by John Browne
On the last line he added, “And I will have a beautiful life.”
22
A MASSACRE IN KANDAHAR
In November 2012 I boarded a rickety blue-and-white 727 and flew two and a half hours from Dubai to Kandahar City. The plane, built in 1967, seemed held together by duct tape (as many of the seats literally were). On board were members of the military and the CIA as well as a few fellow civilians. When we touched down in Kandahar an explosion ripped the sky next to the runway. The Taliban, I later learned, had fired rockets at gas tanks near the airfield.
Welcome to Afghanistan.
I had come to the heart of the so-called war on terror for a preliminary hearing for my latest client: Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of a one-man raid on two Afghan villages. Military investigators said that in the early morning hours of March 11, 2012, Sergeant Bales slaughtered sixteen innocent civilians, most of them women and children (some as young as two years old). The villages were a couple miles from a Special Forces outpost—a forward operating base, or FOB—in the middle of the Panjwayi District, birthplace of the Taliban.
Retained by Bales’s family back in Washington State, where he had been stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, I’d been waging a case in the media since almost immediately after my client was charged.
“If Sergeant Bales did this,” I told reporters, “and I do mean if, then we are responsible. We the American people made Sergeant Bales.” I believed that Bales, on his fourth deployment when the massacre occurred, suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that his country had done little to help his mental health. I believed that after over more than a decade of wars in the Middle East, we were putting all of our soldiers at risk. And I wanted to put the wars on trial.
Now here I was stepping off an aircraft that would never pass inspection back home and onto the Kandahar airfield. There I met my military lawyer counterpart, Capt. Matthew Aiesi—the spitting image of Matt Lauer, by the way—and my bodyguard for the trip, Staff Sgt. Brittany Brinker, a paralegal specialist. Armed and sheathed in body armor, they brought new meaning to the term defense attorneys.
I too was soon covered in body armor and ushered into a Blackhawk helicopter, bound for FOB Camp Nathan Smith—named after a Canadian soldier killed in a friendly fire incident in which a US Air National Guard F-16 pilot dropped a laser-guided, half-ton bomb on a group of Canadians conducting a training exercise.
I could barely sit up straight in the cramped helicopter. No wonder the military has height restrictions. During the twenty-minute ride to Camp Nathan Smith I listened to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on repeat on my iPod headphones. Looking around I saw the look of genuine fear on the .50-caliber machine gun operators hanging out the Blackhawk doors on both sides. Neither they nor the pilots ever smiled. I could feel the fear of all those on board and had flashbacks to how deep and genuine my life had been—how blessed. If this was it and I died here, I thought, then this was it.
At the base we would spend the next week in preliminary hearings and interviewing witnesses—many surviving family members—to the massacre in which Bales was the military’s only suspect. I was issued a light Kevlar vest, heavy Kevlar vest (fifty pounds), helmet (twenty pounds), and—what I’m sure must have violated a regulation or four—loaded M-16 rifle and 9-millimeter handgun. In a photo taken at the time, with all that armor and my white beard, I look like a militarized Santa Claus.
Five foot one, maybe a hundred pounds, Staff Sgt. Brittany Brinker took her job as my bodyguard very seriously. We’d walk into, say, the commissary, frequented by both US and Afghan soldiers, and she’d eye the place like a cat. She even pissed off a major who greatly outranked her when she told him, “Sir, you cannot bring your bag into the commissary.” She was and is my hero, all five foot one of her.
Captain Aiesi and I shared quarters. And by quarters I mean a converted shipping container, a cramped metal rectangle that could barely fit our bunk beds and gear. The stencils on our compartment read, RIFLE SIX and RIFLE SEVEN. I was designated Rifle Six, and Aiesi was Rifle Seven. For some long-standing army reason, this made me the big cheese, as Rifle Six is the leader in any group.
