Robert Bales Speaks: Confessions of America’s Most Notorious War Criminal

Through the scope of his sniper rifle, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales watched a man in a spotless white tunic stroll through a grape field. The man was a few hundred yards away, dipping in and out of view as he traversed the six-foot ditches separating each row of vines. He carried a shovel and appeared to be talking on a cell phone—or was that an Icom radio? Every so often the man stopped, dug a few scoops of dirt, and moved on. He reversed direction for a few steps, then switched back again. He never stopped talking on his device.

Bales thought, What the fuck is this?

A hypervigilant infantryman in his fourth combat tour in the past nine years, Sergeant Bales had been ordered to his sentry position on the roof of his base, VSP Belambai, because U.S. forces in the area were under attack. Minutes earlier an IED had ripped through an armored vehicle as it carried five soldiers back to the base. The explosion flipped the truck, concussing several of the men inside, none seriously wounded. But Taliban strikes like these often come in clusters—a blast to get things started, followed by additional bombs targeting responders—so everyone on the base had shifted to a defensive posture. A quick-reaction force was deployed to the blast site, now a scene of smoke, shrapnel, and debris, the husk of the smoldering vehicle lying on its side. Bales had been sent to the roof to track the guy in the white tunic.

Now, as he watched, the man moved in the direction of the wreckage. This struck Bales as strange. What farmer tending his vines moved toward that kind of chaos?

The man was 400 yards from the site now and closing. He was still holding the device. Three hundred fifty yards. Three hundred. Fuck. The call Bales felt he had to make would be much easier if he could see the device the man carried. The rules of engagement allowed U.S. soldiers to take out any suspected insurgent holding an Icom radio, the Taliban's detonator of choice for remotely activating IEDs. But the guy was too far away. Bales couldn't tell. He decided not to shoot.

Minutes later, the bomb tech clearing the blast site, a Navy petty officer named John Asbury, stepped over a wall near a tall dead tree and…BOOM.

This second blast did far more damage than the first, shearing Asbury's left leg cleanly at the knee.

Two days later, Bales and a couple of dozen soldiers were sent to the scene of the attack to examine the blown-up vehicle and harvest any salvageable parts. They were out in the open, exposed to the enemy, so they worked with urgency.

At the center of the blast site was that old dead tree, about 30 feet tall, visible for hundreds of yards. It was clear that whoever'd planted the second IED had used the tree as a marker, setting off the bomb when the Americans drew near it. Bales decided it was a security threat and must be removed.

First the soldiers tried a chain saw, but the blade was too dull. So they decided to “detcord” the tree—wrap it with explosive tubing and take it down by blowing it up. That worked, but then the trunk got wedged between two adobe walls, forcing even more time and effort to free it. All this took hours, during which time Bales and his men were taking light fire from the Taliban. No one got hit, but Bales was keyed up, frustrated, worried about a full-on attack. It was late afternoon by the time they managed to drag the tree back to the base, where it sat for days, a reminder of the enemy's suffocating presence—and, in Bales's mind, of his own inability to stop the insurgent that he believed triggered the IED.

The other soldiers wanted to simply haul the tree into a burn pit. To Bales, this would not do. He wanted to destroy the thing himself. Finally, on the morning of Saturday, March 10, 2012, after fixating on this symbol of failure for three days and mostly sleepless nights, Bales went at the tree with a hand axe. It took him eight hours—in full view of the entire base—but he eventually succeeded in chopping it to bits.

“This tree was used to hurt my friends, man,” Bales told me recently, recalling the episode in an odd, detached tone. “It was used by the enemy. I had to see it go, you know?”

Later that evening, Bales would turn his rage to less symbolic targets. Shortly after midnight, under cover of a deep rural darkness, Bales slipped away from the base and walked to a nearby village, where he killed four Afghans, including a 3-year-old girl. Then, after returning to his base to reload and telling another soldier what he had done, Bales left again to murder 12 more in another village just down the road. Of the 16 people he killed, four were men, four were women, and eight were children. The youngest was 2.

A few hours later, the world awoke to what came to be known as the Kandahar massacre, the deadliest atrocity committed by an American soldier since the My Lai massacre in 1968, when Lieutenant William Calley's platoon slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. As with that horrific chapter in our history, Bales's rampage occurred late in a long and ultimately fruitless campaign, raising uncomfortable questions about the wisdom of the war and its effect on the soldiers we ask to fight it.

The story of the Kandahar massacre has been told in part by the Army's prosecutors; by the press; by Bales's comrades, commanders, and defense counsel; and by the Afghan survivors, some of whom tell a more complicated tale than the one that emerged at Bales's court-martial. But it has never been told in full, because it has never been told by the man who perpetrated it.

“It's difficult to talk about,” Bales acknowledged in the first of many conversations we shared over a period of months, Bales speaking from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, me from my office at One World Trade Center, high above the ghost pools where the twin towers used to be, the very spot where this American tragedy began. “But I want to tell you the story.”

Robert Bales didn't join the Army until he was 28, a direct response to September 11. “It wasn't like he wanted to fight,” says his brother-in-law Eric Tandberg. “It was just: That's what Americans do. You go, you get in line with everybody else, and you say, We're here to make sure this doesn't happen again. That's Bob.”

