Robert Bales Charged With 17 Counts Of Murder: PTSD & The U.C.M.J. ("War On Trial")

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is being Charged with 17 Counts of Murder on Friday.
Before everyone gets all riled up please remember Bales is Still a Soldier under UCMJ Law (Uniform Military Code Of Justice).
The Legal System is completely different under the UCMJ.
First there is a Court Martial, then he still has the right to Legal Counsel & an Investigation.
Next where is the Evidence?
There were NO Autopsies because the Alleged Victims were Buried Immediately according to Muslim Law.
on top of all that, Bales had PTSD, Serious Mental Health Issues yet the Army continued to Deploy him to a Combat Zone, thus Bales can't even be Discharged right now.
Higher Standard My Foot!
The Man had a Brain Injury, was Mentally & Physically Stressed Out!
The Army knew this Man had Serious Mental & Health Issues yet they continued to Deploy him to a War that America should have been out of long ago.
So Even if its Fast-Tracked it may take Years to Prosecute because this is NOT a Civilian Case!
So everyone needs to Calm Down.
The U.S. Military does NOT treat its Soldiers like Trash when they get into Legal Trouble.
Especially when they have Served for Several Years as a Good Soldier when On-Duty.
His Military Record is Outstanding even if his Personal life was a little messed up.
So everyone needs to just calm down.
Let's focus on getting Out of Afghanistan NOW to prevent other Tragedies like this from occurring.



Bales to be charged with murder in Afghan killings


Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales will be charged with 17 counts of murder in connection with a shooting spree in an Afghan village that left women and children dead and severely tested U.S.-Afghan relations, a U.S. official said.

The official declined to be identified because the charges have not been publicly released yet.

Bales will also face six counts of attempted murder and six counts of aggravated assault, as well as dereliction of duty and other violations of military law, the Associated Press reported, citing an unidentified U.S official.

Bales is being held in a solitary cell in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The charges are to be read to him today.

Bales, who was on his fourth combat tour, allegedly sneaked from his military outpost in Kandahar province at 3 a.m. March 11 and walked to two villages where he shot, stabbed and burned villagers, including nine children.

The military originally said Bales was suspected in the killing of 16 Afghan villagers, but changed that Thursday to 17, raising the number of adults by one but without explaining why.

The massacre followed the accidental burnings of Qurans at a U.S. base in Afghanistan, which touched off waves of deadly rioting. No one has suggested a motive for the shootings, but the massacre has highlighted the issues of combat stress and frequent deployments.

Bales, 38, joined the Army on Nov. 8, 2001, two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Friends say he was driven by patriotism, but Bales' financial businesses had gone bust, and regulators were investigating him for allegedly bilking an Ohio couple of their retirement savings.

He deployed three times to Iraq before Afghanistan. During his second deployment, he fought in Najaf to recover a downed helicopter. His platoon leader praised him, and in a newspaper article, Bales recalled it as one of his proudest moments. He arrived in Afghanistan in December. His unit provided security at a small outpost.

Two days before the killings, one of Bales' fellow soldiers lost a leg after stepping on a mine, said John Henry Browne, Bales' civilian attorney. Bales also suffered a minor head injury in 2010 as a passenger in a Humvee that flipped, Browne said. "I'm not putting the war on trial, but the war is on trial," Browne said.


View Larger Map


Sources: AP, CNN, USA Today, Google Maps

John McCain Wants Afghanistan War To Continue Even After Bin Laden's Death; War Profiteering!

As long as some members of Congress such as John McCain & Mitch McConnell, have a Vested Financial Interest in War i.e., Government Contractors, our Men & Women in Uniform will continue engaging in Tribal Conflicts we can NOT Win.

The Afghan War is a Tribal War.

It has NOTHING to do with Al-Qaeda because even after Bin Laden's Death, the Taliban's presence still rules that region of the Middle East.

And since President Karzai is a Willing Partner in that Scheme, why are we Wasting Billion$ of U.S. Dollars annually in Resources & Human Lives?

Remaining in Afghanistan for another 3 mos, 6 mos or 12 mos will NOT make a difference!

We've killed Osama Bin Laden so the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan is Complete!

Let's just get out & let Karzai govern his Own Country!


View Larger Map


Sources: CNN, White House.gov, Youtube, Google Maps

Afghanistan War To Continue! Gen. John Allen, John McCain & Condi Rice Say No Early Withdrawal

As long as some members of Congress such as John McCain & Mitch McConnell, have a Vested Financial Interest in War i.e., Government Contractors, our Men & Women in Uniform will continue engaging in Tribal Conflicts we can NOT Win.

The Afghan War is a Tribal War.

It has NOTHING to do with Al-Qaeda because even after Bin Laden's Death, the Taliban's presence still rules that region of the Middle East.

And since President Karzai is a Willing Partner in that Scheme, why are we Wasting Billion$ of U.S. Dollars annually in Resources & Human Lives?

Remaining in Afghanistan for another 3 mos, 6 mos or 12 mos will NOT make a difference!

We've killed Osama Bin Laden so the U.S. Mission is Complete!

Let's just get out & let Karzai govern his Own Country!






U.S. General Sees No Sudden Afghan Drawdown


The top allied commander in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that he had no intention of recommending further American troop reductions until late this year, after the departure of the current “surge” forces and the end of the summer fighting season.

That timetable would defer one of the thorniest military decisions facing President Obama — how quickly to get out of Afghanistan — until after the November elections.

Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine who commands the American-led allied force in Afghanistan, said that he remained optimistic about eventual success there but that it was too early to begin shifting forces. He also acknowledged the deep sensitivities, especially given the current diplomatic crisis with Afghanistan, of handing over complete security control to Afghan forces — including over the commando night raids that American commanders say are critical to the war effort. These are the subject of intense negotiation, he testified.

General Allen said that only after reviewing the results of the next six months of fighting — at the end of which there will be 68,000 American troops remaining there — would he turn his attention to the pace of further reductions in the force.

But he repeatedly said that by the end of next year, Afghan forces would have taken over full responsibility for the fight, allowing NATO’s combat role to be finished by the end of 2014, as currently scheduled.

