Afghanistan: What made Sgt. Bales snap?

In three grueling tours of duty in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Bales carved out a reputation as an exemplary soldier who kept cool under fire.

“It was an end no one saw coming,” said Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal. Longtime friends and colleagues of 38-year-old Robert Bales knew him as an outgoing and trustworthy soldier, a devoted husband, and a loving father of two, who joined the Army after 9/11 out of a new sense of duty to his country. In three grueling tours of duty in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Bales carved out a reputation as an exemplary soldier who kept cool under fire. But last week, while on a fourth tour of duty, this time to Afghanistan, Bales snapped. In predawn darkness, he crept away from his military base in Panjwai, walked to a small village, and allegedly slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them children, shooting and stabbing them in their beds before setting fire to some of their bodies. We don’t yet know for sure what triggered Bales’s rampage, said James Dao in The New York Times, but military officials said Bales’s mind had buckled under the combined stresses of repeated tours of duty, financial and marital problems, and alcohol. His lawyer, meanwhile, is blaming a traumatic brain injury suffered in Iraq. “That’s not our Bobby,” said Michelle Caddell, who grew up with Bales in Norwood, Ohio. “Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

The phenomenon of soldiers “snapping” is “as old as combat itself,” said Brad Knickerbocker in CSMonitor.com. Witnessing fellow soldiers, civilians, and even the enemy being killed and dismembered takes a terrible psychic toll. Just a day before his rampage, Bales had seen a fellow soldier’s leg blown off by a land mine. Bales himself had lost part of his foot during a previous tour in Iraq, said Matthew DeLuca in TheDailyBeast.com, and suffered a brain injury when an improvised explosive device blew up under his jeep and the vehicle rolled over on him. After nearly a decade of sending hundreds of thousands of young men and women into foreign combat, America is just beginning to confront the reality that “war leaves no soldier untouched.”

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