The youngest of five boys, Bales grew up in Norwood, Ohio, a modest suburb of Cincinnati. He was an outgoing, friendly boy, a jock who also liked to dance, a leader on the football team who lost his starting spot his junior year when a talented freshman arrived. That kid was Marc Edwards, later a Notre Dame standout and nine-year NFL journeyman who became one of Bales's closest friends. “There was just an instant respect there, on my part,” Edwards says, recalling how Bales accepted his high school demotion for the greater good of the team.

In his early twenties, after a few years of college but no degree, Bales got his stockbroker license. He started out in Ohio, then moved to South Florida. He thrived for a few years, trading stocks in small community banks, but he lost it all—his clients' money, his family's, his own—when a West Virginia bank went under. One investor sued Bales and his firm and won an arbitration judgment of $1.4 million but never managed to collect. (Bales had no money to pay, and eventually the investor and his lawyer gave up.)

By the time of the September 11 attacks, Bales was demoralized and adrift. Enlisting felt like something he should do, yes, but the Army was also a paycheck and a lifeline. “He said, ‘I gotta make something right,’ ” recalls Edwards. “Joining the military and fighting for our country was his way of vindicating himself, to a certain degree.”

Bales got stationed near Tacoma, Washington, and became a gung-ho infantryman. He was eager for deployment, focused and intense, a natural soldier whose amiable aggression served him well as he adjusted to Army life but sometimes manifested in darker ways, especially when fueled by alcohol. In July of 2002, at the end of a long night of partying at a Tacoma casino, he was arrested for assaulting a security guard.

Just over a year later, Bales met the green-eyed woman who would become his wife, Kari Primeau. “I was at a bar seeing a friend's band, and Bob happened to be there,” Kari told me. They danced and flirted all night, but Bales warned her he was shipping out to Iraq in a month. “I'm like, ‘Oh, my God, run!’ ” Kari recalled, laughing. “You want somebody who's gonna be around. But we had a spark.”

The man Kari remembers from that time was pure enthusiasm, full of excitement, eager to tell her every little thing he was learning about war and how to wage it. But that all changed after Bales deployed to Iraq. His relationship with Kari would eventually grow serious in spite of the distance, but he would never again speak to her—or anyone else—about combat with such naïveté.

In the early spring of 2012, the dawn of the fighting season in Afghanistan, the Panjwai district of Kandahar, the spiritual seat of the Taliban, was one of the most hostile places on the planet. Insurgents were everywhere but almost impossible to distinguish from the destitute grape and poppy farmers who populated the villages dotting the relentlessly brown landscape. But making this distinction was precisely what the soldiers stationed at VSP Belambai—a dozen Green Berets supported by two infantry squads led by Bales—were supposed to do.

The base, a cluster of buildings surrounded by blast barriers and concertina wire, was located about 25 miles southwest of the city of Kandahar and extremely close to the villages it was set up to stabilize. The village of Alikozai was about 600 yards to the north; a little less than a mile or so to the south, the village of Naja Bien. Each settlement is little more than a collection of walled compounds that contain a few dozen mud-and-brick homes with no electricity or plumbing.

Bales had aged plenty over the nine years since he first landed in Iraq. Now 38, his hair thinning and his 210-pound body thickening in the middle, he had spent three and a half years in combat—three tours in Iraq and now this one in Afghanistan. He had risen to the rank of staff sergeant, with 19 men under his supervision. Although he remained a loyal and committed soldier, he was also preoccupied with a growing belief that his men were insufficiently prepared, that his Special Forces superiors were too passive toward the enemy, and that he was not being granted the respect he'd earned.

On March 10, after spending all day hacking that tree apart, Bales was posted to guard duty from 8 to 9 P.M. with a young private named Michael Cerciello. Bales told Cerciello that he was anxious about a promotion he was up for. He deserved it, Bales said—he knew he deserved it—but he'd already been passed over once for the bump to sergeant first class and worried it could happen again.

Before long, Bales thought he saw lights coming from Naja Bien and Alikozai. “Everything is pitch-black,” Bales recalls. “Think about a rural farming area of the United States—that's exactly what we're talking about here, and all of a sudden you see lights from the north and the south.” Bales believed these were insurgents sending signals, possibly about a battle plan, possibly an imminent one. A few weeks earlier, a Navy Seal unit had spotted fighters taking refuge in Alikozai; other soldiers had seized weapons and matériel from homes in Naja Bien. Bales says he reported his suspicions to the guards on the next shift (the Army disputes this) but that no one took them seriously.

After his shift ended, Bales joined his friends and squad leaders, Staff Sergeant David Godwin and Sergeant Jason McLaughlin, in McLaughlin's room, where the three of them mixed Diet Coke with Jack Daniel's from a Dasani water bottle. (Alcohol was prohibited on base.) Bales says he had six or seven drinks over the next couple of hours while he and the others watched Man on Fire, the Denzel Washington revenge fantasy about an ex-military bodyguard who goes on a murderous rampage after the girl he has been hired to protect is kidnapped and presumed dead. As Bales drank, his mood darkened. According to the Army's investigation, he talked again about the promotion he feared he wouldn't get, about the anger he still felt over Asbury's leg getting blown off, and about the leadership of the Green Berets, whom he believed were not responding with enough force to the increasingly brazen attacks of the insurgents. And he complained bitterly about his marriage. He and Kari, who by now had two small children, were in serious financial trouble and fighting constantly. Bales's salary—about $64,000—wasn't covering the bills, and they had stopped making payments on their house when they realized it was worth $100,000 less than they owed the bank.