His testimony came after a troubling, violent period on the ground, beginning with public protests — and a series of murders of American troops by Afghan security forces — following the burning of Islamic holy books by United States military personnel. That was followed by an American soldier’s rampage that left 16 civilians dead, most of them children.

General Allen said that in addition to the criminal inquiry into the massacre, there would be an administrative investigation into the command climate and headquarters organization of the soldier’s unit.

In his opening statement, he did not stray from the line taken by the White House and the Pentagon in recent weeks: that the progress toward what the Obama administration calls and “orderly and responsible” transfer of the fight against insurgents from the American-led alliance to the fledgling Afghan Army is going smoothly and that the schedule should not be altered.

He said he recognized the challenges, and deplored the Koran-burnings and the massacre. But he and members of the committee both described those events as isolated, if unfortunate, and there was little discussion of them at the hearing.

Instead, it focused on the schedule and the mechanics of the withdrawal that lies ahead, a subject that is being reviewed by NATO, whose member states are assembling their leadership in May in Chicago, and in talks between the Karzai government and Washington.

On one sensitive subject, the night raids carried out by Special Operations forces that have unsettled the Afghans but are credited with weakening the Taliban’s command structure, General Allen said the Afghans would be taking over control of them, too, eventually. Twelve Afghan teams are being trained for that purpose, he testified.

But he refused to discuss, when asked, a report in the Wall Street Journal that in negotiations with the Kabul government, the United States was considering subjecting American operations to review by some kind of Afghan tribunal.

He said it was important not to rob the surprise raids of “their momentum, which gives them their effectiveness.” And he said it was “very premature” to say what would be the outcome of the talks.

Ultimately, he said, as the Afghans take control of operations, the requirements of the Afghan constitution would need to be respected.

“Throughout history, insurgencies have seldom been defeated by foreign forces,” General Allen said. “Instead, they have been ultimately beaten by indigenous forces. In the long run, our goals can only be achieved and then secured by Afghan forces. Transition, then, is the linchpin of our strategy, not merely the ‘way out.’ ”

The possibility of an accelerated withdrawal order by President Obama has angered senior Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee. The chairman, Rep. Howard McKeon of California, said, “With our eyes at the exits, I am uncertain whether we will be able to achieve the key tenets of president’s own strategy, due to the constraints that the president, himself, has put in place.”

He made the case that “with friend and foe alike knowing that the U.S. is heading for the exits, our silence is likely viewed as a preamble to retreat. And, in warfare, when the mission becomes redeployment, rather than mission success, the outcome can quickly become disorderly.”

But General Allen emphasized that Afghan security forces are growing stronger, having reached 330,000, and that their buildup remains on track. And James N. Miller, Jr., the acting under secretary of defense for policy, testified that attacks initiated by the enemy continued to fall. They were down 22 percent in the first two months of this year compared with last year, he said, after falling 9 percent in 2011.

“We have seriously degraded the Taliban’s ability to mount a spring offensive of their own,” General Allen asserted. “This spring, they will come back to find many of their caches empty, their former strongholds untenable, and a good many of their foot soldiers absent or unwilling to join the fight.”


Sources: CBS News, CNN, NY Times, Youtube, PBS

Robert Bales Does Not Remember Afghan Shootings; Still Deeply Concerned About His Unit

Under the UCMJ, Prosecuting Bales could take Years. Its NO easy process! Especially when a Soldier is Mentally & Physically Diminished.


Lawyer: Bales wasn't drunk and can't remember


The defense of accused murderer Sgt. Robert Bales began Monday when he spent more than seven hours with three of his lawyers, including defense attorney John Henry Browne.

At their meeting, Bales did not confess to the crime.

"He has no memory of ... he has an early memory of that evening and he has a later memory of that, but he doesn't have memory of the evening in between.," Browne said.

Witnesses describe Bales as going deliberately from room to room in several houses while killing people, not in some kind of berserk attack. Browne said that despite the descriptions of his apparently deliberate actions, Bales remembers none of what happened.

Browne also said reports of his being drunk that night were not really true.

"He said he had a couple sips of something but he didn't have a full drink," and therefore he wasn't drunk, Browne said.

Bales told Browne he was in shock.

"He's fixated on the troops left on the ground and what they're accusing him of and how that might have negative ramifications on his friends and compatriots. And he's concerned that there would be retaliation that would be caused by what people think he's done," Browne said.

Bales apparently is eager to get his wife and children on the phone.

"He loves them dearly and he is very interested in talking to them," Browne said.

Browne said he will not seek an insanity defense, rather one of "diminished capacity," like some sort of an emotional breakdown.

Bales is expected to be charged with 16 counts of murder by the end of the week.


The Military Path to Justice Could Be Lengthy


Staff Sgt. Robert Bales has yet to be formally accused of the act that the Army suspects him of committing: the nighttime massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in a village a mile from his post.

But once preliminary charges are announced, as early as this week, the military justice system will proceed deliberately, regardless of the enormity of the charges and the international repercussions of the acts involved.

It is a system devised to be flexible enough to be convened on a battlefield, and broad enough to deal with anything from theft and insubordination to atrocity. Experts agree there will be no quick resolution in this case, especially if the charges carry the death penalty, which Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said last week “could be a consideration” in the case.

That, said John Galligan, a military lawyer in private practice in Texas, would mean “it’s going to take several years.”

Many of the early details provided by military sources about the rampage have not been confirmed, and the case could founder in the courtroom on questions of evidence collected under difficult conditions thousands of miles away, potentially with few of the safeguards that courts in both the military and civilian worlds rely on when it comes to building a trustworthy account.

To Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, there is still too much to learn for easy conclusions to be drawn. “The narrative has not yet emerged,” he said.

One thing, however, is now certain: Sergeant Bales’s court-martial will be held in the United States. The military on Monday released the transcript of a briefing Sunday with Afghan journalists in which an American official said the case will be heard “somewhere in the United States.” The location, the official said, has not been determined, and witnesses may be flown over from Afghanistan. American service members are not subject to the Afghan criminal justice system, under a longstanding “status of forces agreement” between the United States and the Afghan government.