A few yards outside our door sat a cement bunker made of what looked like oversize parking blocks jigsawed together into a lean-to. They were scattered all over Camp Nathan Smith. If the base suspected an incoming Taliban rocket, a siren would blare and I’d have exactly forty-seven seconds to get from wherever I was (asleep on my bunk, taking care of business in the porta potty) to one of the cement bunkers.
It happened three times during my stay.
Let me back up. Eight months earlier, March 11, 2012, and some fifty miles to the southwest, according to my client and two witnesses—Staff Sgt. Jason McLaughlin and Cpl. David Godwin—Robert Bales sat on a bed in McLaughlin’s room. He poured Jack Daniels from a Dasani water bottle into a Diet Coke. On the television flickered the image of actor Denzel Washington laying waste to kidnappers in Mexico City. In the film Man on Fire Washington plays a former CIA operative who goes on a killing spree/rescue mission after the nine-year-old daughter of the man who hired him to prevent such a kidnapping is abducted.
Bales had just returned from guard duty atop Village Support Platform (VSP) Belambay, temporary home of the Third Special Forces Group’s Second Battalion and army support troops—including Bales—who were there to provide locals a safe alternative to the Taliban.
On guard duty on the roof Bales had told another soldier that he’d spotted two lights flashing in the nearby villages of Naja Bien and Alikozai. He reportedly observed the lights flashing for fifteen minutes and said he thought they might be a sequence of signals between Taliban insurgents in the two villages.
Now, back in the soldiers’ quarters, as the whiskey took hold and the violence on the TV screen played out, Bales thought about those lights and about the incident five days earlier when a fellow soldier lost his left leg to an IED (improvised explosive device). Bales believed Special Forces weren’t doing enough to tamp down the enemy.
What the US government says the thirty-eight-year-old father of two did next is more shocking than any event from any case I’ve ever had. (And, yes, that includes Ted Bundy and Benjamin Ng.)
Clad in a dark green T-shirt, camouflage pants, gloves, a helmet, and night vision goggles, Bales left the base. According to the government, he walked north along a dirt road for about half a mile and came upon the village of Alikozai, a collection of a dozen mud-and-straw-brick homes. The inhabitants of Alikozai were unimaginably poor, subsisted on migrant farm work, and lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. Many of the homes included multiple families.
Bales entered the home of Haji Sayed Jan and illumined the scene inside with the flashlight at the end of his rifle: women and children. He yelled and ordered the occupants to move into one room. When an elderly woman, Na’ikmarga, resisted, Bales shoved her to the ground and kicked her. A younger woman tried to intervene, and he threw her to the ground and stomped her too. The rest of the women and children ran out of the dwelling, across a courtyard, and into another home.
Bales followed, spotted an old man along the way, and shot him in the head. He then marched five yards across a dirt road and toward the home of Haji Mohamed Naim. A dog in front of the home barked and lunged at Bales, so he shot and killed it. Inside the home Bales encountered a man, woman, and their daughters, ages seven and three. He beat the man as the wife and kids screamed and cried. Bales turned to the crying three-year-old and shot her in the head. He shot the father in the chest and throat. A bullet hit the seven-year-old in the knee.
The surviving occupants, more than two dozen people, mostly women and children, fled to the room of the home’s elderly patriarch, Naim, who’d slept through the melee. The children told the old man, “The American is shooting people!” Naim told them to lie low and went to the entryway of the room, where he found Bales. The American raised his rifle and, from less than five feet awa
y, shot the patriarch in the face and neck.
Bales stepped over the old man and entered the room where the women and children recoiled in fear. “We are children,” the youngest among them pled in Pashto. “Please don’t hurt us!”
He spotted Na’ikmarga, the elderly woman from the previous home, and put a bullet in her head. He began firing into the room, hitting a young boy in both thighs and a girl in the chest and pelvic area. He shot another girl in the back of the head and another boy in the side of the head.
Nearly out of ammo, Bales began the slog back to base.
If that were the end of it, we’d still be talking about the events of that night as one of the greatest atrocities committed by a member of the US military during our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that was not the end.
