Jew World Order

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 war zone, 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.

For 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 had 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.

Home there 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 next-door
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. And to qualify as a sniper – a
position that all but guarantees a close acquaintanceship with killing – he
also 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 non-combatants 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 night 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 counselling
for an alleged assault on a girlfriend in a hotel. And in 2008, he was
arrested 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 because of a string of
problems. 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. Commanders however 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 decade 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 man.

The release goes on to state that Sgt Bales’ company had successfully secured
the village to rebuild relations with 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.