Just before midnight, Bales went back to his room and swallowed a handful of over-the-counter sleeping pills. He was desperate for rest. “You gotta understand, man, I probably hadn't slept since Wednesday. I just wanted to sleep that night.” But he couldn't. “I just kept thinking about those guys that were out there, moving around at night, doing something. They're getting closer to the base, closing in on our position, trying to kill us.”

He decided to take his concerns to Clayton Blackshear, the Green Beret sergeant in charge of liaising with the infantry. Blackshear's room was dark and he was half asleep when Bales walked in, his face visible in the light that came through the crack in the door. Bales had always respected the chain of command, but he felt comfortable with Blackshear, so he decided to just lay it all out: The Special Forces guys were sloppy on the battlefield, they were passive, they didn't take the fight to the enemy, which is why the insurgents had the confidence to pull off the attack that had taken Asbury's leg. The Taliban is out there right fucking now, sending signals through the darkness, saying fuck you, and we're just sitting back doing nothing.

One of Blackshear's jobs was to run point when the men were out patrolling on foot. Now Bales asked Blackshear to let him take that role, a job he'd done often in Iraq. Who cares if I die? Bales said, according to testimony Blackshear later provided to Army investigators. My life isn't worth as much as yours. It doesn't matter if I step on an IED. I'm 38, I've lived a life, and if I get blown up, it's so much less tragic than some 21-year-old kid with all that promise ahead of him.

Blackshear tried to listen, but he just wanted to go back to bed. He told Bales that everyone had a job to do, that the men who got concussed on Monday meant the Green Berets were short-staffed and unable to counterattack until their ranks were replenished. “He kinda blew me off and told me to mind my own business,” Bales told me.

Bales returned to his room. Again he tried to sleep; again he failed. His blood coursed with booze, sleeping pills, and something else, too: steroids. About three weeks earlier, he had started using stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that he took because, as he told other soldiers, he wanted to “get jacked.” His mind clanged with the ravages of war—the specific threat outside and the net effect of the past ten years—and anxiety over his stalled career and troubled marriage. As he lay in bed, he was unable to shake the thought that something very bad was about to happen. “I'm like, I gotta go see what it is, man. I can't not do anything, have it come out wrong. Have somebody else get killed or have somebody else get blown up. Knowing this is out there going on, and doing nothing. How can you do nothing? How many times have I done nothing?”

By the time Bales's combat career began, he already had a reputation as a preparation-obsessed soldier. But still, he was shocked by the visceral anarchy of war.

“The first time you engage, I hate to say it, but you kind of spray [bullets] everywhere because you're scared, you're hyped up, it's for real,” Bales says, recalling the first significant battle of his first tour, a firefight in Mosul. “Later on, that goes away. You start to control your breathing, start to calm down. You know what you're looking at and what's going on. You've been there. You've done it. But your first firefight is a pretty big deal.”

The ensuing 12 months were “highly kinetic,” to use the Army's stoic and understated language, with frequent enemy engagement. Bales sometimes drove the Stryker (the eight-wheeled armored vehicle that can carry up to 10 or 11 men) but mostly served as a gun-team leader on combat patrol, pounding on doors, raiding houses. The action followed him right up to the end of the tour: “We actually got shot at in Mosul on the airfield, as we were boarding the plane [to come home].”

Kari picked him up at the airport, and they went straight to a Seahawks game. Five months later, they were married. But even though Bales was home now, and safe, he barely scaled back his intensity. Powered by a half-dozen sugar-free Red Bulls a day, he worked life-consuming hours, rising at 4:30 A.M. to beat the traffic and sometimes not returning home until 9 or 10 at night. He knew he'd be deploying again and was focused on making sure his men were prepared.

He was also showing signs of paranoia, though Kari didn't fully perceive it yet. She had a habit of waking up from nightmares, fearful that someone was in the house. When this happened, Bales would get out of bed and perform a full patrol of the home—clearing every room, checking every closet—then go outside and lap the perimeter. Kari thought nothing of it, at least not then: “I just thought, ‘Oh, that's just part of loving a soldier. He's taking care of his family.’ ”

Bales's boozing was another thing that, at first, didn't strike Kari as a reaction to his job. Though he got an open-container citation in 2005 and rolled his Mustang after a night out with the boys a few years later, his drinking often seemed fun and social, a hardworking soldier cutting loose. Other times it was a more brooding act.

“He would go out and sit on the deck and have a cigar, because that was something they did in Iraq,” Kari says. “He'd listen to his music—Metallica when he was feeling dark—and you knew that he was dealing with all that he had seen. I'd go out there sometimes, but he liked to be alone. You could just tell that he was dealing with things that were...dark things. He didn't really open up a whole lot about those things.”

Bales got out of bed and dressed. He put on a green T-shirt; camo pants, boots, and gloves; and a combat helmet equipped with night-vision goggles. He loaded up with his Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter pistol and his M4 rifle. He wore no body armor. He left the base through the one and only exit, on the south side. “We had Afghans [Afghan National Army soldiers] at the gate, but to be quite honest, they were asleep,” Bales recalls. He turned north. He knew precisely where he was going: to Alikozai, where those Seals had seen insurgents enter the homes of two village elders, Sayed Jan and Mohamed Naim.

