. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like this was a job.
Speaker 2: This is my brother on deployments too. Bales wanted to
Speaker 2: be the person in charge of getting everybody back to
Speaker 2: the States in one piece.
Speaker 1: How was the guy that people turned to to bring
Speaker 1: their loved ones back home? Their family members came and
Speaker 1: talked to me, and so did I feel responsible?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: I felt responsible.
Speaker 2: Just days before the killings, Bales blamed himself for another
Speaker 2: soldier's dismemberment. In his mind, he should have shot the
Speaker 2: person who triggered the faithful ied Asbury.
Speaker 1: They took his leg off of not having shot the Afghan.
Speaker 1: You know, it's hard to say, man, I mean I
Speaker 1: feel responsible a.
Speaker 2: Little bit Why does Bals keep harping on this? Why
Speaker 2: is he so eager to tell the world that he
Speaker 2: always takes care of other people? Is there something else
Speaker 2: that he's implying but not saying about the Kandahar Masaker.
Speaker 2: During his interview, David Wesley made another interesting remark that
Speaker 2: we've heard whispers of before.
Speaker 9: The army turned a blind eye to a soldier that
Speaker 9: obviously needed not to deploy anymore.
Speaker 3: To me, they're culpable.
Speaker 9: What he did was wrong, but he didn't do it
Speaker 9: without assistance, and a part of me believes that it
Speaker 9: might not have been him alone.
Speaker 3: Outside the wire.
Speaker 9: Bob Bels didn't do this alone.
Speaker 3: He had help.
Speaker 2: The phrasing of Wesley's point compelled our producer Max Nelson
Speaker 2: to follow up.
Speaker 12: You said one thing there that we don't quote people
Speaker 12: out of context, So I want to check on one
Speaker 12: thing when you said Bob Bells didn't do this alone
Speaker 12: yet help.
Speaker 3: What you mean by that?
Speaker 9: I meant exactly what I said, Bob didn't do this
Speaker 9: on his own.
Speaker 13: I remember sitting on the ground and turning on my camera.
Speaker 13: I was interviewing a little girl sitting there with her grandfather,
Speaker 13: and he was saying to her tell her what we saw.
Speaker 2: Remember yalde Hakim, the reporter who risked her life to
Speaker 2: interview the Afghan victims of Bales's attacks and heard some
Speaker 2: startling perspectives in the process.
Speaker 7: But something that stayed with me and that I found
Speaker 7: quite chilling, was that she said to me, I saw
Speaker 7: many soldiers with lights, dude headlights coming out of their helmets,
Speaker 7: and I saw many many soldiers and they came and
Speaker 7: they killed my father. Another child was saying there were
Speaker 7: multiple people, and then later some of the adults started
Speaker 7: to say.
Speaker 6: He wasn't on his own.
Speaker 11: There's multiple people.
Speaker 13: President karas I was then saying, we're hearing that there's
Speaker 13: more than one soldier.
Speaker 3: What is actually going on here?
Speaker 4: So that was also clouding the clarity.
Speaker 13: That we were trying to establish in terms of whether
Speaker 13: it was just bails or whether there was more to it.
Speaker 2: The United States never took these statements made by the
Speaker 2: villagers of Alakosai and Naujabien all that seriously. Baiales's name
Speaker 2: was released to the media almost instantly, and he was
Speaker 2: the only person tried and convicted under the UCUMJ, But
Speaker 2: the Afghan witnesses maintained that they saw multiple American soldiers
Speaker 2: during the Kanahar massacre. Do you believe that Robert Bales
Speaker 2: did this act all by himself. That's Afghan journalist Merewi
Speaker 2: Satal speaking to Haji Mohammad Wazir, an Afghan man who
Speaker 2: lost eleven family members that night.
Speaker 12: No, it was not alone, but it was the Americans
Speaker 12: who put the responsibility of this act on this one person.