Sergeant Bales, who is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., met with his defense team for the first time on Monday, in a session lasting several hours. His lawyer, John Henry Browne, told The Associated Press that his client’s recall of that night was patchy.

“He has some memory of some things that happened that night,” Mr. Browne said. “He has some memories of before the incident and he has some memories of after the incident. In between, very little.”

Mr. Browne told CBS News his client said that he had not been drunk, and that he had only had “a couple of sips of something.”

Unless a plea deal is struck, the outcome is anything but certain. The Army prosecuted 44 soldiers for murder or manslaughter of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2001 to 2011; 30 were convicted of some form of homicide, 6 were convicted of other offenses and 8 were acquitted. No one has been executed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice since 1961.

Gathering evidence and securing the cooperation of witnesses can be bedeviling in far-flung places, and contributed to the collapse of the prosecutions against Marines linked to the killings of 24 men, women and children in the Iraqi city of Haditha. Charges were dropped against most of the Marines who were tried in that case. In another case — the murders of three Afghan civilians in the Maiwand District in Kandahar Province in 2010 by a rogue “kill team” from Sergeant Bales’s base, Lewis-McChord —11 of the 12 soldiers tried were convicted.

The procedures to come are well defined by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial. The rules require a preliminary charging statement to be issued within days of a soldier being put behind bars. That is followed in coming months by a proceeding known as an Article 32 pretrial hearing, where prosecutors will present their evidence for convening a formal court-martial, leading to a recommendation from the presiding officer to higher command authority as to whether to hold a court-martial.

Only after the Article 32 hearing will the determination as to whether to seek the death penalty be announced. The court-martial would then go forward in two stages, one to establish guilt or innocence, and a second to determine sentencing.

Some of the elements of courts-martial differ from trials in the civilian realm. The military justice system does not allow a guilty plea in a death penalty case, but it does allow pleas that will lead to a lesser punishment. A determination of guilt or innocence, and the decision to sentence the defendant to death, must be unanimous.

If the supporting facts that underlie the accusations against Sergeant Bales are borne out and the military seeks the death penalty, much of the work of his legal team will shift to keeping him off death row. In speaking with reporters since the March 11 killings, Mr. Browne has discussed his client’s four combat deployments and suggested that Sergeant Bales could have been suffering from post-traumatic stress and the effects of concussive brain injury.

The military justice system does have the equivalent of the insanity defense, known as lack of mental responsibility, for which the standard of proof is very high. Mr. Fidell said such a defense is rarely successful, though “it could help soften the blow in terms of avoiding the death penalty.”

In the interview with CBS, Mr. Browne said he would not pursue the insanity defense, but would argue that his client had diminished capacity — apparently in an effort to seek mitigation of any punishment.

One issue that could loom large in the case is the risk that statements by those higher in the chain of command can have a prejudicial effect on members of the court-martial, a problem known as unlawful command influence. Among other statements, President Obama has called the killings “tragic and shocking,” and called President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan last week to pledge that the United States would “get the facts as quickly as possible and to hold accountable anyone responsible.”

Mr. Panetta has called the killings a “criminal act.” When asked whether there was a confession, said, “I suspect that that was the case.”

Jack B. Zimmermann, the co-chairman of the Military Law Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that in high-profile cases, military and civilian leaders were under tremendous pressure to issue statements. “Unfortunately, people in the secretary of defense’s position are caught between the political requirement to make some kind of statement and the danger of what we call unlawful command influence,” said Mr. Zimmermann, a retired Marine colonel. “Somebody should tell him to shut up.”

To James D. Culp, a military lawyer in Austin, Tex., the only question is one of degree. “Is there command influence in the case?” he said. “Undoubtedly. Does it rise to the level of unlawful command influence? We’ll see.” Mr. Fidell, however, noted that while unlawful command influence is often referred to as “the mortal enemy of military justice,” it is “very rare for a case to be set aside” on those grounds.

This court-martial will be closely watched around the world, and that will undoubtedly complicate the prosecution, said Douglas Berman, an expert on sentencing at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

“Every high-profile case, civilian or military,” he said, “takes on dimensions and dynamics that are less familiar and less predictable because there are often interests, both expressed and implied, that transcend resolving this individual case justly. Everything that happens in this case is going to have direct international echoes in terms of the ongoing war effort.”

“Let me put it this way,” he said, “I’m real glad I’m not involved — on either side.”


View Larger Map


Sources: ABC News, CBS News, Daily Mail, NY Times, Google Maps

Robert Bales: Small Town Patriot To Deranged, Alleged Killer; (PTSD) War Is Hell!

At Home, Asking How ‘Our Bobby’ Became War Crime Suspect


He was not the star, just a well-regarded young man who seemed to try to do the right thing. That was Robert Bales, “our Bobby,” friends said.

He was a busy, popular kid, but he made time for the autistic man down the block. Other neighborhood boys admired him. As a high school linebacker, he was good enough to be captain, but also gracious enough to help a more talented player take over his starting position. It was good for the team, he said.

That solid-guy reputation followed him into the Army infantry. He joined at the relatively seasoned age of 27, just a few weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and became respected for his maturity and calm, including in battle. “He was a damn good leader and a damn good soldier,” said Zachary Parsons, who served with Staff Sergeant Bales in Iraq in 2007.

So when many of his old neighbors from Norwood, Ohio, and former battalion mates from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State heard the news that Sergeant Bales had been accused of coldbloodedly shooting to death 16 Afghan civilians on March 11, nine of them children, they were not simply shocked. They grieved.

Michelle Caddell, 48, who knew Sergeant Bales when he was growing up, watched a video clip of the news over and over and over again, mesmerized by disbelief. “I wanted to see, maybe, a different face,” she said, fighting back tears. “Because that’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

Friends, relatives and his lawyer say they have an idea of what that horrible thing was: war.

Three deployments in Iraq, where he saw heavy fighting, and a fourth in Afghanistan, where he went reluctantly, left him struggling financially, in danger of losing his home.

