THE US soldier accused of one of the most horrific atrocities in the 10-year war in Afghanistan was a much-decorated veteran and devoted father who loved messing about on a boat with his wife and two children and took them for holidays, including a Disney cruise to the Bahamas.
Friends, colleagues and neighbours were struggling yesterday to equate the Staff Sergeant Robert Bales they knew with the monster who walked off his base in southern Afghanistan early last Sunday and began a shooting and stabbing spree in two villages that left 16 dead, including nine children. He dragged some of his victims into a room and set fire to them.
The massacre has strained the already fraught relations between the United States and Afghanistan, provoking fears that a hoped-for orderly withdrawal could degenerate into a bloody evacuation.
With Bales on his fourth combat tour in eight years, it has also raised questions about the strain of multiple deployments and whether enough attention is being paid to the psychological effects.
Like many patriotic Americans, Bales, 38, joined the army after the September 11 attacks. He became a sniper in the 3rd Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, based at Fort Lewis-McChord in Washington state.
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Part of the scenic Pacific northwest, it could not be more different from the hot, dusty deserts of Iraq where Bales was deployed three times and received nine medals, three for good conduct.
Captain Chris Alexander, his platoon leader on one of the tours, described him as “one of the best soldiers I ever worked with”.
Others said he had always shown particular concern for civilians. His unit was involved in the battle of Najaf in January 2007, a huge offensive against Shi’ite fighters south of Baghdad in retaliation for the downing of a US helicopter. Some 250 fighters were killed and 80 wounded in two days. Afterwards Bales was one of the soldiers who led the way in providing medical aid to survivors.
His commanding officer in that battle said when he heard Bales had been named as the soldier suspected of killing 16 Afghans, he “nearly fell off my chair and had a good cry”.
Bales was married in 2005 and bought a clapboard house in the pine woods of Lake Tapps, 35 miles south of Seattle, with his wife Karilyn, who works for a public relations company. Their daughter Quincy was born in 2006, followed by a son, Bobby, now 3.
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“He was always really gentle with his kids. He was full of life and seemed like a happy guy for the most part,” said Kassie Holland, a family friend. “I never saw him angry.”
Reporters who descended on the Bales’s home found it locked up and for sale, with boxes piled in the porch. An estate agent said he had been instructed to put the house on the market three days before the massacre as the couple were in negative equity and had fallen behind with their mortgage payments. The asking price was $50,000 less than the $280,000 they had paid.
Karilyn Bales wrote on her blog that she was “sad and disappointed” her husband had been passed over for a promotion that would have sent them to Italy, Germany or Hawaii. “It is very disappointed [sic] after all the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends,” she said.
Local newspapers reported that Bales was then upset at being redeployed and had some history of drinking and violent incidents.
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While still single, he was arrested at a Tacoma hotel in 2002 after a woman accused him of assault. He was sent for 20 hours’ anger management training. Police records show that in 2005 he was arrested for drunken driving. In 2008 he was given a 12-month suspended sentence and a $250 fine after crashing his car and running away from the scene. He later told police he had fallen asleep behind the wheel.
Military officials leaked reports that Bales had been drinking on Sunday before setting out from the base on his deadly mission. “When it all comes out it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues — he just snapped,” an official told The New York Times.
John Henry Browne, his lawyer, disputes this and is expected to argue that the army should never have redeployed him. Bales suffered two serious injuries in Iraq, a head wound that occurred when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb and another that required part of his foot to be removed.
His wife, who wrote a blog about life as an army spouse, suggested a year ago that he was considering leaving the army. Instead, last December he was sent to Afghanistan, one of 92,000 American soldiers to serve a fourth deployment.
With Obama committed to withdrawing US forces by 2014, Bales had expected to be involved in recruitment to the Afghan army rather than combat. But on February 1 he was moved to Camp Belanbay, an outpost in Panjwayi, a former Taliban stronghold near Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.
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His task was to provide security for special forces conducting a “village stabilisation operation”, a pilot programme aimed at teaching villagers how to look after themselves.