Speaker 12: I don't know how it would be possible for a
Speaker 12: person to go to one village and make four or
Speaker 12: five people martyrs, and then go to another village and
Speaker 12: make ten or twelve more people martyrs. This is not possible,
Speaker 12: nor is it believable to us. One person did not
Speaker 12: do this.
Speaker 2: Another local farmer, Mulla Baran, made a similar argument.
Speaker 12: We can say for sure that Robert Bales was not alone.
Speaker 12: They all did this together. They just presented this one person.
Speaker 12: We know their military tactics. When the American forces surround
Speaker 12: the house, they send one person inside to kill. I've
Speaker 12: seen this before myself. When they claimed that one person
Speaker 12: had gone crazy and did this alone, we rejected their
Speaker 12: words completely.
Speaker 2: Hick Matula is Mulla Baran's nephew. He was just a
Speaker 2: child in twenty twelve, but his personal recollections line up
Speaker 2: with his uncle's theory.
Speaker 11: Was Robert Bales alone in this?
Speaker 12: He was alone in the room, there were people outside?
Speaker 11: Who were they?
Speaker 12: They were his friends?
Speaker 2: It might sound like a stretch. How could such a
Speaker 2: serious revelation about this highly publicized tragedy stay hidden for
Speaker 2: so long? Yalda Hakim had these questions herself after returning
Speaker 2: home from Panhue, Afghanistan.
Speaker 14: Now, after that interview, we spoke to like a trauma
Speaker 14: person off the record back in Australia.
Speaker 11: I was worried about driving that multiple soldier narrative if
Speaker 11: it had no basis. And one of the things the
Speaker 11: trauma expert said was.
Speaker 14: That sometimes people misplace events in trauma and in a
Speaker 14: child's mind, they can't quite figure out the sequence of
Speaker 14: events and it's all mishmash.
Speaker 2: March eleventh, twenty twelve was likely the worst day that
Speaker 2: the Afghans we interviewed whatever hope to live through, And
Speaker 2: some of the details they reference would imply that the
Speaker 2: attacks were not committed by a lone gunman, but in
Speaker 2: an entire platoon. For example, there's this from Hajji Wazir.
Speaker 12: Go Quickly there were twenty to twenty five people there,
Speaker 12: because when people came out of their houses in the morning,
Speaker 12: they saw the footprints from their boots. About twenty to
Speaker 12: twenty five people must have collaborated with him in this act.
Speaker 12: Airplanes were with them, providing light for.
Speaker 2: Them, airplanes, twenty five people. These points were repeated by
Speaker 2: the other villagers.
Speaker 12: He was not alone in doing this act. There were
Speaker 12: two or three airplanes with him that night. I went
Speaker 12: to the back of our house in our alley and
Speaker 12: saw the footprints of twenty five American soldiers.
Speaker 2: In the military's reports on the incident, there's no mention
Speaker 2: of planes flying overhead, and the notion of twenty five
Speaker 2: soldiers covertly executing this mission is hard to fathom. Y
Speaker 2: all who believes it's possible that the Afghan civilians are
Speaker 2: confusing the events of that night with what happened the
Speaker 2: next morning when Bales was evacuated in a massive commotion
Speaker 2: formed outside VSP BELLUMBI.
Speaker 11: I don't know this sure, but it could be the
Speaker 11: bails came, the incident took place, and then they came
Speaker 11: to get him, and then that's where you have the
Speaker 11: multiple soldier theory, where you know then all the other
Speaker 11: guys came to pick him up, and that's where the
Speaker 11: helicopters then turned up.
Speaker 2: Maybe the Afghan's arm is remembering the details like the
Speaker 2: aldest trauma specialists suspected, it'd be the easy conclusion to reach,
Speaker 2: especially when you're trying to prove an argument beyond a
Speaker 2: reasonable doubt, like Bailes's prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel J.
Speaker 3: Morse.