After about 20 minutes on foot, Bales reached Sayed Jan's home and slipped through the open gate into a courtyard, his path illuminated by the light affixed to the barrel of his rifle. Sayed Jan was not home that night, but others were, including his wife, two of his grandchildren, and an adult cousin named Khudai Dad, a field laborer who had a wife and seven small children of his own. In all, 12 people slept inside.

Bales insists he was looking for military-age men, but the first person he encountered after entering the house was Sayed Jan's wife, Na'ikmarga, an old woman who had been sleeping near her two grandchildren. Bales herded the woman and the kids, now awake, into an adjacent room, screaming at them to drop to the floor and stay put. When Na'ikmarga struggled with him, he threw her to the ground and stomped on her. “If someone's engaging with you while you're clearing a room and they're a non-threat, you're gonna push them down to the floor, which is what I did,” Bales says.

He moved into the next room, which allowed the woman and the children to make a break for the adjacent compound, a two-family home owned by Mohamed Naim. Bales began to follow them, but on his way out of the house, he stuck his head into another room, where a man was sleeping. This was Khudai Dad, the farmhand. Bales shot him several times at close range, killing him instantly.

Bales followed the screams of the fleeing children across a narrow dirt road, toward the two-family compound. A dog leapt at him, and in an instant Bales killed the dog. “You have to understand, these people are starving, in poverty; the only reason they keep dogs is because they're Taliban,” he says. “This isn't the United States of America. Fido isn't a family pet. Fido's there to warn that someone's coming.”

Hearing the commotion, a man named Nazir Mohamed encountered Bales, who began to beat him, demanding information about insurgents and homemade explosives. “Where are the Talib? Where are the HMEs?” Others were waking now, and the man's wife, Mariam, implored Bales to stop pummeling her husband, while one of the couple's daughters, 3-year-old Gulalai, began to cry hysterically.

“At this point... This is tough, man, this is really tough,” Bales tells me. Through the phone, his voice sounds ragged. He doesn't quite choke up, but long silences separate his sentences. “The kid comes running out, screaming, from almost the same [direction] where the dog came from. I shot the kid.” He pauses. “Um.” Pauses again. “It was a quick reaction. You know, to be honest, you know—I hate it. I hate it. Every day, I think about it all the time.” Pause. “At this point, I just kind of turned and killed the man [Nazir Mohamed]. And pretty much after that it was autopilot.”

Bales made his way to the side of the compound where Mohamed Naim and his family lived. Ahead of him, a terrorized group of women and children moved through the darkness, trying to stay ahead of Bales, pursued by the relentless beam of his rifle light. Finally the group reached the room of Naim, an elderly man whose blood-pressure medication had allowed him to sleep through the attack. The women and children woke him up now, screaming, “The American is shooting people!” Naim told his family to hide while he investigated.

But the instant he stepped out of the room and into the corridor, Bales shot him in the face and neck. Then Bales stepped across the threshold and looked into the room, where by now nearly 30 women and children were desperately trying to hide from him. He recognized the face of Na'ikmarga, the old woman who had struggled with him before running, and shot her in the head, killing her. Then, he says, he felt something “switch” inside him. He sprayed a fusillade of bullets, wounding four: Rafiullah, a teenage boy of 13 or 14, who was shot in both thighs; Parmina, a slightly older teenage girl, shot in the chest and groin; Sadiquallah, a boy of about 10, who took a bullet through the ear and into his skull; and Zardana, a 7-year-old girl, who was shot in the back of the head.

“I was so angry at these guys [the men who owned the homes] for putting their families in harm's way like that,” Bales says, his voice tightening with a kind of agitated despair. “You wouldn't make HMEs in your house. You wouldn't have terrorists running to your house, bleeding. You wouldn't have people run to your house for aid, where you have your wife and children sleeping. You just wouldn't do it. To me, that's hard. That's really, really hard to comprehend.… So I blamed them, but I took it out on [the women and children]. I was just raging.”

Bales turned, left the house, and started back to the base. It was about 1:40 A.M., less than 30 minutes after his rampage had begun. He had killed four and wounded six. He was low on ammunition, but he was far from finished.

The most significant wounds that Bales would suffer at war were psychic ones. Like most soldiers, though, he had no way of knowing the damage at the time.

Indeed, the biggest and bloodiest conflict of Bales's career was most scarring because of what happened after it was won. In January of 2007, the Battle of Zarqa pitted coalition troops against an army of 600 Shiite fanatics called Jund As-Samaa, or “Soldiers of Heaven.” The two-day firefight killed at least 250 enemy fighters, and when it was over, the U.S. soldiers worked to save the lives of the surrendered, including women and children.

Later, in an interview with the Northwest Guardian, a newspaper published by the Army, Bales said: “I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day, for the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants, and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us.” And then he added something that eerily foreshadowed what he told me about the men in Alikozai: “I think that's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm's way like that.”

