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“My mind was consumed by war,”
The soldier who committed the worst atrocities of the Afghanistan War acknowledged while asking for a reduced sentence last year that he had lost compassion for Iraqis and Afghans over the course of his four combat deployments with a Joint Base Lewis-McChord Stryker brigade.
“My mind was consumed by war,” the former Staff Sgt. Robert Bales wrote in a letter late last year to the senior Army officer at JBLM.
“I planted war and hate for the better part of 10 years and harvested violence,” he wrote. “After being in prison two years, I understand that what I thought was normal was the farthest thing from being normal.”
Bales, who was sentenced in August 2013 to life in prison for the killings of 16 Afghan civilians, including seven children, failed to persuade Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza to overturn his conviction or modify his sentence. Lanza in March rejected Bales’ clemency bid after considering the weight of evidence in Bales’ court-martial, I Corps spokesman Col. Dave Johnson said Friday.
Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2015/06/06/3827362_robert-bales-makes-bid-for-mercy.html