You Sent Me To Kill Or Be Killed

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the enigmatic figure at the center of the worst American 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 . . . Critics of America’s decade of conflict in the region . . . seized on the stresses experienced in the war by soldiers like Sergeant Bales . . .
NY Times
June 5, 2013

It’s Late. Night hangs heavy in Kandahar Province. Scorpions. Wood lice. A
Mantis prays. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales injects his nightly dose of
anabolic steroids, buckles up his gear.

Four tours in ten years. No time to reminisce, no time to dream. He’s careful
to climb down the ladder reserved especially for him. At the bottom is the pit,
Dung Beetles scurry. His head throbs.

You’ve seen your buddies’ shredded bodies baking in the desert sun, babies
dangling dead from barbed wire, a woman blown to clots & bone by the
bomb she’d wrapped around her waist.

The medic’s say PTSD – The lawyers say, booze & drugs. Tonight, Robert
dreams mayhem: Spirits of the brave & lost will cross the devil’s river –
He’s locked & loaded . . .

Night goggles & high octane Wild Turkey 101. My enemies are everywhere:
In their tents, behind their walls, in their gardens & in their beds. They
babble in tongues, sneer & wail.

I need silence to think. My throat chokes on our renegade soup. There’s
nothing to be done. Extermination. I am the champion of justice, the avenger
& the priest. Locked & loaded.

Bless me father for I . . . I am a missile unleashed & proud, a drone in desert
camouflage. I’ve been sent to redeem my country’s honor. I am without
home, without mercy, without guilt.

Pray for me as I kneel in the sand & light my torch. Nothing is left of me. I
am slag. I am heroic. I am disaster. See me for what I am, what I have been
trained to be. I am a machine.

Running on fumes. Nothing matters. The mission is at hand. How many
must die? & why? I am marked. Absurd. Without guile. A bomb. Fused. As
intended. Poison. Catastrophe.

Collateral damage . . . It is. I am . . . What must be known . . . What must be expected.