And there were more direct impacts. During his deployments, Sergeant Bales, 38, lost part of a foot and injured his head, saw fellow soldiers badly wounded, picked up the bodies of dead Iraqis, was treated for mild traumatic brain injury and possibly developed post-traumatic stress disorder, his lawyer and military officials said.

But there are also glimpses of a darkness in his personal life. Sergeant Bales’s past includes an arrest on a misdemeanor charge of assault on a woman, which was dropped after he completed anger-management counseling; an accident in which he overturned his car, something he attributed to falling asleep at the wheel; and an accumulation of rejections and disappointments.

A year ago, according to a blog written by his wife, he was denied a promotion to sergeant first class, a rank that would have brought not just added responsibility and respect but also money at a time when his finances seemed stretched.

Neighbors remember him, in between earlier deployments, as a gung-ho solider, eager to get back to the fight. But that seemed to have changed.

He trained to become a recruiter, a job that would have allowed him to skip Afghanistan, but the Army kept him in the infantry. And though he felt that his injuries were significant enough to keep him out of combat, his lawyer said, Army doctors said he was fit to deploy.

Weeks later, he arrived in one of the roughest precincts of Afghanistan.

A long legal process — starting with the formal filing of charges in the coming weeks and ending, most likely, in a court-martial — will sort out whether Sergeant Bales was guilty of atrocities and may shed light on which, if any, of these factors played a role.

From dozens of interviews with lawyers, friends and military officials, competing legal narratives are already starting to emerge.

A military official, speaking anonymously, has said Sergeant Bales had marital problems, felt stressed by the Afghanistan deployment and snapped after drinking alcohol before the shootings.

Sergeant Bales’s lawyers contend that he had a solid marriage and no drinking problems. If he cracked, they said, it was because he probably had P.T.S.D. that the Army failed to diagnose, had been dispatched to a war he did not want to fight and had seen a friend gravely wounded just before the killings.

Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired brigadier general who was an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that after a decade of combat, where hundreds of thousands of troops have sustained traumatic brain injury and P.T.S.D., those syndromes by themselves seem inadequate to explain how a seemingly normal and widely admired sergeant might have single-handedly committed one of the worst war crimes of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

With his multiple deployments and wounds, Dr. Xenakis said, Sergeant Bales seems emblematic of bigger problems: an overstretched military battered by 11 years of combat; failures by the military to properly identify and treat its weary, suffering troops; and the thin line dividing “normal” behavior in war from what later is deemed “snapping.”

“This is equivalent to what My Lai did to reveal all the problems with the conduct of the Vietnam War,” Dr. Xenakis said. “The Army will want to say that soldiers who commit crimes are rogues, that they are individual, isolated cases. But they are not.”

Inspirational Teenager

Sergeant Bales grew up in Norwood, a modest suburb of Cincinnati, the youngest of five boys who lived in a two-story brick home still known as “the Bales house,” though no Baleses live in it anymore. The family was that well known, and that well liked.

“They’re down-home country,” Ms. Caddell said.

Mr. Bales was a gregarious, chatty, engaged teenager who played football and threw himself into an array of clubs and activities, including theater. In his yearbook, he signed the football team photo with a nickname, “Doom,” and is listed on the “senior superlatives” page as one of the best dancers in his class.

“He’s one of those kids you remember,” said David C. Griffel, the principal of Norwood High School when Mr. Bales attended. “A real extrovert.”

Mr. Bales was a leader on the football team, a feisty middle linebacker who was not big but strong, able to bench press 300 pounds. But in his junior year, a freshman star named Marc Edwards arrived, and the coach wanted the newcomer to be the starting middle linebacker. There might have been an unpleasant rivalry, but instead Mr. Bales shared tips on the position.

“He got the idea in that situation that Marc was going to be better for the team,” said Aaron M. Smith, the author of a book about Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Edwards was surprised by Mr. Bales’s generosity. “He credited Bob Bales with teaching him what leadership meant, and how to handle a situation that doesn’t favor you,” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Edwards went on to be named Ohio’s “Mr. Football” for 1992 and to play for Notre Dame, the San Francisco 49ers, the Cleveland Browns, the New England Patriots, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Chicago Bears.

Mr. Bales was enrolled in the College of Mount St. Joseph in 1991 and 1992. He attended Ohio State University from 1993 until 1996, declaring an economics major, according to Jim Lynch, a university spokesman. It is not clear why he left, Mr. Lynch said.

Details about Mr. Bales’s life during the next several years are sketchy. Friends and his lawyer said he had worked in financial services in Columbus, Ohio, then started an investment business with his brother Mark. No sign remains of their Spartina Investments at the modest office building where they leased space in Doral, Fla., a few blocks west of Miami International Airport and south of the Doral Golf Resort and Spa.

By November 2001, he had joined the Army.

“It wasn’t really anger when he joined,” said Michael Blevins, 35, a childhood friend. “It was — they had hurt something,” he added, referring to the Sept. 11 terrorists.

Ms. Caddell said that she had worried about his decision, but that he had assured her, “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” The decision made sense to Ms. Caddell’s son Mark, who had idolized Mr. Bales since he was a toddler.

He has to join, Ms. Caddell recalled her son saying. “He takes care of everybody.”

Introduction to Warfare

After basic training, Sergeant Bales was assigned to what was then known as Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, which would become the Army’s Western deployment hub for the wars. For the next 11 years, he would spend his career with the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment in a Stryker brigade.

In 2002, the criminal assault occurred in a Tacoma-area hotel room, but he paid his fine and completed court-mandated anger-management counseling, court records show.

Not long after, he married Karilyn Primeau, a woman he had met online, his lawyer said, and they went on to have two children, a daughter named Quincy and a son named Bobby.

The Third Brigade deployed to northern Iraq from November 2003 to November 2004, a time when the country was quickly devolving into looting, insurgency and chaos. But it was Sergeant Bales’s second tour, from June 2006 into September 2007, that was particularly eventful.

By then, Iraq was in the throes of sectarian civil war, and American troops were dying at a rate of about 80 a month. David Hardt, a Third Brigade soldier who wrote a blog about the deployment, said that the enemy had almost always been invisible and that soldiers had grown bitterly frustrated at their inability to fight back.