Speaker 15: If I'm conducting an investigation and there are multiple witnesses
Speaker 15: and all the witnesses say the exact same thing, I
Speaker 15: got a problem. People don't see things the exact same way,
Speaker 15: people don't remember things the exact same way. But as
Speaker 15: a prosecutor, I want to make things as simple as possible.
Speaker 15: I don't want to make this complex, and I don't
Speaker 15: need to. I have all the tools I need at
Speaker 15: my disposal to prosecute this guy. One of those first
Speaker 15: things I decided was, we're not going to have any
Speaker 15: insurmountable mistakes.
Speaker 2: The United States was a global superpower trying to reconcile
Speaker 2: and move on from the deadliest war crime perpetrated by
Speaker 2: its military in decades, and if one guy was responsible
Speaker 2: for it, that's explainable. He's a bad apple. But if
Speaker 2: multiple soldiers were involved, that signifies there's an institutional problem.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing. The Afghans aren't the only people who
Speaker 2: feel this way. Ever since the killings occurred, some of
Speaker 2: the Americans stationed at the VSP have had their suspicions,
Speaker 2: which was not picked up by the national media. In
Speaker 2: the middle of the night, Private James Alexander, one of
Speaker 2: the lower enlisted guys, shares his theory based on his
Speaker 2: memories from the early morning of March eleventh, twenty twelve.
Speaker 6: I get woken up very early in the morning and
Speaker 6: it's like, hey, we need to do one hundred percent accountability.
Speaker 6: When we're running out there, Gwynn, who is the guy
Speaker 6: on guard, is coming in and he is telling us
Speaker 6: this very very important part of the story. He tells
Speaker 6: us the gate guard has said that two people came
Speaker 6: in and one person left.
Speaker 2: Remember, Bales hit two villages that night, first Alkosi and
Speaker 2: later Naja Bien. He came back to the VSP in
Speaker 2: between three load, which is when he and possibly somebody
Speaker 2: else were seen by an Afghan soldier who was guarding
Speaker 2: the front gate. When SF Captain Danny Fields was alerted
Speaker 2: about a problem. That's the intel.
Speaker 6: He speaking to the gate guard.
Speaker 4: You know, I remember him saying something to the effect
Speaker 4: of an American left and then an American came back,
Speaker 4: or he said somebody came back. My instant fear was
Speaker 4: that maybe we've got one more person inside.
Speaker 6: The base than what we should have. The guy on
Speaker 6: guard says that he's a man in body arm come
Speaker 6: through the gate. Well, we know Bail didn't wear body arm.
Speaker 6: He says that I had a beard. Well, Bails couldn't
Speaker 6: grow a beard. So it's like this guy's talking about,
Speaker 6: you know, these physical characteristics that don't match up to
Speaker 6: Robert Bals at all. And the crimes that were committed
Speaker 6: at each location were vastly different. The first location, Ala Coosi.
Speaker 6: The crimes that were committed there were not nearly as heinous.
Speaker 6: There were survivors. In Naja Bien, there were burned bodies,
Speaker 6: something that didn't happen. In Alakozi, there were more children,
Speaker 6: more people were killed. The horrors of the crime were
Speaker 6: ratcheted up in such a way that it almost makes
Speaker 6: me feel like there was a presence at Alakosi that
Speaker 6: stopped him from going the length that he wanted to do.
Speaker 6: And so it is my belief that he was helped
Speaker 6: in some way to commit these crimes with the aid of.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not. I tried so hard to suppress all that
Speaker 3: crap out.
Speaker 2: Soldier X, the unidentified participant with the digitally altered voice
Speaker 2: who's been prevalent throughout this podcast. He never told us
Speaker 2: why he would have ran us formal consent to use
Speaker 2: this interview. But when we broached the subject of potentially
Speaker 2: helping to carry out the Candaharm massacre, let's just say,
Speaker 2: the mood changed.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of times where, even at twenty years old,
Speaker 3: I wish I would have stepped in and stopped it.
Speaker 3: Do you have a super faces? You're a super little
Speaker 3: girl's face.