For all of Bales's pride, the episode haunted him. “There was this one thing he talked about a lot,” Kari recalls. “He saw this woman, her baby was dead in her arms, and she had a blanket [over the body] because it was cold that morning. A man who was injured came by and, seeing that the baby was dead, took the blanket from her so he could be warm.”

The 15-month tour wouldn't get any easier. Bales spent the last three months of it in Dora, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood of Baghdad. “I saw some things in Dora I just wish I never saw,” Bales says now. He remembers one deep-buried IED that blew up a vehicle from Alpha Company, killing a couple of the soldiers inside. “It was pretty graphic, man. The IED ripped through the bottom of the truck. The insides [of the soldiers] were just plastered up against the sides, you know.…” Bales displayed at least as much emotion during this moment as at any other time in the seven hours of conversation we shared—including when talking about the children he massacred. “It was bad, man. It was just as bad as it gets.”

By the time that tour ended in September of 2007, Bales was 34 years old and thinking about leaving the Army. But then he scored a win he'd eventually regret: He got promoted to staff sergeant and, around the same time, handpicked to go to sniper school, a rare honor he couldn't turn down. “I was gonna get out, and I didn't,” he says. “I really wish I had, but I didn't.”

Shortly before 2 A.M., Bales walked back through the gate of VSP Belambai, saying “Sanga yee?”—Pashto for “How are you?”—to the Afghan National Army guard, now a different one, who was awake. The guard trained his weapon on Bales and told him to stop—he was surprised to see an American outside the wire, by himself—but Bales ignored him and kept walking.

A few minutes later, Bales entered the room of Sergeant McLaughlin, one of the two soldiers he'd been drinking with earlier. “I told him, ‘Yo, man, I just killed some military-aged males in Alikozai, and I'm gonna go to Naja Bien and finish it. Take care of my wife and kids.’ ” (The only male Bales killed in Alikozai who was even close to military age was Nazir Mohamed.)

McLaughlin didn't believe Bales, thinking he must be sleepwalking. Bales stuck the barrel of his M4 under his nose and said, “Smell my weapon.” McLaughlin was sleepy, irritated, and unconvinced. He snapped at Bales to take care of his own kids. Bales kept insisting that he promise to look after his family, and finally McLaughlin relented, just so he could go back to sleep.

“I don't think I expected to come back,” Bales says now. “Why else would I tell him to take care of my wife and kids? I grabbed a grenade launcher, a grenade belt, a couple extra magazines, and I rolled back out.”

It wasn’t until after his third tour, a relatively quiet stint in a comparatively peaceful Iraq, that Bales finally admitted he needed help. The drinking, the paranoia, and the sleeping problems (three hours a night was not unusual) were all getting worse, and now there were some new problems: terrible headaches and an increasingly explosive temper. In the summer of 2010, he went to an Army doctor about the headaches. The doctor diagnosed Bales with mild traumatic brain injury (almost certainly from repeated exposure to IEDs, but possibly going all the way back to his high-school-football days) and also found clear symptoms of PTSD. Bales, like many soldiers, had always believed PTSD was, as he told me, “an excuse to be a coward,” a cop-out for weak men who lacked the stomach and heart for the real work of war. But he agreed to meet with a therapist, mainly because he wanted to ensure treatment for his headaches. That didn't last. “After a few sessions, I thought it wasn't helping, because he just kept telling me my anger was a mask for another emotion,” Bales wrote in a letter to an Army judge this past February. “What emotion! The only thing I felt was weak, talking about my emotions. Where I am from, men don't talk like that. I told the PTSD doctor I was doing better, and he let me stop coming.”

None of this stopped the Army from redeploying him to Afghanistan a year and a half later. Bales and his platoon arrived at VSP Belambai on December 14, 2011. The mission was diffcult and tense, but he loved working with the Special Forces. To Bales, they were smart, prepared, aggressive, and perhaps most important to his ego, respectful of the regular infantrymen who supported them.

That all changed in mid-January, when the original detachment of Green Berets shipped out and was replaced by another one. Almost immediately, Bales took a dislike to this second group. In an e-mail to Kari, he wrote that “the old guys were part of the team the new guys think they are the shit,” adding that they “treat us like bitches.” In mid-February, Bales started taking those steroids, which may have shortened his fuse even further. Around this same time, he punched and kneed an Afghan truck driver who'd grazed him with a box while unloading a truck—an incident that fed a growing perception among the soldiers on base that Bales was becoming increasingly erratic.

As winter turned to early spring, the enemy grew more active. About a week after the Navy Seals chased insurgents into Alikozai, American soldiers discovered a 150-pound IED buried in Naja Bien and parts nearby that could be used for explosive devices. Five days after that, on February 29, they seized an Enfield rifle, a Thuraya satellite phone, two motorcycle batteries suspected of being used to power IEDs, and 30 pounds of hash. And finally, on March 1, four days before Asbury lost his leg, Bales and his men were ambushed by insurgents. When they asked their Special Forces commander for air support—a Hellfire missile—they were denied for fear of collateral damage, a decision that enraged Bales.

“We should have been dead, man—we got lucky,” Bales says. “We had the opportunity to kill the enemy, and due to civilian considerations, the commander refused to drop [the Hellfire].… I couldn't understand why you could have an enemy pinned and you wouldn't engage them as a target. In my mind, by allowing the enemy to survive that, you allow them to become more brazen. We had signal intelligence where we had them laughing and cheering over their communications about engaging us and getting away. I mean, these are things that are psychologically defeating.”

