{"id":60272,"date":"2015-06-08T10:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T14:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60272"},"modified":"2015-06-08T09:44:13","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T13:44:13","slug":"robert-bales-war-is-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60272","title":{"rendered":"Robert Bales: War is evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/a> reports on a letter written by Robert Bales, that former staff sergeant now serving a life sentence for murdering in cold blood 16 Afghans in the dark of night, then setting his victims on fire. Of course, Bales blames the war for his unconscionable act;<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mind was consumed by war,\u201d Bales wrote to a senior Army officer late last year as he made a plea for clemency. \u201cI planted war and hate for the better part of 10 years and harvested violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

\u201cI still don\u2019t believe the PTSD, [traumatic brain injury], alcohol, steroids, and sleeping pills were the only factors in my actions on 11 March 2012,\u201d he wrote to Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza. \u201cI believe there is much more. I worked hard wanting to be the best combat Soldier in the Army. I was obsessed with studying manuals, watching war documentaries and reading about insurgencies. Later in my Army career, I began to change. I didn\u2019t want to make a bad decision on the ground and [lose] one of my guys. We trained hard and most of the guys understood why we trained hard. \u2026 I had been through fire fights, IEDs \u2026 mass casualty situations, and many other combat situations. So, going into my fourth deployment, I was experienced.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormally that would be a good thing, but now I know it made me paranoid and ineffective.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You know, hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers and leaders went through much more than Bales and they haven’t murdered civilians while those civilians slept. Millions of veterans who have experienced war on varying levels go to work every day and do their jobs and come home at night without starting an incident with police, without going on a shooting rampage in their workplace. Thousands of soldiers are currently deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, many have already experienced multiple deployments, and they’re not murdering children in their beds.<\/p>\n

No, it wasn’t PTSD, but Bales, in contravention of command directives consumed drugs and alcohol while deployed. That, to me, indicates that he wasn’t as good a soldier as everyone wants me to believe. The “experts” blame the drugs, the alcohol, and anti-malarial drugs, but, you know what? A good leader doesn’t take drugs and alcohol when lives depend on him being 100% all of the time. <\/p>\n

Yes, war is evil, but millions of Americans who went to war didn’t let the war make them evil like Bales. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post reports on a letter written by Robert Bales, that former staff sergeant now … Robert Bales: War is evil<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shitbags"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/60273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}