JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the enigmatic figure at the center of the worst U.S. war crime in recent memory, admitted for the first time on Wednesday deliberately killing 16 Afghan civilians last year, most of them women and children.
He took the oath in a military court, swore to tell the truth, and conceded in crisp “yes sirs” and “no sirs” every major charge against him — that he shot some victims, and shot and burned others, and did so with complete awareness that he was acting on his own, without compunction or mercy or orders by a superior Army officer. The guilty plea removes the possibility of the death penalty in the case.
But the curtain of enigma about the man himself, and his descent into darkness and murder on the night of the killings, remained firmly in place. The millions of Americans who have pondered the mechanisms of atrocity since the attacks in March 2012 were left in the dark.
Even Bales himself, finally pressed by the presiding judge, Col. Jeffery Nance, to explain more deeply what happened, seemed baffled.
“What was your reason for killing them?” Nance finally asked.
Bales, 39, seated at the defense table in his blue service uniform, hands clasped before him — thumbs often nervously twitching — said he had asked himself the same question “a million times.”
“There’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did,” he said.
Prosecutors say Bales slipped away before dawn on March 11, 2012, from his base in Kandahar Province. Armed with a 9 mm pistol and an M-4 rifle equipped with a grenade launcher, he attacked a village of mud-walled compounds called Alkozai, then returned and woke up a fellow soldier to tell him about it. The soldier didn’t believe Bales and went back to sleep. Bales then left to attack a second village known as Najiban.
Relatives of the dead were outraged at the idea that Bales could escape execution when they spoke to The Associated Press in April in Kandahar.
“A prison sentence doesn’t mean anything,” said Said Jan, whose wife and three other relatives were slain. “I know we have no power now. But I will become stronger, and if he does not hang, I will have my revenge.”
The murders had global repercussions. U.S.-Afghan relations shuddered as villages in the area erupted in protest. Critics of America’s decade of conflict in the region since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, seized on the stresses experienced in the war by soldiers like Bales, who was on his fourth overseas deployment in 10 years.
Bales still faces an August sentencing trial to determine whether he will receive life in prison with the possibility of parole, or life without parole.