No, Sgt. Robert Bales, according to the military, marched back to stock up on more ammunition and weapons. He awoke Staff Sergeant McLaughlin, with whom he’d drank and watched Man on Fire a few hours earlier. He told McLaughlin that he’d just killed insurgent combatants (failing to mention that those “insurgents” were in fact unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly men). McLaughlin was incredulous. Bales said, “Smell my weapon,” offering the muzzle of his M4. McLaughlin still couldn’t tell whether the rifle had been recently fired. Bales announced that he was going out to do more damage. McLaughlin, still not believing the claims, drifted back to sleep.
Bales added to his arsenal an M320 grenade launcher, 12 grenades, 180 bullets for the M4 rifle, and 15 rounds for the 9-millimeter handgun. This time he headed southeast, along a dirt path the soldiers referred to as No Name Road, toward the village of Naja Bien. There he walked into a home where an impoverished mason named Mohamed Dawud, his wife Masuma, and their six young children, including an infant, slept. The soldier stepped on two of the sleeping children and yanked Dawud out into the courtyard, shouting “Talib! Talib!” Dawud replied, “No Talib. No Talib.” Bales then shot Dawud in the head.
Bales reentered the house, grabbed the crying Masuma by the hair, and bashed her head against the wall. He then shoved the muzzle of the 9 millimeter into the infant’s mouth and asked Masuma, “Where are the Talib?” He let the infant go but tore the house apart, breaking dishes and furniture, before stepping back out into the courtyard.
He advanced toward the home of Haji Mohamed Wazir, shot the family dog, and stepped inside the house, where there were eleven people, again nearly all women and children, one as young as two years old.
Attempting to defend the occupants in the first room, a thirteen-year-old boy swung a shovel at Bales, striking him in the back. Unfazed, Bales threw the teenager on top of the others. He set his M4 on burst and killed every person in the room, eight in all.
He entered another room, grabbed Wazir’s brother and sister-in-law, dragged them into the room with the bodies, and shot them dead as well. Next he took a kerosene can, doused the bodies, lit a match, and set them ablaze. He turned and met Wazir’s mother, shot her in the head and chest with the 9 millimeter, and stomped on her head, sending her eyeballs out of their sockets and spraying blood and brains on the wall.
Bales then pulled a decorative rug off the wall and draped it over his shoulders like a cape. Covered in blood, he turned north, toward the base—a killer in a cape traipsing down No Name Road.
Like I said, nothing in my career has been as horrifying as the crimes for which Sergeant Bales was charged. As in the cases of Benjamin Ng and Ted Bundy, however, I believed the accused deserved the best defense possible, that the death penalty the military would no doubt try to impose was an immoral response.
Five days after the massacre, I received a phone call from my office as I drove back from a court appearance in Olympia, Washington. Kari Bales had called my office and said her husband was the accused soldier in the Kandahar killings, though his identity had yet to be made public. She told me her husband had asked for my representation while in a holding cell in Kuwait.
I agreed to meet with her and other family members at a Starbucks near Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The military was taking measures to get Kari and her kids into secure housing on the base because there were threats of retaliation from Islamic fundamentalists. (Hearing that, I immediately thought about my own family’s safety if I decided to represent Sergeant Bales.)
Kari pleaded with me to take the case. As usual, I knew it would probably break me financially. Sure, it would mean international attention for my law firm and myself, but I was at the stage of my career where building my résumé or getting national media attention meant little.
I was also concerned about the effect it would have on current and potential clients, who might think I was now too busy to work on their cases. (That fear proved warranted, as my ability to draw new clients was indeed hampered during the Bales case.)
I told Kari I would help “for now,” explaining that if the case went down the capital punishment route—very likely—I would need to either bow out or raise at least $2 million. (The average price for a death penalty defense is $3 million to $5 million.) I had about $50,000 in the bank and was paying the salary of five employees and supporting four family members.