Speaker 2: Soldier X is a free man and he didn't have
Speaker 2: to speak with us in the first place, but he
Speaker 2: wanted the opportunity to respond to the actations levied against
Speaker 2: him by the soldiers who served alongside him in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: And after all has happened, I let's just try to
Speaker 3: walk down of my life like it never happened. And
Speaker 3: then one of my Jones associates and contact with me.
Speaker 3: So the bs that they're putting out there they're paying
Speaker 3: this picture, like, you know, as part of this great
Speaker 3: conspiracy anxious refting. All right, I was like, well, I
Speaker 3: guess this is time to confront this and go through this.
Speaker 6: This is even after speaking with himself. We've been on
Speaker 6: Facebook Messenger and he's explained his side of things. But
Speaker 6: in the reality, there's a lot of holes in his
Speaker 6: story that directly fly in the face of some of
Speaker 6: the things that I saw.
Speaker 2: Let's dive in on exactly what Alexander claims to have
Speaker 2: seen and heard on March eleventh, twenty twelve.
Speaker 6: The person that woke us up was okay. When he
Speaker 6: woke us up, he was fresh out of the shower.
Speaker 6: It might not seem like a huge deal, but when
Speaker 6: you're in Afghanistan and you're showering less than once a day,
Speaker 6: you do not take a shower in the morning. His
Speaker 6: hair was done, and it was gelled perfectly, and he
Speaker 6: smelled He had like a little bit of Colonne or
Speaker 6: something on right. He was reasonably clean shaven. When I
Speaker 6: say that, he had sort of shaved some of it
Speaker 6: down or instead of done some maintenance to it, which
Speaker 6: was highly.
Speaker 2: Unusual at that point in time. There was someone missing
Speaker 2: from VSV bellum By. It was a dust one an
Speaker 2: emergency in theory, there shouldn't have been time to shower.
Speaker 2: We asked Soldier Ax about this.
Speaker 3: That was an accurate that didn't happen. I made a
Speaker 3: showered up VSP BOMBI later, definitely not before I would
Speaker 3: and look with them up.
Speaker 2: We also asked Private Gavin Jones to confirm or deny
Speaker 2: Alexander's story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 5: You know, as soon as we were able to that
Speaker 5: dude was straight up like spick and span and showered
Speaker 5: up and bade it to go.
Speaker 6: Then we have actions afterwards where he started cleaning up
Speaker 6: and throwing away things and walking contraband items to the
Speaker 6: bird pair. So he's cleaning up these crimes already. There's
Speaker 6: cleaning up evidence of whatever misgivings and misdeeds.
Speaker 16: Were going on, which is very strange that in a
Speaker 16: day like this you find that you need to throw
Speaker 16: away a bag of us We essentially thought it was
Speaker 16: closed because it was a black plastic bag that you
Speaker 16: didn't see trashking out of it.
Speaker 2: Soldier X had a clear explanation from what he remembers
Speaker 2: being in that trash bag.
Speaker 3: One of the CEOs from yourself was like clear, shut up,
Speaker 3: went threw aways of alcohol and which investigation knows it
Speaker 3: was just our own stuff? Was anything Bill's or anything
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: Don't forget who has proven to be drinking liquor and
Speaker 2: discussing tactics with Bails just hours before the killings, Soldier
Speaker 2: X the Staff starred with Jason McLoughlin, also known as Mac.
Speaker 2: When we approached Mac about this podcast, he asked that
Speaker 2: we fuck off his words.
Speaker 6: There is a report one of the people that lived
Speaker 6: nearby said that she heard two men drunkenly arguing outside.
Speaker 6: Now two men arguing, okay, that could be anything but
Speaker 6: drunkenly arguing. That is really, really, really fascinating.
Speaker 2: Then there's the issue of a comment that was made
Speaker 2: after Robert Bales had returned to the VSP and had
Speaker 2: been detained. Captain Field had called a meeting to discuss
Speaker 2: what had just occurred.