“You sort of got used to seeing dead bodies, seeing things blow up in front of you,” said Mr. Hardt, who did not know Sergeant Bales but was in Iraq at the same time. “We wanted to get insurgents, but it’s so rare that we succeeded.”

In one extraordinary battle in January 2007, however, Sergeant Bales’s battalion encountered as many as 600 Shiite militia fighters while trying to recover a downed Apache helicopter in Najaf. In a pitched two-day battle that included airstrikes and mortar exchanges, the American forces claimed to have killed 250 enemy fighters while losing none of their own.

“The cool part about this was, World War II-style, you dug in,” Sergeant Bales, then a team leader, was quoted as saying in a recounting of the battle by the Fort Lewis newspaper. “You’re taking a shovel and digging as fast as you can.”

“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” he added.

Somewhere during that deployment, Sergeant Bales injured his foot, though his lawyer said he did not know how. The Army has declined to provide details about the sergeant’s record.

But the injury did not seem significant enough to remove him from Iraq, and he seems to have finished the tour, which was extended to 15 months from 12 in what became known as the surge.

Mr. Hardt said most soldiers he knew were angry about the extension because they were exhausted by the continuous fighting and the threats of roadside bombs. But if Sergeant Bales was upset, he did not seem to complain. When he returned to the Tacoma area, he was limping, neighbors said, but also working hard to rehabilitate his foot because he wanted to return to full duty.

“He was a gung-ho Army guy,” said Tim Burgess, 59, a retired trucker and warehouse worker who lived next door to Sergeant Bales at the time. “He still wanted to see action even though he had been wounded.”

Neighbors remembered his wife as an avid bicyclist but not particularly sociable. Records show that she worked as a project manager at now-defunct Washington Mutual, then became an associate technical project manager at Amaxra, a business communications company in Redmond.

Sergeant Bales was home for nearly two years after his second deployment. Mrs. Bales, also an avid blogger, cheerfully recounted baking cookies, reading books and visiting her parents in Bellingham with their daughter.

By August 2009, he was gone again. It was a quieter tour, with more nation building than combat. In a Facebook exchange with a childhood friend, Steven Berling, Sergeant Bales called the deployment “boring” and “pretty dumb,” then lamented the lack of fighting.

“Giving money to Hagji instead of bullets just don’t seem right,” he wrote, apparently misspelling Hajji, a term used by soldiers, often pejoratively, in referring to Arab people.

Financial and Career Setbacks

About the time Sergeant Bales was preparing to deploy in 2009, the Baleses were having financial problems, records show.

Early in their relationship, they had lived in a house in Auburn, between Seattle and Tacoma, that Mrs. Bales had owned before they were together. According to records, they received a notice of a trustee sale in mid-2009. The couple, who had moved out by then, had missed $17,000 in payments and owed a total of $195,000 to the bank.

A trustee auction was scheduled for October 2009, while Sergeant Bales was in Iraq, but the auction was postponed three times and then called off in early 2010 for reasons that are unclear.

Robert Baggett, president of the neighborhood’s Riverpark Estates Homeowners Association, said the Baleses had stopped paying their annual association dues of about $120 at least two years ago.

The house, which for a while was occupied by renters whose noise drew complaints from neighbors, has been vacant for about 18 months and is now filthy and in disrepair. “We are parking cars there to keep it looking like it is occupied so no homeless move in,” Mr. Baggett said.

The Baleses bought their two-story house in Lake Tapps, east of Tacoma, in 2005, records show. But just three days before the shootings in Afghanistan, Mrs. Bales told a real estate agent, Phillip Rodocker, that she wanted to sell the house because they were financially stretched. The house is listed for sale at $229,000, about $50,000 less than what the family paid for it.

Asked about the mortgage problems, Sergeant Bales’s lawyer, John Henry Browne, said, “There are no financial pressures on the family right now other than the normal ones that are experienced by the 99 percenters.”

Last March, Mrs. Bales wrote on her blog that her husband had not gotten the hoped-for promotion to sergeant first class, which would have raised his pay by about $370 a month and made him eligible to be the senior noncommissioned officer for a platoon.

(He was also paid an extra $400 a month during his deployments.) The promotion probably would have also given him some peace of mind about his Army career, which was nearly halfway to the 20 years needed for retirement with pay.

Though “sad and disappointed” by the news, Mrs. Bales said she was also relieved. “We can finally move on to the next phase of our lives,” she wrote.

The Final Deployment

That next phase, the Baleses hoped, would take them to Germany, Italy or Hawaii. But the Army did not move Sergeant Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Nor did it allow him to become a recruiter, though he was in training for the job. Instead, he was told he would go with the Third Brigade to Afghanistan in December.

“He was not happy about it,” Mr. Browne said, but took his orders like a professional soldier.

Before deploying, Sergeant Bales would have undergone physical exams, including on his foot, and a computer-based survey for traumatic brain injury intended to measure attention, memory and thinking ability. The survey is not well regarded among many specialists, but it remains the Army’s chief screening tool for traumatic brain injury. Sergeant Bales was declared fit to deploy.

Little is known about his time in Afghanistan, other than that he and others in his battalion were assigned to work alongside Army Special Forces soldiers in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, a longtime hotbed of Taliban activity that has grown more secure in recent years. Sergeant Bales would probably have provided security for the Green Berets while they carried out night raids, built relations with village leaders and organized local militias.

A Green Beret who has spent time in Panjwai in the past year said the combat outpost would have been relatively small, protected by dirt-filled containers known as Hesco barriers, with guard towers and perhaps a blimp with a high-powered camera capable of capturing images more than a mile away. It would have been difficult, but not impossible, for Sergeant Bales to slip away at night unnoticed, as the Army says he did.

Supervision in the outpost might also have been more lax than at larger bases, which could explain the presence of alcohol. Sergeant Bales might have even been among the more senior noncommissioned officers on his team. Special Forces teams typically have 12 members, sometimes fewer, and Sergeant Bales’s unit might have been as small as a platoon of two dozen soldiers.

