http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/us/suspects-deployments-put-focus-on-war-strains.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120318

 

March 17, 2012

Suspect’s Deployments Put Focus on War Strains

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON — Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan last week, was deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan over a decade, a record of combat that at the very least suggests high levels of stress. He was particularly upset about being sent to Afghanistan, his wife wrote last year on her blog, and the family had hoped to be stationed in Germany, Italy or Hawaii instead.

But Army officials said over the weekend that Sergeant Bales’s combat tours were hardly unusual in a force that has had an unprecedented pace of repeat deployments in two grinding ground wars, among the longest in the nation’s history.

“Lots of soldiers have four deployments, and they’re not accused of things like this,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, an Army spokesman.

Over the next weeks, a debate is likely to turn on whether Sergeant Bales’s four combat tours helped deliver him to the village in Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan where he is accused of going door to door and methodically shooting or stabbing Afghan civilians, mostly children and women. The argument could well play out in a court-martial, should his case go to trial.

So far, however, his profile — including a history of war injuries, financial pressures, disappointment about being passed over for promotion, brushes with law enforcement and a wife who went through pregnancy and years of parenting alone — matches that of many other American soldiers and Marines.

Over the years, high-ranking Army officials have spoken out about how those strains were affecting morale and the mental health of the troops. Official surveys and studies have researched the relationships between repeated deployments and a range of problems, like marital stress, suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder. Commanders have said that they are acutely aware of the problems that can follow combat, even as they have expressed pride in the resiliency of the rank and file.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 107,000 soldiers out of 570,000 — the size of the active-duty Army at its height — have been deployed three or more times, Army officials said on Saturday. But even seven or eight deployments are not unheard of, especially among Special Operations commando units that have shorter tours. Sergeant Bales, a 38-year-old father of two, had yearlong deployments, although his tour in Panjwai was to be for nine months.

His lawyer, John Henry Browne, said on Saturday that Sergeant Bales had joined the military within about a month of the Sept. 11 attacks, out of patriotism. “It was not ‘I’m going to get the bad guys’ kind of thing. It was ‘I’m going to help my country,’ ” he said.

Recent military studies on the stress of repeat deployments have reached ambiguous conclusions. One 2011 report by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center found that some problems, like alcohol abuse or mental disorders, were more common after a single deployment than after repeated tours. It suggested that some people washed out of the military after the first deployment, leaving a more robust group to carry on.

But another military survey last year focusing on the morale of combat forces in Afghanistan did link declining morale and increasing mental health problems to repeated deployments.

It concluded, based on interviews with more than 1,200 soldiers and Marines, that because of repeated deployments, troops were increasingly likely to have experienced traumatic events in combat — being wounded, suffering through explosions, seeing comrades killed or wounded, killing the enemy. “There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat and seeing what war can do,” Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, then the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference announcing the results.

Army officials point out that the sizable population that has had three or more tours — about 20 percent of the active-duty force — includes those in support and headquarters units who do not face the same pressures as those who fight war up close. “We always talk about how the wars don’t have front lines,” Colonel Collins said. “But the fact remains that the great majority of those killed are from infantry units.”

Sergeant Bales, who spent almost all his career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., as part of the Third Stryker Brigade, named after the armored Stryker vehicles, was in the infantry and so faced the greater dangers when he was shipped out to the war zone.

In 2007, he was part of an operation south of the Iraqi city of Najaf that recovered a downed Apache helicopter, and in that case, at least, the risks appear to have brought him some personal satisfaction. In a 2009 article that was originally on the Army’s Web site but has since been removed, a Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is identified as a team leader in Company C’s First Squad and recalls carrying wounded Iraqi civilians from danger. “We’d go in, find some people that we could help, because there were a bunch of dead people we couldn’t, throw them on a litter and bring them out to the casualty collection point,” he said.

He added: “I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” because of “the simple fact that 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,” he said.

Little is known so far about Sergeant Bales’s deployment to Panjwai, a rural stretch of grape fields and mud-brick villages outside the city of Kandahar, the province’s capital. But his unit appears to have been charged with building up the local police, a frustrating task that requires organizing often suspicious Afghan men into a security force. Although Panjwai is far quieter than it used to be, largely because of the Obama administration’s so-called surge, it is still violent in a low-grade, death-by-a-thousand-cuts way.

Sergeant Bales received extra pay every time he was deployed, although it amounted to only $150 more a month for combat duty and $250 more for separation pay, because he was away from his family. Over all, his annual tax-free compensation when he was deployed to a war zone, including housing and food allowances, came to around $68,000, the Army said on Saturday.

On the day before the shootings, Sergeant Bales had seen a fellow soldier lose a leg in a land mine explosion, Mr. Browne, his lawyer, said. A senior government official said that on the night of the killings, Sergeant Bales had been drinking. Although other militaries allow alcohol on bases in Afghanistan — Italian forces have wine with their meals — on American bases it is forbidden.

Mr. Browne has questioned the reports of Sergeant Bales’s drinking — “You don’t get drunk and go out and kill children,” he said — and there is nothing in the public record to suggest an alcohol problem. Court records show that Sergeant Bales was charged with assault in 2002, but the charge was dismissed. Another charge, a hit and run involving a parked car, was also dropped.

On his third tour in Iraq, in 2010, a Humvee he was in flipped over, possibly because of a roadside bomb. Sergeant Bales injured his head and probably sustained a minor traumatic brain injury, which in chronic cases can lead to cognitive problems and a loss of impulse control.

Mr. Browne, who said he would meet with Sergeant Bales at the prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., on Sunday, said that Sergeant Bales had lost part of his foot in another episode, also apparently from a bomb, and that some of the arch was removed afterward. And it was possible that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Adding to the stress was disappointment about being passed over for a promotion. Before Sergeant Bales was sent to Afghanistan, the military had been training him to be a recruiter, Mr. Browne said. Then the sergeant found out that he was being deployed.

“He was disappointed,” Mr. Browne said, “but he is a soldier, and he does what he’s told to do.”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; C. J. Chivers from Providence, R.I.; Taimor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul, Afghanistan; and Serge F. Kovaleski from Washington State.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

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