U.S. Identifies Army Sergeant in Killing of 16 in Afghanistan
By JAMES DAO
Published: March 16, 2012
The military on Friday identified the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers earlier this week as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two who had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments and had, his lawyer said, an exemplary military record.
A soldier identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, left, appeared in this photo and in an article in High Desert Warrior, a military Web site, in 2011. The article and photo have been removed.
The release of Sergeant Bales’s name, first reported by Fox News, ended an extraordinary six-day blackout of public information about him from the Pentagon, which said it had withheld his identity so long because of concerns about his and his family’s security.
An official said on Friday that Sergeant Bales was being transferred from Kuwait to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., home of the Army’s maximum security prison. His wife and children were moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Wash., east of Tacoma, onto Joint Base Lewis-McChord, his home base, earlier this week.
Military officials say Sergeant Bales, who has yet to be formally charged, left his small combat outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province early in the morning last Sunday, walked into two nearby villages and there shot or stabbed 16 people, 9 of them children.
Little more than the outlines of Sergeant Bales’s life are publicly known. His family lived in Lake Tapps, a community about 20 miles northeast of his Army post. NBC reported that he was from Ohio, and he may have lived there until he joined the Army at 27. Sergeant Bales’s Seattle-based lawyer, John Henry Browne, said several members of the sergeant’s family moved to Washington since he was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Mr. Browne said he joined the Army right after the attacks of 9/11 and then spent almost all of his Army career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he was part of the Third Stryker Brigade in the Second Infantry Division, named after the eight-wheeled armored Stryker vehicles.
The killings have severely undermined longstanding NATO efforts to win support from villages in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and have shaken relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who this week told Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, who was on a visit to Afghanistan, that he wanted American forces out of Afghan villages by next year.
Pentagon officials, who have been scouring the sergeant’s military and health records for clues, have said little about what they think motivated the killings. But one senior government official said Thursday that Sergeant Bales had been drinking alcohol before the killings and that he might have had marital problems.
“When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues — he just snapped,” said the official, who had been briefed on the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the sergeant has not yet been charged.
But Mr. Browne has disputed those assertions, telling reporters on Thursday that the sergeant’s marriage was sound and questioning reports about drinking. On the day before the shootings, he said, the sergeant had seen a fellow soldier lose his leg from a buried mine.
Mr. Browne, who said he had had only limited conversations with Sergeant Bales because he was worried that the phone calls were being monitored, added that Sergeant Bales had thought he could avoid this deployment. “He was told that he was not going to be redeployed,” Mr. Browne said. “The family was counting on him not being redeployed. And so he and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.”
He added, “I think that it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back.”
Over the course of the decade, Sergeant Bales was deployed three times to Iraq, including for 15 months between June 2006 and September 2007, during the height of the civil war and at the beginning of what became known as the surge. During that tour, his battalion, the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment, was involved in a major battle in the city of Najaf while trying to recover a downed Apache helicopter.
On his third tour, in 2010, a Humvee carrying Sergeant Bales flipped over, possibly because of a roadside bomb, Mr. Browne said. Sergeant Bales injured his head and probably sustained a minor traumatic brain injury, a common injury that, in chronic cases, can lead to short-term memory loss and other cognitive problems, as well as a loss of impulse control.
Mr. Browne said the sergeant also lost part of a foot, also apparently from an explosive device. It was not clear whether he might have also sustained another traumatic brain injury in that episode.
Court records show that Sergeant Bales was charged with assault in 2002, but that the charge was dismissed. In 2008, he was charged with a hit-and-run involving a parked car, but that too was dropped, the records indicate.
Though the Army has said nothing about its investigation, investigators have been pouring through Sergeant Bales’s evaluations, health records and computers in search of telltale information. But Mr. Browne said his client’s record was good and that he had been awarded a number of medals.
“He’s never said anything antagonistic about Muslims,” Mr. Browne said. “He’s in general been very mild mannered.”
Joint Base Lewis-McChord has come under intense scrutiny because of a string of problems in recent years. In 2010, rogue soldiers from another Stryker brigade murdered three Afghan civilians during combat episodes staged by the soldiers. Earlier this year, the Army opened investigations into the base’s Madigan Army Medical Center after soldiers complained that diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder were being changed or dismissed.
Some advocates for active duty troops and veterans say the problems demonstrate that the sprawling base, the Army’s largest on the West Coast, with nearly 40,000 soldiers, was not prepared to handle the strain of repeated deployments. Between 2009 and 2010, when Sergeant Bales was on his third deployment to Iraq, about 18,000 soldiers from the post were sent to war zones, and almost all returned at roughly the same time, overwhelming base services, the critics contend.
But on Friday, the general in charge of managing military bases said that the installation was not under an exceptional amount of strain from multiple deployments and was not seeing an unusual number of crimes or mental health issues, at least when compared with other bases nationwide.
“There’s nothing different here than most places,” said Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the commanding general of the United States Army Forces Command. “Again, those things happen. Everybody knows that doesn’t reflect our standards and our values, nor does it reflect the majority of leaders and soldiers who serve here every day as well as overseas.”
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