Many younger soldiers consider such assignments exciting and more fulfilling, though they are also potentially more dangerous. But Mr. Browne said Sergeant Bales had considered the posting “grueling,” noting that the soldiers lived in metal cargo containers.

“It was very tough and rustic,” the lawyer said.

About a week ago, Mr. Browne said, Sergeant Bales saw a friend lose a leg to a buried mine. Soon after, according to Mr. Browne, he sent his wife a short message: “Hard day for the good guys.”

About a day later, Army officials said, Sergeant Bales walked out of the outpost and headed toward the nearby village.


View Larger Map


Sources: ABC News, Daily Mail, NY Times, Google Maps

Robert Bales & Abel Gutierrez Being Unfairly Judged By Media: PTSD & War Vets

I am Not Opposed to War.
Instead I am Opposed to Unnecessary Wars. i.e., Iraq & Afghanistan, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales served in Iraq & Afghanistan. He Suffered from Severe PTSD as a Result of 4 Deployments, Brain & Foot Injuries. Part of his foot had to be amputated.

It is believed Bales recently Killed 16 Afghan Civilians while on Duty at an Outpost Base in Afghanistan.

Abel Gutierrez was also an Iraq War Veteran. He also Suffered from Severe PTSD.

Gutierrez recently Murdered his 11-Yr old Sister, Mother than Committed Suicide.

After Selfless Sacrifice & laying their lives on the line for ALL American Citizens, Men like Staff Sgt. Robert Bales & Abel Gutierrez are now being Unfairly Judged by people in the Media who NEVER served one day in the U.S. Military or in a Combat Zone.

Whatever happened to Patriotism?
Where is the Gratitude for our Men & Women who Serve in the U.S. Military?

I believe Bales is being Unfairly Judged because some people within the Federal Gov't want to use him as an Example to prove something to Afghanistan President Karzai.

Gutierrez is being Unfairly Judged because he's Hispanic, plain & simple.

This Troubles Me Immensely!

Its another Vietnam all over again.

After Drafting American Males ages 17 to 35, then Sending them to War to Vietnam & Cuba, upon their return they were treated like DIRT!

Although the Men & Women serving in the 21st Century U.S. Military were NOT Drafted they still served their Country.

Yet they are being treated like DIRT!

Thousands of Men & Women are returning home from Iraq & Afghanistan, Suffering from PTSD, yet the Federal Gov’t is Refusing to Treat them or Give them Disability Benefits.

This is NOT right!

Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is NOT some Phony Illness Human Beings can just make up out of the blue to receive Government Checks.

Its a REAL Mental & Physical Disease caused by Shock & Trauma.

PTSD is Not a New Mental Disease.

The Federal Gov't (Pentagon, CIA) has known about PTSD & and it affects on Soldiers for decades.

Men who served in World War 2, Vietnam & in the Bay Of Pig Wars All Suffered from PTSD.

So why is the Military & Federal Gov't choosing NOT to provide Proper Treatment & Counseling for Men & Women Suffering from this Illness?

Is it about Money or Saving Human Lives from Suicide?

What's worth more?

Providing Proper Treatment & Disability Checks until these Soldiers are Well enough to continue living Normal Lives or....

Suicide???

In fact, whenever a Service Member Suffering from PTSD Commits Suicide, the Federal Gov’t does NOT want to give their Survivors Life Insurance Money.
This is NOT right either.

As the 2012 Elections approach, Our Service Members are even being used as Pawns to help win those Elections.

Let's Please Continue Praying For Our Men & Women Serving In The U.S. Military.


Friends praise Sgt. Bales, but his past is dark


Bypassed for a promotion and struggling to pay for his house, Robert Bales was eyeing a way out of his job at a Washington state military base months before he allegedly gunned down 16 civilians in an Afghan war zone, records and interviews showed as a deeper picture emerged Saturday of the Army sergeant's financial troubles and brushes with the law.

While Bales, 38, sat in an isolated cell at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.'s military prison Saturday, classmates and neighbors from suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, remembered him as a "happy-go-lucky" high school football player who took care of a special needs child and watched out for troublemakers in the neighborhood.

CBS News correspondent White Johnson reports that, in Lake Tapps, Wash., where he and his family have a home, neighbors still can't believe the 11-year veteran is accused of mass murder.

"I'm shocked. I'm completely shocked," said Kassie Holland. "He was always happy. Happy guy, full of life. I really wouldn't expect it."

"A good guy, got put in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Paul Wohlberg.

But court records and interviews show that the Army veteran -- with a string of commendations for good conduct after four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan -- had joined the Army after a Florida investment job went sour, had a Seattle-area home condemned, struggled to make payments on another and failed to get a promotion or a transfer a year ago.

His legal troubles included charges that he assaulted a girlfriend and, in a hit-and run accident, ran bleeding in military clothes into the woods, court records show. He told police he fell asleep at the wheel and paid a fine to get the charges dismissed, the records show.

Military officials say that after drinking on a southern Afghanistan base, Bales crept away on March 11 to two slumbering villages overnight, shooting his victims and setting many of them on fire. Nine of the 16 killed were children and 11 belonged to one family.

"This is some crazy stuff if it's true," Steve Berling, a high school classmate, said of the revelations about the father of two known as "Bobby" in his hometown of Norwood, Ohio.

Bales hasn't been charged yet in the shootings, which have endangered complicated relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan and threatened to upend U.S. policy over the decade-old war.

His former platoon leader said Saturday Bales was a model soldier inspired by 9/11 to serve who saved lives in firefights on his second of three Iraq missions.

"He's one of the best guys I ever worked with," said Army Capt. Chris Alexander, who led Bales on a 15-month deployment in Iraq.

"He is not some psychopath. He's an outstanding soldier who has given a lot for this country."

But pressing family troubles were hinted at by his wife, Kari, on multiple blogs posted with names like The Bales Family Adventures and BabyBales. A year ago, she wrote that Bales was hoping for a promotion or a transfer after nine years stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord outside Tacoma, Wash.

