Model US soldier who buckled under the pressure of war

Robert Bales turned his back on civilian life as a financial adviser in Ohio and signed up for the military after the September 11 attacks on the US.

He was a popular combat veteran, twice injured in Iraq, described by a former platoon leader as "one of the best soldiers I ever worked with" and who prided himself on identifying "the bad guys from non-combatants".

Now, though, he has been identified as the US soldier accused of last Sunday's massacre of 16 Afghan villagers, nine of them children, in a pre-dawn shooting and stabbing rampage.

The atrocity has plunged US-Afghan relations to a new low, prompting "Death to America" protests in Afghanistan, and fresh calls for the timetable for the 2014 withdrawal of American and British forces to be accelerated.

As a commander and trained sniper in a frontline US infantry unit, Sgt Bales was no stranger to combat and the stress it can produce in those who wage it. He had witnessed the bloodiest of the fighting in Iraq in the years after the 2003 invasion, earning the praise of his superiors, and was decorated a dozen times during three tours of duty there.

Then in 2010, towards the end of his third deployment, he suffered a minor traumatic brain injury after the vehicle in which he was travelling rolled over. And last year to his disappointment he was passed over for promotion, adding to money worries back home.

But for Sgt Bales, 38, and his wife Karilyn, there seemed at least one reason for optimism on the horizon. They understood he had served his final tour in a warzone, and that they and their two young children would soon move to a non-combat posting. Instead, he was sent back to the front last December, this time to Afghanistan. The consequences were more dreadful than could have been imagined.

What emerged this weekend is a morality story for a nation whose army has been at war for a decade, and at the centre of it is a soldier who, despite an impressive military record, also had a recent history of trauma, grievances and financial pressures.

Court records show another side to the character of a man who was described by stunned neighbours as a loving father and husband and "life of the party". In 2002, he underwent an anger management assessment after he was charged with assault. And in 2008, witnesses said that he smelled of alcohol after crashing his car and running off into woods.

At home in Washington state, his wife was struggling with the finances as she raised Quincy, four, and Bobby, three. Only this month, they put their home up for sale as they had fallen behind with their mortgage payments.

Sgt Bales, 38, a member of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, was flown back on Friday evening to the military's highest-security prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where investigators will pore over his military evaluations, mental and physical health records and computer logs as they draw up charges against him.

An unnamed official briefed US media that Sgt Bales buckled under a combination of work stress, marital strains and alcohol, saying that he had been drinking in violation of military rules.

But the shocking incident raises alarming questions about his emotional and mental stability, and whether he had slipped through the net of care at one of America's biggest bases and the pressures of repeat deployments to combat zones. John Browne, his lawyer, dismissed reports of domestic problems as "hogwash" but said Sgt Bales had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his deployments and his head injury in Iraq.

He also had seen one of his fellow soldiers lose his leg in an explosion hours before he allegedly committed the massacre.

Sgt Bales and his wife lived at Lake Tapps in Washington state, about a 20-minute drive east of his base at Lewis-McChord near Tacoma in the Pacific North West.

His home was a modest two-story beige wood-frame house with a small front porch beneath tall fir and cedar evergreens in a neighbourhood popular with military families. But three days before the shooting in Afghanistan, Mrs Bales contacted Philip Rodocker, an estate agent, to say that she wanted to sell their house. The property was listed for $229,000, about a $50,000 loss on what the family paid for it in 2005 and less than they owed the bank.

"She told me she was behind in payments," Mr. Rodocker said. "She said he was on his fourth tour and (the house) was getting kind of old and they needed to stabilise their finances."

The house "looked like it had been really, really neglected", he added.

Mrs Bales and her children were moved into accommodation on the army base last week, to protect her from the inevitable media scrutiny as well as the danger of revenge attacks. Boxes, toys, a sledge and a barbecue grill were piled on the front porch this weekend, collected by Mrs Bales as she prepared for the move.

"We are completely in shock," said Kassie Holland, 27, a neighbour.

"They seemed very happy, he was the life of the party and great with the kids. I can't see how this can have happened."

His commanders also evidently had no doubts about his capabilities. Staff sergeants are the backbone of a fighting unit, providing support to their officers and bolstering morale of the troops.

To qualify as a sniper - a position that all but guarantees a close acquaintance with killing - he underwent and passed routine psychological screening assessments.

Sgt Bales offered his own insights on the war in Iraq after he fought in a battle in the city of Najaf in 2007 in which 250 enemy fighters died, in clashes described by some participants as "apocalyptic".

"I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day," he said afterwards in a testimony collected for a military training college. "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."

Speaking of the intensity of the battle, he added that "the cool part about this was World War II-style. You dug in. Guys were out there digging a fighting position in the ground."

That vivid account is evidently one that the US military would prefer the public no longer to read. The link to the website that carried it was removed last week, but the article was still available in other archives.

Comrades have been quick to come to the support of the soldier they had known before Sunday. Capt Chris Alexander, his platoon leader in Iraq, said in an interview on Friday that the sergeant "saved many a life" by never letting down his guard during patrols.

"Bales is still, hands down, one of the best soldiers I ever worked with," he said. "There has to be very severe [post-traumatic stress disorder] involved in this. I just don't want him seen as some psychopath, because he is not."

But public records show two brushes with the law after he moved to Washington. He was ordered by a judge in 2002 to undergo anger-management counseling for an assault case, but no further details of the incident were immediately available. He was arrested in 2008 after he drove his car off a road and into a tree, then fled the scene. Witnesses told police that he was bleeding, disoriented and smelled of alcohol, but he was not charged with drunk driving.

He was deployed three times to Iraq: between 2003 and 2004 as anti-US resistance erupted; for 15 months between June 2006 and September 2007, at the height of the brutal civil war and the beginning of what became known as the surge; and for a year from August 2009. As well as the head injury in that final tour, his lawyer said that he had also lost part of his foot in a separate incident.

The massacre has focused attention on the care and vetting given to soldiers who have gone through multiple tours and, in Sgt Bales' case, suffered a brain injury on deployment.

Joint Base Lewis-McChord has come under scrutiny after a series of incidents.

Most notably, rogue soldiers from another Stryker brigade formed a "kill unit" and murdered three Afghan civilians in 2010, and the Army recently opened an investigation into complaints that diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder were being changed or dismissed by the base's medical centre.

Some veteran groups have argued that the base, which is home to 40,000 soldiers, is unable to handle the pressures of repeated deployments. In 2010, Sgt Bales was among 18,000 personnel who returned there from war zones over just a few weeks. however However, commanders insisted on Friday that facilities at Lewis-McChord were not overwhelmed.

Why Sgt Bales snapped in the early hours of last Sunday remain unclear for now; officials say he appears to have only vague recollections of the incident.

But as he stands suspected of perhaps the worst single atrocity committed by a US serviceman in the last decades of foreign wars, a recent US military press release about military's "hearts and minds" operations in an Afghan village has a chilling poignancy.

"How's the security affecting your family?" Sgt Bales asked a village elder relaxing outside of his home. "Much better than yesterday," the man replies.

The release goes on to state that Sgt Bales' company had successfully secured the village to rebuild relations with the local population. In the words of his commander, "it represents the finest of everything the Army presents".

Nobody, it seems, envisaged that Sgt Bales might ever come to represent anything else.