Bales left the base again, walking right past the Afghan guard, who questioned him but did not stop him.

This time Bales headed south, to Naja Bien, where the rifle and satellite phone had been found. He first went to the house of a man named Mohamed Dawud. When Bales walked in, he found his entire family asleep in one room. He dragged Dawud out of bed, yelling “Talib! Talib!,” and pulled him into the courtyard, where Dawud pleaded, “No Talib! No Talib!” Bales then shot Dawud in the head while Masuma, his wife, watched from a few feet away.

Bales went back into the house. Masuma and her six children were in a state of hysterical shock, shrieking at the half-awake nightmare they must have been praying wasn't real. Bales then grabbed Masuma by the hair and, according to the Army's official account, shoved his nine-millimeter pistol into the mouth of her infant child while screaming, “Where are the Talib!” (Bales denies that he put the gun in the baby's mouth.) But he did not shoot.

Instead, he left Dawud's house and proceeded to the home of Mohamed Wazir, 500 yards to the west—near the spot where the Americans had discovered the 150-pound bomb. Wazir was not there, but 11 members of his family slept inside. His brother and sister-in-law were in one room. In another, his wife, his mother, six of his seven children, and his 13-year-old nephew. Bales walked through the door and into the courtyard, where he again encountered a dog. He shot it.

He then entered the room where the family had been sleeping on carpets, huddled together for warmth. Awakened by the gunfire, a boy named Issa swung a shovel at Bales, hitting him in the back. Bales easily overpowered the boy, flipping him over his head into the center of the room. A kerosene lantern on the floor provided some dim light. As Bales moved through the room, he kicked and stomped on various members of the family, beating one so severely that, according to prosecutors, he “left hair and skin stuck to the wall.” Bales then set his M4 on burst and murdered all eight people in the room.

Bales stepped into an adjacent room, where he grabbed Wazir's brother and sister-in-law and pulled the couple into the room where their dead relatives lay. He forced them to the bloody floor and emptied the rest of his magazine into them. According to the Army, Bales then poured kerosene from the lantern on top of the bodies and set the room on fire. (Bales insists he did not do this and believes the lantern was knocked over in the melee.)

At this point, Bales says, he was still looking for weapons caches and homemade explosives, none of which he found at any of the homes he visited that night. As he made his way through the house, he encountered one more soul: Shah Tarina, the elderly mother of Mohamed Wazir. Bales's rifle was out of ammo, so he shot the old woman in the chest and head with his pistol. “She was not dead,” reads the Army's account, so Bales “crushed her skull with his boot, stomping on her with so much force that her face and head were mutilated, leaving her blood splattered on the walls of her son's home.” Bales then picked up her body, carried her into the other room, and laid her down with her family. The blankets and sheets were ablaze, the room bright with fire.

“Now I think it hit me,” Bales tells me, his voice slow, deliberate, and barely audible. “I think there's a point that, you know, when it hits you, what you did. This is it. Everything you ever worked for, everything you ever loved, is now, in a matter of hours, destroyed. So I sat down in the room. Put the gun in my mouth.” Long pause. “I just couldn't do it, man. It came down to thinking about my kids. I, uh, couldn't do it. Sat there. I don't know how long it was. I got up. I walked outside. All night I was in a T-shirt and just a pair of army pants, so now I'm just freezing. Before, I wasn't really cold at all, now I'm freezing. They used blankets to cover doors, so I cut a blanket off a door and used it to cover up. I remember being disoriented when I came out. But at this point, they're shooting up flares from the VSP. That was how I knew where I was. The flares.”

The flares were mortar rounds, fired by soldiers from the roof of the base to illuminate the sky. An hour earlier, after the Afghan guard saw Bales leave, the news had been relayed to the Americans. The search for SSG Bales was under way.

Meanwhile, in Alikozai, the villagers sought help for the wounded. One of Mohamed Naim's adult sons, Faizullah, borrowed a car and delivered the five bloodied survivors to FOB Zangabad, a larger U.S. military outpost located roughly a mile from Belambai. Their conditions varied widely. Mohamed Naim, the patriarch, had gunshot wounds to his neck and cheek and was crying out to Allah. Sadiquallah, the 10-year-old boy, had a bullet in the back of his skull. Rafiullah, the teenage boy, had bullets in both thighs. Worst off was Zardana, the 7-year-old girl, who had severe head wounds and was mostly unresponsive. As for the fifth victim, Mohamed Naim's teenage daughter, Parmina, the doctors were unable to determine the extent of her injuries, because she would not allow herself to be examined by a male doctor, and no female medics were on duty. A female soldier examined her above the waist and discovered a gunshot wound in her chest, which the medics treated with a chest seal. It would be hours, after the victims were evacuated to the larger American hospital at Kandahar Airfield, before a female medic would fully examine Parmina and discover additional gunshot wounds to the girl's lower body. All five of the wounded would survive.

