By Horatio Green
 |
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales
pictured at the National Training
Center at Ft. Irwin, California,
August 23, 2011: U.S. federal government image.
|
On Sunday, March 11, 2012, Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales
walked out of his operating base in Afghanistan, entered three homes in the villages
of Alkozai and Balandi, and killed 16 villagers. Of the 16, he killed nine
children, some as young as two years old. He
returned to his base, laid down his weapon and voluntarily surrendered.
Bales negotiated a plea agreement and avoided the death
penalty by pleading guilty. On August 23, 2013, he was sentenced to life in
prison with no chance of parole.
Neighbors say Robert Bales was good-natured, warm, and a
very nice person. A father they saw playing with his children outside their
home. He participated in his and his neighbor’s kid’s birthday parties. Friends,
who grew up with Bales spoke highly of him.
However, as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, while in
Afghanistan on his fourth combat tour (three in Iraq before being deployed to
Afghanistan) became
a much different man. The warriors he led called him “bipolar,” “crazy,”
“paranoid,” a “control freak,” and didn’t trust him; they saw him pummel an Afghan
because the man accidentally bumps into him with a box of supplies. His
superiors thought of him as an “even keeled” combat veteran who they could
trust.
A military official told
the New York Times that the reason “When it all comes out, it will be a
combination of stress, alcohol, and domestic issues -- he just snapped.”
However, the essential reason for this tragedy does not lie
in some complex psychological issue. It lies in the culture of war itself.
Following boot camp, soldiers are selected for combat roles based
on their physical condition, aptitude, and their suitability for training in
the specialty of killing another human being. That is the military mission;
everything else is secondary to that primary task.
Sergeant Bales did nothing more that early morning in March
than what he was trained to do: kill, maim, or incapacitate another human being
With his certification as a sniper, and four combat tours, he most likely had
killed many times, but then he was under military orders to kill. As a sniper,
it makes me wonder how many innocent civilians he may have killed. The only
difference this time was Bales’ actions were not authorized and condoned.
In his review of the documentary The Good Soldier, Robert
W. Butler of the Kansas City Star wrote, “At heart, it’s a rueful
acknowledgement that when you put young men in stressful, violent situations,
they’re not always going to behave according to the Geneva Convention.”
Butler asks the question, “When you turn somebody into a
well-trained killer, how do you turn off the killer part of their personality?”
The answer is not to turn them into killers in the first
place. But the United States will never learn. For here we go again, bombing in
Iraq and now Syria. But it won’t be long before we have boots on the ground
again and breed more Sergeant Bales in the process.
Copyright © 2014 Horatio Green
(A previous version of
this article was published on the Yahoo Contributors Network)