"We are hoping to have as much control as possible" over the future, Kari Bales wrote last March 25. "Who knows where we will end up. I just hope that we are able to rent our house so that we can keep it. I think we are both still in shock."

After Bales lost out on a promotion to E7 -- a first-class sergeant -- the family hoped to go to either Germany, Italy or Hawaii for an "adventure," she said. They hoped to move by last summer; instead the Army redeployed his unit -- the 2nd Infantry Division of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, named after armored Stryker vehicles -- to Afghanistan.

It would be Bales' fourth tour in a war zone. He joined the military two months after 9/11 and spent more than three years in Iraq during three separate assignments since 2003. His attorney said he was injured twice in Iraq -- once losing part of his foot -- but his 20 or so commendations do not include the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in combat.

Alexander said Bales wasn't injured while he oversaw him during their deployment -- Bales' second in Iraq. He called Bales a "very solid" officer who didn't have more difficulty than his fellow soldiers with battlefield stress. Bales shot at a man aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at his platoon's vehicle in Mosul, Iraq, sending the grenade flying over the vehicle.

"There's no doubt he saved lives that day," Alexander said. The charges he killed civilians is "100 percent out of character for him," he said.

Bales always loved the military and war history, even as a teenager, said Berling, who played football with him in the early 1990s on a team that included Marc Edwards, a future NFL player and Super Bowl champion with the New England Patriots.

"I remember him and the teacher just going back and forth on something like talking about the details of the Battle of Bunker Hill," he said. "He knew history, all the wars."

Bales exulted in the role once he finally achieved it. Plunged into battle in Iraq, he told an interviewer for a Fort Lewis base newspaper in 2009 that he and his comrades proved "the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy."

Bales joined the Army, Berling said, after studying business at Ohio State University -- he attended three years but didn't graduate -- and handled investments before the market downturn pushed him out of the business. Florida records show that Bales was a director at an inactive company called Spartina Investments Inc. in Doral, Fla.; his brother, Mark Bales, and a Mark Edwards were also listed as directors.

"I guess he didn't like it when people lost money," Berling said.

He was struggling to keep payments on his own home in Lake Tapps, a rural reservoir community about 35 miles south of Seattle; his wife asked to put the house on the market three days before the shootings, real estate Philip Rodocker said.

"She told him she was behind in our payments," Rodocker told The New York Times. "She said he was on his fourth tour and it was getting kind of old and they needed to stabilize their finances."

The house was not officially put on the market until Monday; on Tuesday, Rodocker said, Bales' wife called and asked to take the house off the market, talking of a family emergency.

Bales and his wife bought the Lake Tapps home in 2005, according to records, for $280,000; it was listed this week at $229,000. Overflowing boxes were piled on the front porch, and a U.S. flag leaned against the siding.

The sale may have been a sign of financial troubles. Bales and his wife also own a home in Auburn, about 10 miles north, according to county records, but abandoned it about two years ago, homeowners' association president Bob Baggett said. Now signs posted on the front door and window by the city warn against occupying the house.

"It was ramshackled," Baggett said. "They were not dependable. When they left there were vehicles parts left on the front yard...we'd given up on the owners."

The diverging portrait of the sergeant rippled across the country on Saturday.

"It's our Bobby. He was the local hero," said Michael Blevins, who grew up down the street from him in Norwood, Ohio. The youngest of five boys respected older residents, admonished troublemakers and loved children, even helping another boy in the area who had special needs.

In Washington state, court records showed a 2002 arrest for assault on a girlfriend. Bales pleaded not guilty and was required to undergo 20 hours of anger management counseling, after which the case was dismissed.

A separate hit-and-run charge was dismissed in Sumner, Wash.'s municipal court three years ago, according to records. It isn't clear from court documents what Bales hit; witnesses saw a man in a military-style uniform, with a shaved head and bleeding, running away.

When deputies found him in the woods, Bales told them he fell asleep at the wheel. He paid about $1,000 in fines and restitution and the case was dismissed in October 2009.

Dan Conway, a military attorney who represented one of four Lewis-McChord soldiers convicted in the deliberate killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010, said whether legal scrapes affect a soldier's career depends in part on whether they prompt the Army to issue administrative penalties. The punishments are typically recorded in official personnel files.

Over the past decade, Conway said, the military has sometimes been lax in administering such punishments. As a result, soldiers who might be bad apples sometimes remain in service longer than they otherwise might have.

"It's something you want to note," Conway said. "The best predictor of future violence is past violence."

Bales' lawyer, John Henry Browne of Seattle, said he didn't know if his client had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the shootings, but said it could be an issue at trial if experts believe it's relevant.

He also said Friday he didn't know if his client had been drinking the night of the massacre. Browne didn't return telephone calls on Saturday. His legal team has said Browne will be meeting with Bales at Fort Leavenworth next week.


View Larger Map


Sources: AP, ABC News, CBS News, Daily Mail, Google Maps

Robert Bales: How The U.S. Military Lost Him (PTSD, Brain Injury, 4 Deployments)

Staff Sgt Robert Bales Enlisted in the U.S. Army out of Patriotism soon after the 9-11 Attack on the World Trade Center. After 4 Deployments & a Brain Injury he's now being treated like Trash.


LOSING SERGEANT BALES


Staff Sergeant Robert Bales began a series of journeys a decade ago, by plane and car and Humvee and on foot. He started out and has ended up, at least for now, in the Midwest: he is from Ohio, and, on Friday, was flown to Kansas, to the prison at Fort Leavenworth.

Bales had gone to Iraq three times; in 2007, in Najaf, in the middle of a battle, his unit was sent to protect a helicopter that had crashed down: “It was like a match lit up. It looked like a toy with a candle lit underneath it,” he said at the time, according to an Army news release.

In 2010, he was driving in a Humvee when it rolled over, and his head was banged up. He flew to Afghanistan in December—his lawyer, John Henry Browne, told the Times that he didn’t want to go:

The family was counting on him not being redeployed…He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.

Military officials had kept Bales’s name secret since last Sunday, when he left his base and walked by himself for about a mile until he came to a village house, and went inside. When he walked out of that house he went to another, and then another.

