General David H. Petraeus (center) talks with US soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, in eastern Afghanistan. Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Bradley Lail.
The US soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan has been named as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. The 38-year-old soldier and trained sniper, part of 3rd Stryker Brigade and married with two young children, has been flown to a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Bales reportedly entered three houses in two Kandahar villages in the early hours of Sunday 11th March, shooting dead the occupants and attempting to burn their bodies. Nine of the victims were children. The soldier, who may face the death penalty if found guilty of the murders, then apparently returned to his military base and surrendered.
The identification of Bales has provoked a media frenzy, with news outlets scrambling to comb through the details of the father-of-two’s life in an attempt to understand what could have provoked the killing spree. So who is Robert Bales?
Hometown shock. “He was not the star, just a well-regarded young man who seemed to try to do the right thing. That was Robert Bales, ‘our Bobby, friends said,” reported James Dao for The New York Times from Norwood, Ohio, Bales’s hometown, pointing out that friends and former battalion mates were shocked by the news. According to Dao, one of the soldier’s childhood friends said: “That’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.” Bales volunteered for the army in the wake of 9/11 and undertook three tours of duty in Iraq, followed by a fourth in Afghanistan; Dao wrote that military officials have suggested that the difficulties Bales endured during his military career may be relevant. “During his deployments, Sergeant Bales, 38, lost part of a foot and injured his head, saw fellow soldiers badly wounded, picked up the bodies of dead Iraqis, was treated for mild traumatic brain injury and possibly developed post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dao said. Bales also suffered problems in his personal life, reported Dao, including marital issues and financial worries.
Considerable media attention has focused on a blog by Robert Bales’s wife, Karilyn, in which she detailed the stress of military life. She wrote in March 2011 that her husband was disappointed at missing out on a promotion “after all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends”, reported The New York Times.
PTSD? According to Peter Beaumont in The Observer, military officials and Bales’s lawyer have indicated that post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will play a major part in the soldier’s defence. “The killings in Afghanistan have come amid escalating concern over an epidemic of suicides and PTSD among US military veterans of the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Beaumon wrote. “Of particular concern is the increased risk of PTSD in soldiers who are deployed on multiple occasions. PTSD is known to be “dose dependent” – the risk of suffering from it increases after more exposure to its triggers.”
“Court documents show Bales once completed 20 hours of anger management treatment for an assault case that was later dropped,” said CBS News.
Trouble at the base? “The horrific episode also revives charges that Bales’ home base – Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) near Tacoma, Wash. – has unusually serious problems ranging from violent episodes involving soldiers at home and in war zones to failings in the base’s command structure,” wrote Brad Knickerbocker at The Christian Science Monitor. Knickerbocker quoted an Iraq veteran as saying the base had significant leadership problems and high incidences of sex crimes, substance abuse and suicide: “These abuses are not because of a few bad apples, but because of the base’s systematic dehumanization of soldiers and civilians,” alleged the veteran.
Robert Bales’s lawyer, John Henry Browne, said his client had been treated badly by the army over his fourth deployment, reported The Daily Beast: “The Army kept the soldier in a state of limbo, the lawyer said. ‘He wasn’t thrilled about going on another deployment,’ Browne said. ‘He was told he wasn’t going back, and then he was told he was going.’” Browne also said Bales had witnessed a fellow soldier’s leg blown off in an explosion the day before the killings, although this has not been confirmed.
This wasn’t madness. Robert Fisk declared in The Independent that he is heartily sick of media speculation that Bales must have been “deranged” to carry out such a massacre: “Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn’t kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans.” Fisk pointed out that the US commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, issued a statement before Bales’s killing spree urging American troops not to take revenge after six soldiers died in the aftermath of the Koran-burning scandal that inflamed tensions in the country. “The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to ‘take vengeance’ on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc,” Fisk said.