Speaker 6: We're all kind of gathered together like a bunch of
Speaker 6: little kids on a picnic bench, and Captain Fields is like, Okay,
Speaker 6: I'm just gonna tell you guys that we're getting reports
Speaker 6: that there are women and children that are cash dows,
Speaker 6: and we believe Bobby has been the one that's done it,
Speaker 6: and he was in there immediately pipes up and says.
Speaker 5: He did it for you guys, And this is before
Speaker 5: we have any idea like what he's intertwined with. He
Speaker 5: just told us this fully critic thing of like whatever
Speaker 5: did you know?
Speaker 6: He did it for y'all? And that I will never
Speaker 6: get that out of my head. I can never get
Speaker 6: that out of my head.
Speaker 2: Soldier X remember saying something different in that moment.
Speaker 3: Danny Fields was like, you're just gonna a brief about
Speaker 3: the situation. Like, I was pretty emotionally angry about what
Speaker 3: was happening. This is a huge situation, and I didn't
Speaker 3: want a bunch of people going on social media and
Speaker 3: being like, oh my god, chuck where I'm at right now?
Speaker 3: And so I gave very clear, concise information to stay
Speaker 3: up social media.
Speaker 2: They might sound like minor, harmless details, a shower trash bag,
Speaker 2: an attempt at understanding what Bales had just done, but
Speaker 2: this perceived odd behavior from another soldier stuck with the
Speaker 2: privates so much so that they alerted the Army's Criminal
Speaker 2: Investigation Division or see ID.
Speaker 6: Of the joes were so nervous and rightfully so that
Speaker 6: somebody else was involved from the infantry that we finally
Speaker 6: did it. We broke chain a command. We went to
Speaker 6: talk to the CID agent and we said, listen, sorry,
Speaker 6: we don't know how to put this this way, but
Speaker 6: something else is going on here and other people are involved.
Speaker 6: You need to talk to these two individuals, that is
Speaker 6: Mac and immedium. That night they were flown out, okay,
Speaker 6: like they were gone. They then were interviewed by CID
Speaker 6: and so forth and so on repetitively to the point
Speaker 6: where CID no longer interviewed anyone else.
Speaker 2: Some of the previous evidence offered by Alexander and Jones
Speaker 2: could be considered to be here set. But on March thirteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, the military flew McLoughlin and Soldier X back
Speaker 2: to Kandahart. Their deployment was over. That's indisputable.
Speaker 3: It was pretty quick crd K and they spoke to
Speaker 3: us and then they took us back to Canada. Article
Speaker 3: for the investigations there be I don't know half four times,
Speaker 3: you know, first by CID officers and then you know,
Speaker 3: by the prosecuting Attorney's office. It was at hand four times.
Speaker 3: Why I got to Candahart. They stuck me in a
Speaker 3: wooden box like a little sleeping area. I wasn't allowed
Speaker 3: to talk to anybody about my attorney and the chaplain.
Speaker 5: And the thing is, if anyone was going to have
Speaker 5: Bails's back like that, it was going to be because
Speaker 5: they were on a recon team previously together. That's why
Speaker 5: we were all very skeptical of him.
Speaker 6: They acted like best friends and deployed with Bails previously
Speaker 6: as part of the sniper section, so they were tight.
Speaker 6: They had shared experiences of Iraq, and the reason why
Speaker 6: he was chosen for this deployment is because again Bals
Speaker 6: got to choose his guys, so he picked somebody at
Speaker 6: trust and in a relationship with.
Speaker 2: In our conversation with him, Soldier Eggs grappled with whether
Speaker 2: he in some way was accountable for what happened in
Speaker 2: the Canahem massacre.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of emotions, a lot of thoughts I'd
Speaker 3: go into it. I still figure about those families every day.