Bales has two children of his own, a girl and boy ages three and four. In the three houses he allegedly shot and killed nine children, four of them under the age of six, and seven grown-ups, too.
Bales is thirty-eight. His namelessness was never going to last long, or be useful.

(It still hasn’t been released officially: Bales’s name was leaked, and first reported by Fox News.) The explanation was that his wife and children needed to be kept safe, but they were moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Washington, and sent to Joint Base Lewis-McChord days ago.

(Reporters who walked up to their house found a front porch “cluttered with empty boxes and a snow sled, while toys, a barbecue grill and a weathered hot tub sat in the fenced backyard,” according to the Times.) Transporting Bales hastily from Afghanistan to Kuwait only made both of those countries angry, in Kuwait’s case because the press figured it out before the government there did.

Without a name, Bales had been a phantom of suppositions. Browne had begun to make some of them solid, as had military officials who spoke to the press.

Browne told reporters that Bales had lost part of a foot in Iraq; that was in addition to the head injury. He also said that Bales saw a friend’s leg blown off last week.

Military officials told the Times that Bales had been drinking the night of the murders, and that he was having trouble with his wife.

Browne said that the drinking story was “very offensive,” according to the Post, and that Bales had a “very strong marriage.” Browne has hardly said a sentence that wouldn’t fit in a a closing statement in a defense built around post-traumatic stress disorder or diminished capacity—the loving husband and father broken by the war. But not all explanations can double as absolutions.

One shouldn’t stigmatize veterans by implying that this is normal behavior; but one doesn’t want to isolate them, or leave them stranded on a difficult path, by cheerfully failing to recognize real pain.

The decision to pack Bales on a plane and out of Afghanistan may lead to other journeys.

Will the villagers who saw him that night, like the woman who saw another woman taken by her hair and slammed against a wall, be brought to the trial to testify? (The answer may turn on Bales’s right to confront his accusers.)

The dead left behind in the villages had names and stories and maybe strong marriages, too.

We saw some of their faces in images in which mourners lifted up quilts to show their bodies. Now we are getting snapshots of Bales; neither set should banish the other.






Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' Neighbors Described Afghan Massacre Suspect As 'Good Guy'

Shock echoed down the street in Lake Tapp, Wash., where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, named as the suspect who allegedly went on a rampage, murdering 16 Afghan civilians, was remembered as a family man and "good guy."

"I just can't believe Bob's the guy who did this," neighbor Paul Wohlberg told the Associated Press. "A good guy got put in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Neighbors painted a picture of the career soldier as a family man who spoke little about his deployments.

Kassie Holland, a neighbor, told the Associated Press that she would see Bales playing with his daughter Quincy, 4, and son Bobby, 3.

"My reaction is that I'm shocked," she said. "I can't believe it was him. There were no signs... He always had a good attitude about being in the service. He was never really angry about it. When I heard him talk, he said, it seemed like, yeah, that's my job. That's what I do. He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it."

Bales' platoon leader in Iraq described him to the Washington Post as an exemplary soldier who "saved many a life."

"Bales is still, hands down, one of the best soldiers I ever worked with," Army Capt. Chris Alexander , 28, told the newspaper.

Bales, 38, remains locked up today in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is being housed in a private cell away from other inmates.

Charges are expected soon against the career soldier, who was flown out of Afghanistan and arrived at the Army prison Friday night.

Bales is accused of breaking into several Afghan homes in the middle of the night last Sunday and killing 16 civilians, mostly women and children. He could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Pentagon officials said that Bales' being brought back to the U.S. does not necessarily mean that his military court proceedings will be held in the U.S., holding out the possibility that they could be held in Afghanistan. The Afghan government is demanding that Bales be tried in Afghanistan.

Details of Bales' military record have also emerged and they depict a soldier who has seen intense combat and lost part of a foot.

Bales, who enlisted shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, was first deployed in November 2003 when his unit spent a year in Mosul, Iraq.

In June 2006 he and his unit were sent back to Iraq and their year-long deployment was given a three month extension until September 2007. During that time, he saw duty in Mosul in the north, Bagdad when the city was pressed by militants, and then to Baquba where his unit took major casualties.

His final Iraq deployment was from September 2009 to September 2010 in Diyala province, which was also a hotbed of insurgent activity.

In December 2011, he was ordered to Afghanistan.

Bales' alleged murderous rage is in stark contrast to what he said after a fierce battle in Zarqa, Iraq, in 2007.

"I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day for 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," he told Fort Lewis' Northwest Guardian.

"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," Bales said at the time.

John Henry Browne, Bales' lawyer in Seattle, told The Associated Press Thursday that the soldier had witnessed his friend's leg blown off the day before the massacre.

Bales reportedly spent his entire 11-year career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and lived not too far from the base. Originally from the Midwest, he was deployed with the Second Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in December.

Browne said that he was highly decorated and had once been nominated for a Bronze Star though he did not receive it. He also lost part of a foot because of a combat injury.

"He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's in general very mild-mannered," Browne told the AP.

Bales reportedly left Camp Belambay, where he was stationed to protect Special Operation Forces creating local militias, in the middle of the night wearing night-vision goggles, according to a source. The shooting occurred at 3 a.m. in three houses in two villages in the Panjway district of southern Kandahar province.

In the first village, more than a mile south of the base, he allegedly killed four people in the first house. In the second house, he allegedly killed 11 family members -- four girls, four boys and three adults.

According to a member of the Afghan investigation team and ABC News' interviews, he then walked back to another village past his base and killed one more person. He reportedly returned to the base on his own and turned himself in calmly.

An official told ABC News that the soldier had suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He reportedly went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News. But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.

On Thursday, Browne said that Bales' marriage was "fabulous."

Afghan political leaders have called for the shooter to be tried publicly in Afghan courts, but U.S. military officials say the case will be handled in U.S. military courts. A U.S. military official says Afghan officials were made aware of the transfer before it occurred.


View Larger Map


Sources: ABC News, AP, Daily Mail, New Yorker Magazine, USA Today, Youtube, Google Maps