Back at the base, the search for Bales continued. The commanding officer of the Green Berets, Captain Daniel Fields, ordered a rescue team to begin scouring the area around the base. He also dispatched a device called the Persistent Ground Surveillance System, a high-tech air balloon with a thermal camera attached to it. At about 4:30 A.M., the camera picked up Bales walking north toward the VSP, dropping to the ground as the flares brightened the sky, apparently in an attempt to avoid detection. At 4:47 A.M., Bales approached the gate, walking with what the Army's lead prosecutor would later describe as “the methodical, confident gait of a man who's accomplished his mission.” His squad leaders, McLaughlin and Godwin, pointed their weapons at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Bales said, then accused McLaughlin of “ratting him out.” Godwin and McLaughlin disarmed their platoon sergeant, whose pants and shirt were soaked with blood, ushered him through the gates of the base, and turned him over to the Green Berets.

For the next eight hours or so, according to the Army, Bales vacillated between confessing what he'd done and halfheartedly obstructing the investigation. When Captain Fields asked him, “Where the fuck were you?” Bales said he couldn't tell them because then they'd have to testify against him. When a medic asked if the blood on his clothes was his, Bales said no, but then shrugged when the medic asked whose blood it was.

A bit later, Bales asked the guards to bring him his laptop. When they obliged, Bales snapped the screen off and started stomping on it. Even more damning than his actions was what he said. As he waited for Army investigators to arrive, he offered a series of declarations that included: “I thought I was doing the right thing.… I'm sorry that I let you guys down.… My count is 20 [the number of Afghans he believed he'd killed].… You will thank me come June [the height of the fighting season].… We shouldn't worry about collateral consequences.”

Outside the base, Afghans were flowing in from the surrounding villages. The bodies of the victims were brought there as well, covered in blankets and ferried in the backs of trucks and vans. As the dead were unloaded, the growing crowd erupted—horrified and enraged at the sight of the children's corpses and infuriated all the more by the desecration of the burned bodies.

Bales was whisked out of Afghanistan, angering Afghan president Hamid Karzai and virtually every other citizen of that country who wanted him tried, and perhaps hanged, for his crimes, in Kandahar.* Within days he had retained the media-savvy Seattle defense attorney John Henry Browne, a long-haired six-and-a-half-foot former Vietnam protester who once wore a cutout of Lieutenant Calley over his face at an anti-war demonstration in the late '60s. His point: We can blame Calley for what he did at My Lai—and we should—but not without assigning a share of the blame to our government and ourselves for allowing it to happen.

Browne began to lay the groundwork for a similar defense of Bales, hoping he could spare him the death penalty. “The government is going to want to blame this on an individual rather than blame it on the war,” he said during a press conference. His instinct was to argue that Bales snapped under the pressure of four deployments and was not in his right mind when he committed his crimes.

“Part of PTSD is dissociation,” says Charles Golden, a neuropsychologist who wrote a report on Bales for the defense. “The person feels like he's watching himself or outside himself—he's not himself. And head trauma—we don't have a lot of research on that—but head trauma may exacerbate that tendency to dissociate when under stress.”

But as Browne confronted the military justice system that would decide Bales's fate, he decided the strategy would fail. “It was a political case,” he told me flatly. “It wasn't a legal case.” He concluded that the six military jurors would not be swayed by any argument that apportioned blame to the Army, nor would they put much stock in a mental-health defense.

Instead he proposed a deal: Take the death penalty off the table and Bales will plead guilty, sparing the government a trial at which sensitive or even damaging details about the Army might emerge. After months of legal wrangling—including a pre-trial hearing in November of 2012 that included graphic testimony offered by survivors via live video feed from Afghanistan—the two sides agreed on terms. In June of 2013, Bales pleaded guilty to a slew of charges, including 16 counts of murder and six of attempted murder.

All that remained for the jury was the question of whether Bales should ever be eligible for parole. Nine Afghan witnesses and family members (all men and boys) were flown from Afghanistan to testify during three days of hearings in August of 2013, and Bales apologized to them directly, saying he would bring their loved ones back “in a heartbeat” if he could. But what he remained unable to do, a full 18 months after that unspeakable night, was answer the biggest question of all: Why?

These days, Bales does his best to stay busy at Leavenworth, where he was sentenced to live out the rest of his life. (The jury took less than 90 minutes to decide he deserved no chance of parole.) He's working on completing his college degree. He's training to work in the prison barbershop, where he'll earn a buck an hour cutting the hair of his fellow inmates, who include Chelsea Manning and the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan. He talks to Kari nearly every day. She and the kids spent a week at a hotel near the prison in August, visiting Bales every morning, afternoon, and evening. “It's kind of rough to have a 5-year-old tied up in a visitation room for nine hours a day, but it was fun,” Bales says, his voice tinged with awareness of how heartbreakingly absurd it is to use the word fun. “We built Jenga houses, played some Pictionary. Nothing like getting on the floor and rolling around with your kid.”

Bales and I had our first conversation in April and the last in late September. Sometimes our calls lasted two hours; other times, 30 minutes or less. We both knew our phone access could get cut off at any time—technically Bales is not allowed to speak to the press. His friends and family often talk about how much he loved to joke, what a goofball he could be, and at one point Bales told me, “That's why I like being in a barbershop, you know? I tell jokes all day.” But there weren't many laughs during our calls.