A few weeks later my associate Emma Scanlan and I met with Bales at the Fort Leavenworth maximum-security unit in Kansas. The media presence was intense. At times we felt like prisoners in the hotel and actually thought about buying disguises. (Then again, what can a six foot six, long-haired, grey-bearded fellow like me disguise himself as?)
The army had assigned Maj. Tom Hurley as Bales’s official military lawyer. The conflict between Hurley and Emma and I was immediate. The rules made the civilian counsel (me) the chief counsel, which irritated Major Hurley. He was arrogant, despite having little experience with cases like this. And when he got defensive and angry—which he did often—his face turned bright red.
He leaked internal e-mails between attorneys to the press—and tried to make it look like Emma and I did it. He got busted a few months into the case and was removed from the team. (A civilian lawyer would have been disbarred for such transgressions.)
We were reassigned a team of wonderful, gifted, experienced JAG lawyers and paralegals. The new team was led by Maj. Greg Malson, assisted by Capt. Aiesi and the talented, dedicated Staff Sgt. Brittany Brinker (my bodyguard in Afghanistan). Major Malson and Emma did the heavy lifting, but we all had supporting roles. And luckily for Sgt. Robert Bales, this new legal team clicked.
As I learned more about the soldier, I realized that, unlike Ng and Bundy, Bales was not a sociopath. Far from it.
To the people in the blue-collar Cincinnati suburb of Norwood, Ohio, population nineteen thousand, where he grew up, he was “Bobby.” The youngest of five boys, captain of the high school football team, and the sophomore class president, Bobby was known as a bright, compassionate teenager who went out of his way to befriend Wade, a neighbor boy with developmental disabilities.
Wade’s hands were always crossed, his body twitched often, and his face wore a constant, simple smile. He was unable to care for his bodily functions or walk without assistance and always had a towel around his neck for drool collection.
His dad was a single father, so between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Bobby helped take care of Wade. He cleaned up when Wade soiled himself, took Wade to the mall, introduced him to girls, and even took him to the senior prom, where Wade joined Bobby and his girlfriend. Wade is still alive, and his father is forever grateful. Pictures of Sgt. Bales and Wade adorn the walls of Wade’s room to this day. (When asked about this during the trial Bales said, “No big deal. I loved Wade.” The whole courtroom was in tears, except for the unfeeling military jury.
I asked Bales quietly, “What happened to that Bobby Bales?”
He had tears in his eyes and said, “That Bobby died a long time ago.”)
As an adult he was a loving father who enjoyed making chocolate chip pancakes for his son and daughter. He and his wife, Kari, took the kids on camping t
rips and, recently, on two annual Disney cruises.
I’m not saying Robert Bales is a saint. During a short stint as a stockbroker he was accused of fraud—never proven—and he had once been charged with assault of a woman. And he and his wife were rumored to fight a lot. But he was an exemplary soldier.
In the army, which he joined in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he had a reputation as a gifted leader. Bales’s “superb leadership abilities were essential to the success of the squad and platoon during 100 percent of missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” wrote a superior in a 2008 evaluation. “Unlimited potential,” wrote another. “Select for the most challenging assignments that the Army can offer this outstanding NCO.”
He was decorated many times, including in 2007 when the army awarded him the Commendation Medal for “outstanding achievement during the battle of Najaf while serving as a fire team leader.” The army said of this honor, “Sgt Bales’s heroic actions resulted in mission accomplished. His actions securing a downed helicopter and clearing a trench line resulted in the destruction of a superior numbered enemy.”
And yet from almost the moment he was apprehended that night at the gate of VSP Belambay—the rug cape hanging from his shoulders—the military began to paint a completely different image of their man with “unlimited potential.” Suddenly he was a sadistic and subpar soldier, one who complained about his superiors, groused over losing promotions, and even openly bemoaned his wife’s weight.
The army knew that one of its own had committed an atrocity, and now they wanted as much distance from him as possible. I understood that.
What I didn’t understand was how Bobby Bales went from boy-next-door Ohioan and model soldier to mass murderer seemingly overnight.