This podcast series is nothing but an attempt at sympathy to have a mass murder released early. Robert Bales is exactly where he needs to be and should serve the remainder of his sentence.

The podcast itself is great. Retell the story without hearing from Bales and I will listen. I am sympathetic to what our soldiers go through during deployment and service and my heart and prayers to them and their families. Bales is a different story .. I wish you wouldn’t have included his storytelling in the story. He is full of excuses and he had so many options besides what he chose to do that night. He put his fellow soldiers in a very dangerous and unforgivable position as well. I cannot listen to him another minute.

The style is good. It’s cleanly edited with some music that spoon feeds you emotion but doesn’t mess with sound leveling. The presentation of material works like a proper journalistic presentation (pyramid, establish basics, add context, add nuance, describe details and spin off topics). Awesome. Too many unanchored podcasts with full funding these days. But. The podcast perhaps shows a little too much grace to the convict. For the malaria thing…too much for two episodes. I let it slide when someone who stomped an old lady to death said that being dead is lucky compared to him being locked up as consequence. And when him wife said that “this happens” to someone else and not once extended any grace to the families. She meant that they have to visit papa in jail. It’s America, there’s lots of jail for much less. So they lay out that the survivors may have been Taliban affiliates. And they might have. But honestly the way they spoke about pretty much anybody registering pretty much anybody they interact with as a known agent if some kind just means you were unlucky to meet the soldiers twice. Of course some will also be Taliban. Then they really drove home which flight the witnesses came on in hopes someone joins their cause in rage. Let’s not forget this era closed with Trump signing a deal to give the Taliban rule over Afghanistan, no strings attached. Maybe the malaria drug causes psychosis, but most psychosis is acute, and the kind that isn’t has some very noticeable depersonalization. “He did it because we just haven’t been able to do studies to say this causes psychosis!….but definitely not because he chose to take steroids and continuously obsess over honor and being a super soldier. Also…he said he regrets so many things, but all of them were boohoo woe is me. He said himself he was in a mental state before last departure that he hid for expectation it would disqualify deployment. Then abused multiple drugs. But someone it’s not that, it’s this malaria drug. Totally. Let’s give it two episodes.

As an Old Grunt who served 30 years ago, I’m not going to condone the killing of non-combatants, but Bales and everyone else that’s served in the Uniparty’s scam of the GWOT to make themselves rich and gain more power is a victim. When you can’t define a clear end of war objective, enemy or even remotely clarify the ROE’s, disaster and catastrophic loss are what you are going to finish with in the end. Frankly, as this Country disintegrates with a corrupt elite and a military whose leadership is rotten to the core it appears the GWOT is a defeat far worse than Vietnam.

Did I miss something? Bales goes into a house and a kid trying to protect himself from a gun wielding madman hits him in the head with a shovel, and that child’s murder and the subsequent massacre is excused because of that? There is something fundamentally wrong with Bales. Basically the producers, Bales, Bale’s wife, and his supporters think any serviceman who went through combat should be excused for the killing of innocent people. They aren’t saying the quiet part out loud, Afghanistan's lives are not as important as American’s lives.