A world away from the isolated camp
in the plains southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where U.S.
soldiers seized homemade bombs and weapons caches in nighttime
raids, Robert Bales’s other life was crumbling.

The Army sniper’s home in Lake Tapps, Washington, where
wife Karilyn once made Impossibly Easy taco pie and watched
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with his young daughter, was to be sold
for $50,000 less than what they’d paid. They’d already defaulted
on another home, scheduled for public auction in 2009 after the
couple fell $15,644.19 behind in payments. Bales had failed to
get the promotion that stood to ease their financial stress.

Sometime before dawn on March 11, the Army alleges, the
decorated veteran hiked to two villages and killed 16
Afghanistan civilians including women and children in their
homes. A U.S. official has said family stress and alcohol may
have combined to prompt the shootings. Friends, neighbors and
experts in post-traumatic stress disorder contend that something
else must have driven a man they know as unfailingly polite to
such horrific acts.

“It is PTSD plus something,” said Harry Croft, a former
Army doctor who has reviewed about 7,000 cases of post-traumatic
stress disorders. “To kill innocent women and children
indicates to me that something happened during these killings
that was simply more than the product of PTSD,” said Croft,
who’s the author of “I Always Sit with My Back to the Wall,” a
book aimed at people who suffer from PTSD.

‘Not Thinking’

“He was not thinking of his family,” Croft said. “I do
not think he was thinking about the children. I do not think he
was thinking about the women. I do not think he was thinking
about the reprisals.”

The polite neighbor who answered “yes, ma’am” also had a
dark side, once completing court-ordered anger counseling to
resolve an assault charge. A high school football player who
grew up in a Cincinnati suburb, he was unfulfilled in early
attempts to establish a direction in life. Bales left college
without finishing and helped start an investment firm in Florida
that closed after 16 months.

The military he entered less than two months after the
Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks gave him a purpose. It also
burdened his young family, as four combat deployments lasting
more than 1,000 days left Bales’s wife alone caring for their
children, Quincy, now 5, and Bobby, 2, according to a blog she
kept chronicling struggles with housework and appointments.
Their stresses were compounded by $506,250 in mortgage debt they
took on in 2006 at the height of the U.S. housing boom, records
show.

Military Families

The nation’s military families are taking the brunt of
repeated deployments as Middle East engagements continue more
than 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 107,000 of
570,000 active-duty troops have been dispatched more than three
times since Sept. 11, military figures show. About 21 percent of
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who sought medical treatment from
2004 to 2009 were diagnosed with PTSD, the Congressional Budget
Office said in a February report.

While none of that can excuse or explain the murder of
women and children, former soldiers say it does show why an all-
volunteer force prosecuting a decade of war may show strains.

A soldier at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Bales was
based, threatened to blow up the barracks over the weekend in
the latest incident at a station under scrutiny for suicides,
killings and other crimes. Military police took the unnamed
suspect into custody, according to Lieutenant Colonel Gary
Dangerfield, a spokesman for the installation.

‘Repetitive Deployments’

“We’re going on 11 years since this started,” Mike
Courts, a retired army colonel who is now a council member in
the nearby city of DuPont, said in an interview last week. “I
think we’re seeing the results of repetitive deployments.”

John Henry Browne, Bales’s lawyer, called his client “in
general very mild-mannered” with “a very strong marriage” at
a news briefing last week, denying that alcohol or marital
stress were factors. The possibility of post-traumatic stress
disorder and the adequacy of his screening for a concussive head
injury will be examined, according to the lawyer.

The U.S. Army will probably file “really bad” charges on
March 22 against Bales, Browne said in an interview today.

“We know what they are going to say — it’s something
really bad,” Browne said in Lansing, Kansas, near the Fort
Leavenworth base where Bales is detained. The two men expect to
meet “all day today and all day tomorrow,” said Browne, whose
only previous contact with Bales was a brief phone call last
week.

Youngest of Five

Navy Captain John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, declined
today to comment on Browne’s remarks except to say “look to
Kabul for release of the charges,” a reference to the U.S.
Army’s operations there. Kirby said Bales also has been assigned
military counsel.

Bales, 38, grew up in Norwood, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb of
19,000, on a residential street near a United Dairy Farmers’
plant. He graduated from Norwood High School in 1991.

The youngest of five brothers, Bales was a guard and
linebacker on the football team, said Michael Blevins, a
neighbor who considered Bales his role model.

“He was always the one to stand up for the little guy,”
Blevins, 35, said, remembering that Bales spent time with a
neighbor boy who had cerebral palsy.

Sitting on the porch of his mother’s house across from the
former Bales family home, Blevins kept saying of the killings in
Afghanistan: “That’s not Bobby.”

Football Team

Bales starred on Norwood’s team before he lost his starting
middle linebacker position as a junior to freshman Marc Edwards,
according to “Odyssey: From Blue Collar, Ohio to Super Bowl
Champion,” a 2010 biography of Edwards by Aaron M. Smith.
Edwards would go on to play for the New England Patriots and
other National Football League teams.

The NFL player would remain friendly with Bales, crediting
his teammate as an early mentor who helped him learn the
position. “That was huge motivation for me,” Edwards is quoted
as saying in the book. “This guy was a junior and one of the
stars of the team and he’s sucking up his pride to help me
out.”

Edwards didn’t respond to a request for comment left on his
home telephone.

Stock Broker

After high school, Bales first studied physical therapy and
then decided he wanted to get into finance, Blevins said.