Why did he agree to speak to me in the first place? His “task and purpose,” as he put it—Bales may have been dishonorably discharged, but he still talks like a soldier—was to say the things he never got to say at his court-martial. One, offer an apology to the men he served alongside: “I want to say to those guys that I hurt—my guys, the patriot brotherhood—I want them to know I'm sorry. I don't want nothing but good things for my soldiers. I hope that in some way they can understand how sorry I am. They're my family, and I love them.” Two, convey his belief that the homes and men he went after were Taliban targets, not random Afghan civilians. “It wasn't like I was looking to go into a school and open up on a bunch of kids,” he says. “That doesn't make it right. I'm not trying to make it right. I can't make it right. The difference between a soldier and a thug is authority, and I didn't have authority. But it's not the same as walking into a movie theater and opening up on a bunch of people in a Batman movie.” And three, explain that although he'd waived his mental-health defense, Bales believes he was very much not in his right mind when he committed the massacre—“Was I in some kind of trance? I'm still baffled by it”—or, more generally, in the years leading up to it. “How many people clear their house with a weapon in the middle of Nice Place, Washington?” he wonders, thinking back on those nights when Kari would stir.

Bales hopes this article will humanize him, and he hopes that one day in the hard-to-imagine future, as the wars fade from memory, someone will deem his sentence to be excessive, take mercy on him, and grant him a measure of clemency. In February he filed a clemency request with the Army, asking for the possibility of parole after 40 years. The request was denied. But he's not giving up. He has just signed on to participate in the Combat Clemency Project, an effort by a legal team from the University of Chicago Law School that will appeal to President Obama to reconsider the sentences of six American soldiers who were convicted of murders committed while they were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Bales's lack of judgment, his incorrect assessment of the situation he was in—it was fueled by his mental illness, his not sleeping, his drinking,” says Mark Heyrman, the law professor in charge of the project. “He was pretty far gone when he left that base. Everything that could make you do something really, really bad was present. It was in some sense a perfect storm.”

Meanwhile he's left to do what lifers just can't avoid: think. He thinks about what he did that night in Afghanistan, and what he failed to do, and what that says about the person he is, regardless of whatever circumstances he tries to convince himself matter. “You wake up in the morning and you're like, ‘Wow, I am an incredibly terrible human being.’ You don't want to think that about yourself. You look for a way out. You look for a way to say, ‘It wasn't that bad. It wasn't that serious.’ You don't want to make it true. But at the end of the day, you know what you did. You know what happened.

“I can't take it back,” he continues. “If I could, I would. Not just because I'm gonna be in prison for the rest of my life. Because of the cost. No conscious person wants war. No conscious person wants to kill people.”

This kind of indirect expression of regret, not quite an apology, was typical of how Bales talked about the Afghan people he murdered, maimed, widowed, and orphaned. When Bales says he regrets what he did, I believe him, and for the reasons he cites. But I still don't quite believe that he thinks of his victims, fully, as human beings. The people to whom Bales apologizes, over and over again—with far more feeling than he exudes when talking about the people he killed—are the fellow soldiers he says he let down. And when he put that gun in his mouth after laying waste to an entire family in Naja Bien, he thought of his own kids, safe in their beds at home in America, but not the Afghan children he had just slaughtered like animals.

I don't know if the spirits of the dead are haunted by Bales, but his living victims certainly are. I managed to reach several survivors and family members through an intermediary, an Afghan journalist named Lela Ahmadzai, who had previously interviewed them for an Internet documentary about the massacre called Silent Night. Rafiullah, the teenage boy who was shot in both thighs, walks with a cane and is worried that his disability will prevent him from finding a wife. “I dream a lot of that night,” Rafiullah says. “How he comes to our house and pushes the door in and enters our home. How he runs after us and screams. And everything in my dream is a mess.” His sister Zardana, the girl who was shot in the back of the head, suffered substantial paralysis on the right side her body and has almost no use of her right arm and right leg.

And Mohamed Wazir—the man who lost 11 members of his own family that night, including his wife, his mother, and six of his seven children—has since moved to the city of Kandahar, where he opened a dress shop with the “condolence payments” the Army distributed to the families: $50,000 for each death and about $10,000 for each wounded. He quickly remarried and has a new baby boy, just 5 months old. (In Afghanistan a man is “nothing,” Wazir says, unless he has a wife and children.) He returns to Naja Bien occasionally to look after the land he owns there, but avoids his house.

“When I enter the house, I feel exactly the same way as that moment when the attack happened and I came home and stood over the dead bodies of my family, absolutely powerless and helpless,” he says. “That feeling hasn't changed at all: powerless and helpless.”

In a twisted sense, I think, Bales felt the same way on that night back in 2012—and that this is the key to the why that remains such an elusive thing to grasp, even for Bales himself.

Many have called Bales “evil,” an adjective that is so reductive it's meaningless. It may be that he carried the potential for evil inside him, but that doesn't explain why he snapped. Bales was a defeated man, a once proud man who was losing control of his finances, his career, his body, his mind. A man who felt marginalized and disdained by the elite soldiers whose respect he coveted. A man who, in the end, no longer felt like much of a man at all. And in those final fitful moments before he left the base for Alikozai, I don't believe he was motivated only by a desire to protect his men, as he claims, or a desire to murder random Afghan civilians, as the Army insists. I believe he wanted to prove his mettle as a soldier, one last time, even if it cost him his life.

Brendan Vaughan is GQ's executive editor.