From The Washington Post:
Soldier accused in Afghan shooting spree identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales
Pentagon officials Friday evening identified the soldier who allegedly killed 16 Afghan villagers as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a trained sniper who had served three tours in Iraq and suffered multiple wounds.
Bales, a 38-year-old married father of two who enlisted 11 years ago, was being flown Friday to a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to await possible criminal charges, a U.S. official said. He is accused of leaving his base in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province and committing one of the worst atrocities by U.S. forces during the war in Afghanistan.
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The U.S. soldier accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend had been reluctant to leave on his fourth deployment, his lawyer said Thursday.
U.S. military officials say a 38-year-old Army staff sergeant walked off his base in a remote southern village in Afghanistan on Sunday and fatally shot 16 civilians.
Most of the dead were women and children. The incident has sparked significant backlash in Afghanistan, straining already difficult relations with the United Statesover conduct of the war there.
The suspect’s name had been a closely guarded secret since he allegedly surrendered to authorities after the shootings on Sunday morning. Officials released the name to several news organizations simultaneously, after withholding it for five days.
His attorney, John Henry Browne, has said that Bales did not want to deploy to Afghanistan in December, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his deployments and had a head injury during a deployment in Iraq. Bales also had seen one of his fellow soldiers lose his leg in an explosion on the day he’s accused ofgoing on a rampage, Browne said.
“His leg was blown off, and my client was standing next to him,” Browne told the Associated Press, citing information given to him by the soldier’s family.
Bales lived with his wife and children, ages 3 and 4, in Lake Tapps, Wash., about a half-hour drive east of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma. He was based there for several years. The family was moved onto the base for their protection, officials have said.
The neighborhood where Bales lived includes many military families, according to neighbors. The suspect lived in a two-story beige house with a cedar-shake roof and a small porch out front.
While in Iraq, Bales was part of a long, bloody battle in southern Iraq during 2007 in which 250 enemy fighters were killed and 81 were wounded while members of Bale’s unit suffered no casualties, according to the Army news release. It described the battle as “apocalyptic.”
“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” Bales was quoted as saying. “For the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”
A member of the 3rd (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, based at Lewis-McChord, Bales said of the battle, “the cool part about this was World War II-style. You dug in. Guys were out there digging a fighting position in the ground.”
He also described an intense firefight as his unit tried to secure a downed helicopter: ”It was like a match lit up. It looked like a toy with a candle lit underneath it.”
Government officials, in some news reports, have said Bales may have been drinking the night of the shootings and was agitated by marital problems at home. But Browne disputed that, saying the reports were “very offensive.” The couple had financial problems but nothing severe, he said, adding that they had “a very strong marriage.”
Family members of Bales could not be reached for comment Friday night.
The U.S. soldier accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend had been reluctant to leave on his fourth deployment, his lawyer said Thursday.
U.S. military officials say a 38-year-old Army staff sergeant walked off his base in a remote southern village in Afghanistan on Sunday and fatally shot 16 civilians.
While his background has started to come into clearer focus, the story behind the shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan remains largely a mystery.
U.S. and Afghan officials have said that the suspect left his base alone, shot 16 people in their homes and attempted to burn their bodies before returning to the base and turning himself in.
In the absence of a clear sense of the soldier’s motive, some veterans groups and mental health advocates fear that the image being stitched together from the loose assemblage of facts is of a crazy veteran gone wild.
“The main concern is that we’ll be back where we started with a stigma that all veterans that return are broken in some way,” said Ryan Gallucci, the VFW’s deputy director of national legislative service.
On Friday, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, which is in charge of training and equipping soldiers for war, said the Army has done a “very very good job of sustaining” troops through multiple combat deployments.” He said the decision of whether to send soldiers on multiple deployments are made “on a case-by -case basis.”
“There is not a cookie-cutter solution or rule that says this guy can handle two or three [tours],” he said. “It’s about taking care of soldiers.”
But there is not yet a complete explanation of why an armed soldier would go on such a rampage. Veterans groups and mental health advocates say there are many more questions that need to be answered before any motive can be assigned.
Was he carrying any kind of mental health problem resulting from prior deployments? Did his brain injury, which supposedly occurred during a vehicle crash two years ago, play a role? Was he properly screened for mental health issues before and after his other deployments?
Some fear that the stereotype of veterans as unstable at best and violent at worst will be resurrected. Many veterans spoke out against a headline about the shootings in the New York Daily News this week that read, “Sergeant Psycho.”
Tom Tarantino, the deputy policy director at Iraq and Afghanistan of America, said that without the facts, “you have this wired mindset in the public consciousness and immediately everyone goes to the ‘Sergeant Psycho’ thing. . . . We need to try to make sense of this tragedy, and it’s extremely difficult to do so. And that’s the problem.”
In fact, many veterans advocates have dismissed the simple theories about what set off the killings.
“There are plenty of service members with stress and trauma who are drinking and self-medicating every day to deal with their conditions, and they don’t go out and gun down a bunch of women and children,” said Josh Renschler, the director of a Men of Valor, a service member support group.
He argued that while bouts of rage can be caused by traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder, they alone are not sufficient to explain killing of this magnitude.
“He was given the means and the opportunity to carry out a fantasy of violence that stemmed from somewhere,” he said. “He figured out to get off base, which is no small thing. . . . You have someone with a homicidal ideation — a thought dwelling in their mind that they can envision killing someone — and then add a stressor and a trauma, and that may have set it off.”
The U.S. soldier accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend had been reluctant to leave on his fourth deployment, his lawyer said Thursday.
U.S. military officials say a 38-year-old Army staff sergeant walked off his base in a remote southern village in Afghanistan on Sunday and fatally shot 16 civilians.
Aside from basic questions asked so far, there are deeper, more complex, factors that could have had an effect on the soldier’s behavior. Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist and author who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work with veterans, wondered about the soldier’s relationship with the special operations forces — which can be very standoffish to outsiders — he was attached to at a remote outpost in Afghanistan.
Shay was less concerned with the post-deployment screenings, which he called “a box checking exercise,” than the leaders in the staff sergeant’s unit who were supposed to be looking out for him.
“To me this is a presumptive case of leadership failure,” he said. “Whoever was directly responsible for this soldier did not do his job in the sense of getting to know him.”
The other factor that is too often overlooked in combat is sleep, he said. Service members like to brag about how little they get, and commanders have created a culture, Shay said, where sleep is often viewed as a self-indulgent weakness. But in reality, sleep is vital, especially in stressful situations, and helps the parts of the brain associated with ethics, morality and the ability to understand the relationship with actions and consequences.
But like so much else about Bales, his sleep schedule is unknown.
“What was he thinking?” Shay said. “This is a legitimate question. What was he thinking when he left the base, armed, apparently with the intent of killing people in their sleep?”
Flaherty reported from Tacoma. Staff writers Craig Whitlock, Peter Finn and William Branigin, staff researchers Julie Tate, Lucy Shackleford and Madonna Leibling, and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
