Sgt. Bales: Two Wars' Legacy of Tragedy

Two stories in the Washington Post on Saturday should be read in tandem for insight into how we might best interpret the recent killing of sixteen Afghan civilians by a U.S. combat staff sergeant. The first, the paper's lead story, identified the alleged killer as thirty-eight-year-old Robert Bales, a trained army sniper who had served three tours in Iraq before his Afghan deployment and had suffered combat wounds during his overseas assignments. Bales is accused of leaving his base in Kandahar province, engaging in the house-to-house killing spree, then returning to the base and turning himself in. He could face the death penalty.

 

The Post probes the man and his background in an effort to perhaps shed some light on why a seemingly normal soldier would engage in such a grisly business. The paper quotes Bales's lawyer, John Henry Browne, as saying Bales didn't want to deploy to Afghanistan in December, had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his previous deployments and suffered a head injury during one of his Iraq tours. Also, just hours before the killing spree, he had witnessed a friend lose a leg in an explosion.

 

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