What may have pushed Bales over the edge was seeing a friend hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) while they were on patrol. According to Browne, “his [the friend’s] leg was blown off and my client was standing next to him”.
Villagers said they had had no problems with the foreign troops before that but the next day the Americans had summoned elders on the base and refused to believe they did not know who had planted the device.
The American soldiers had “collected people in the area and told them they would harm their children”, said Haji Jan Agha, a district council member for Panjwayi. “They said they would get revenge because of this IED.”
“They said they’d do something to our families and to our children but we weren’t sure what they were talking about,” said Baran Jan, a local farmer.
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Whatever the reason, Bales left the base at 3am and made his way a mile south to Najeeban, a small settlement of mud houses surrounded by wheat fields.
The first house he entered was that of Abdul Samad who had recently moved his family close to the base for safety. Samad was away visiting relatives with his nephew Mohammad Wazir Agha. It was at the settlement that the soldier carried out most of his carnage, shooting and stabbing 11 people.
The victims included Samad’s wife and eight of Agha’s nine children — four daughters between the ages of two and six and four sons between eight and 12. None of them went to school because the nearest establishment was too far away. The older children worked on a farm.
Anar Gul, an elderly neighbour, said she had heard an explosion, screaming and shooting as the soldier broke down the door of Samad’s house and chased his wife and other women from room to room before shooting them. Two of the women and some of the children had been stabbed, Gul and other villagers said, and blankets had been placed over them and set alight.
After leaving that house, Bales circled back north around the base to the village of Alkozai, where he forced his way into the home of Haji Said Jan, 45, a labourer who had fled to Kandahar during the years of fighting but had brought his family back because he could not afford to live in the city. Jan was in Kandahar; his wife, nephew, grandson and brother were all killed.
In the same village the soldier entered another home and shot dead Muhammad Daoud, 55, a farmer. His wife and children escaped to a neighbour’s house.
Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said the sergeant had gone back to the base “and basically turned himself in”.
When Samad returned home to find his family dead, he thought the Taliban had returned. When he discovered the killer was one of the Americans he had thought were protecting them he was outraged.
Trust between the US and Afghan governments was already close to breakdown. In January a video had emerged of four US marines urinating on dead Afghans. Then last month came the discovery that Korans had been burnt among rubbish on a Nato air base.
A week of violent protests culminated in two US soldiers being shot in the interior ministry in Kabul. Western advisers have been pulled out of all Afghan government ministries. At least 10 Americans have also been killed this year by Afghan security forces they have trained or by militants wearing military or police uniforms.
The distrust on both sides has inhibited talks on the form and scale of America’s presence in Afghanistan after the planned withdrawal in 2014.
President Hamid Karzai, who has complained bitterly about night raids carried out by US special forces in which civilians have been killed, met relatives from Panjwayi on Thursday and called on the Americans to “get out of our villages”.
Military commanders have advised waiting to see what happens in the summer fighting season before any decision on the timetable for pulling out the 68,000 US troops who will remain by September. The British force will be down to 9,000 by the end of the year.
At a joint press conference with David Cameron at the White House, President Barack Obama said the withdrawal would be discussed at a Nato summit in Chicago but he saw no need to alter plans that call for Nato forces to shift to an advisory role next year, followed by a full Afghan takeover in 2014.
“We’re going to complete this mission and we’re going to do it responsibly,” he insisted.
However, some see the events of the past week as a “game-changer” that will force Obama to accelerate the withdrawal. “It’s all spinning badly out of control,” said Matthew Hoh, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a former State Department adviser in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Far form an orderly withdrawal leaving a stable government, we’re now down to how you get troops out without it looking like an evacuation.”
US military commanders warn that to speed up the withdrawal now could jeopardise what progress has been achieved.
“I’d hate for us to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” said Brigadier-General John Nicholson, the former head of the Pentagon’s Afghanistan-Pakistan cell, who helped to write the withdrawal plan. “We’re down to talking about keeping on some tens of thousands of troops for a period of months in a 13-year war.”
Bales himself will have plenty of time to think about it all alone in a cell in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. US military officials said that if convicted he could face the death penalty.
Additional reporting: Miles Amoore