Speaker 3: There's definitely times where I wish I would have stepped
Speaker 3: in and stopped it, maybe would have prevented something. I'm
Speaker 3: a firm believer with great power, times great responsibility and
Speaker 3: I feel like when Bob did that, it took all
Speaker 3: that wind down that sale, like do you really do
Speaker 3: you really believe that? Did you step up and do
Speaker 3: your part to prevent this?
Speaker 2: As for Bails, during Paul's eighteen hours with him, there
Speaker 2: was no grand admission that anyone went with him to
Speaker 2: Ala Kosai and not to be in just a few
Speaker 2: remarks here and there, which can be interpreted at face
Speaker 2: value or not.
Speaker 1: I will lay down my life for the guy to
Speaker 1: my left and right. In some ways it kind of
Speaker 1: helps me get through prison. What is my responsibility here?
Speaker 1: I can't go to the facility because then I'm a
Speaker 1: rat and I won't do it.
Speaker 2: Between the years of twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, we
Speaker 2: didn't know about this alternate narrative. It's only later in
Speaker 2: retrospect that we began to question whether the story surrounding
Speaker 2: one of the most infamous war crimes committed by an
Speaker 2: American was actually true and ask which version of events
Speaker 2: would be more in line with the man that we
Speaker 2: had come to know. The following audio was captured on
Speaker 2: December fifteenth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: Hey Bob, right off the bat, how are you doing
Speaker 3: these days? You know, I'm all right, I'm doing that.
Speaker 9: I'm doing it.
Speaker 3: I'm in the same place, you know, I've been in
Speaker 3: the same place.
Speaker 1: For a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's been some time since you and I first
Speaker 10: started talking about your case and everything. Between then and now,
Speaker 10: we've spoken to a lot of people. Some people were
Speaker 10: pretty sympathetic, spoke favorably of you, and there were a
Speaker 10: fair number of people didn't speak so favorably and weren't
Speaker 10: so sympathetic, And ultimately we thought it was only right
Speaker 10: that Bob Bales have the final.
Speaker 1: Say, Hey, just out of curiosity, how bad was these other.
Speaker 8: Guys, like you know, he was my boy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love them, man, and I just want to.
Speaker 3: Know what is it? What he said.
Speaker 6: Coming up on the war within the way that I
Speaker 6: see this thing going is bails recruits and goes along
Speaker 6: with him.
Speaker 5: Took us aside and had a conversation with about if
Speaker 5: you need to make that shot, you know that you've
Speaker 5: got your back.
Speaker 3: On that camaraderie and the military is pretty strong.
Speaker 15: If you just do the numbers, it's hard to believe
Speaker 15: it's just one person.
Speaker 6: I'm shocked here. I've got to look into them, whether
Speaker 6: or not there's another man there.
Speaker 4: He's always said it was him and only him, and
Speaker 4: I honestly think he We'll take.
Speaker 9: That to his death.
Speaker 1: They would have been impressed with us had we not
Speaker 1: done what we did, or had I not done what
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: The War Within the Robert Bailes Story is production of
Speaker 2: Bungalow Media and Entertainment, Checkpoint Productions and Mosquito Park Pictures
Speaker 2: in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series was created by
Speaker 2: executive producers Paul Polowski and David check Executive producers from
Speaker 2: Bungalow Media and Entertainment are Robert Friedman and Mike Power.
Speaker 2: The podcast was written and produced by Max Nelson and
Speaker 2: hosted by me Mike McGinnis. Editing was done by Anna Hoberman,
Speaker 2: sound design and mix by John Gardner. Teddy Gannon was
Speaker 2: an archival producer, Leila Ahmadzai was an associate producer, and
Speaker 2: Peter Solataroff was production assistant. Special thanks to Liz Yelle Marsh,
Speaker 2: Nicole Rubin, Marcy Barkain, Zach Burpi, and Meerwi Satal as
Speaker 2: well as all of the people who were interviewed for
Speaker 2: the podcast. Listen and subscribe to the War Within on
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
Speaker 2: podcast