Accused soldier was family man

Associated Press

LAKE TAPPS, Wash.

On a winding road of wood-frame homes tucked amid towering trees, Robert Bales was the father who joined his two young children for playtime in the yard, a career soldier who greeted neighbors warmly but was guarded when talking about the years he spent away at war.

“When I heard him talk, he said ... ‘Yeah, that’s my job. That’s what I do,’” said Kassie Holland, a next-door neighbor to the soldier who is now suspected of killing 16 Afghan civilians. “He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it.”

Speaking to his fellow soldiers, though, Bales could exult in the role. Plunged into battle in Iraq, he told an interviewer for a base newspaper in 2009 that he and his comrades proved “the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy.”

As reporters swarmed Bales’ neighborhood late Friday, Holland and other neighbors shook their heads, trying but failing to reconcile the man they thought they knew with the allegations against him.

Military officials say that about 3 a.m. last Sunday, the 38-year-old staff sergeant crept away from the Army base where he was stationed in southern Afghanistan, entered two slumbering villages and unleashed a massacre, shooting his victims and setting many of the bodies on fire. Eleven of those killed belonged to one family. Nine were children.

“I can’t believe it was him,” said Holland, recalling a kind-hearted neighbor who grew up in Ohio.

There, he was a “happy-go-lucky” football player and a good student at Norwood High School in a mostly blue-collar Cincinnati suburb of 20,000, said Jack Bouldin, a retired Norwood High School teacher who was Bales’ physical- education teacher.

Bales played alongside Marc Edwards, who went on to be a star running back at Notre Dame and later NFL teams including the 2002 Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. He had a part-time job helping care for a youth with special needs, said teammate Steve Berling, who called him a “great guy with a huge heart.” Bales went on to college at Ohio State University from 1993 to 1996 with a major in economics, but didn’t graduate, according to the university.

Bales had previous brushes with trouble. In 2002, records show, he was arrested at a Tacoma, Wash., hotel, accused of assaulting 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 a nearby town’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.

Bales has not yet been charged in the killings in Afghanistan. He was flown Friday on an Air Force cargo jet from Kuwait to the military’s only maximum- security prison, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he’s being held alone in a cell.