He attended the College of Mount St. Joseph, a private,
liberal arts school in suburban Cincinnati, for two semesters in
1991 to 1992, said Jill Eichhorn, the college’s communications
manager. Bales went to Ohio State University in Columbus from
1993 to 1996 and studied economics, though he didn’t graduate,
university spokesman Jim Lynch said in a telephone interview.

In 1997, Edwards and Bales, identified in the book as a
Columbus, Ohio stock broker, spent a weekend together at the PGA
Memorial Tournament in Columbus watching golf, “drinking a
couple beers,” and singing at a dueling piano bar, according to
the book.

“People were watching us make complete idiots of
ourselves, but we were having an absolute ball,” Edwards says
in the book. “We were talking to girls, we were dancing. It was
fun.”

Before enlisting, Bales lived in Jensen Beach, Florida,
according to the Army, and records there show he registered to
vote as a Republican in St. Lucie County.

Joining the Army

Bales started Spartina Investments Inc., based in Doral,
Florida, in 1999, with his brother, Mark, and a person named
Mark Edwards listed as directors, according to state records.
The company dissolved 16 months later. Manuel Arthur Mesa, shown
in the records as an attorney for the company, didn’t return a
phone message.

Bales’ enlistment in the Army, on Nov. 8, 2001, set him on
a new course. He won medals for superior performance and spoke
proudly of his combat experiences. He spent nine years at Lewis-
McChord, the largest base in the western U.S., in a Stryker
brigade of the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment.

“He wanted to be a soldier,” said Tim Burgess, 59, a
retired warehouse worker who was a neighbor of Bales’s in
Auburn, Washington, and remembered him talking about it with a
sense of duty more than “rah-rah-rah.”

Court records show Bales was arrested at a hotel in Tacoma,
Washington, in 2002 for investigation of assault in a case
Browne said involved a woman he dated before he married his
wife, according to the Associated Press. The lawyer didn’t
return a call seeking comment on the case.

Not Guilty

Bales pleaded not guilty and underwent 20 hours of anger
management counseling, and the charge was dismissed, the news
service said.

He left for combat in Iraq a year later, serving from Nov.
1, 2003, to Oct. 1, 2004, the Army says.

The next year, he married Karilyn Primeau, according to the
blog his wife later set up. She now works for Amaxra Inc., a
Redmond, Washington, business communications company, according
to the firm. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as an associate
technical project manager and says she earlier worked for
Washington Mutual, the Seattle lender that filed for bankruptcy
in 2008 and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase Co. (JPM)

“The Bales Family Adventures” blog and the companion
“BabyBales” site were closed to public view after Robert Bales
was identified as the shooting suspect. The sites were linked to
others associated with Karilyn Bales and an e-mail that uses her
maiden name. Karilyn Bales didn’t respond to an e-mailed request
for comment.

War Injury

The couple lived in Auburn at a house Karilyn owned for
about a year. They moved when Karilyn became pregnant, according
to neighbor Burgess. Bales was nursing a war-related injury to
his foot and walked with a pronounced limp, he said. Bales’s
lawyer has said he lost part of his foot.

“He wanted to go back over there,” Burgess said. “His
mission was to rehabilitate himself, to get back into another
combat situation and get over there.”

Karilyn’s dad, who drove a brand-new Ford diesel pickup
truck, took the couple out on his boat, Burgess said. Bales
bought a new Ford Mustang, he said.

Edith Bouvette, 52, remembers when Bales once helped an
elderly neighbor fix her roof. “He was always, ‘yes, ma’am, yes
sir,’” Bouvette said. “Total military.”

The Baleses bought a four-bedroom home with 2.25 bathrooms
in Lake Tapps, Washington, in 2005 for $280,000, county property
records show. They rented the other home to neighbors, according
to Burgess, vice president of the local homeowners association.

Surge in Iraq

On June 19, 2006, Army records show, Bales returned to war,
where his service coincided with the surge in Iraq ordered by
George W. Bush.

With Karilyn’s baby on the way, the couple borrowed
$506,250 on two residential properties in October 2006, public
records show — $178,500 on the Auburn house and $327,750 on the
Lake Tapps home. Karilyn had a power of attorney to sign on her
husband’s behalf, the records show.

While it’s unclear what his wife was earning, the debt was
a stretch on the salary of a staff sergeant — more than $60,000
a year, based on military pay scales.

“I’ve rarely seen staff sergeants who lived in $300,000
houses,” said John S. Odom Jr., a retired Air Force judge
advocate and partner in Jones, Odom Politz LLP law firm in
Shreveport, Louisiana. “Other than the fact that his job was as
an infantryman carrying a rifle and supervising a squad of
infantrymen, he isn’t different than if he had been a lineman
for the local power company.”

Returning Home

Daughter Quincy arrived Dec. 11, 2006, Karilyn Bales wrote
in her blog. As Quincy, 7 pounds, eight ounces, was getting her
first bath, Karilyn’s cell phone rang. “It was Bob calling from
the airport in Kuwait!!” she wrote. “It was so good to hear
his voice. I told him how the birth went and he got to hear
Quincy squeaking in the background.”

Returning home with the baby a few days later, her phone
rang again. It was Bales; he was in Dallas and would be home
soon. “We would be a family,” she wrote.

The next month, in January 2007, Bales and his unit fought
in the Battle of Najaf near the Euphrates River. They found
villagers and family members of Iraqi fighters in the aftermath
of the battle, also known as the Battle of Zarqa, which left 250
insurgents dead, according to a 2009 report by the Northwest
Guardian, the military-authorized newspaper at his base.

They piled the injured on litters. Some had lost limbs or
eyes, according to the report.

‘Dead People’

“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,”
Bales was quoted as saying.

His second deployment ended in September 2007. A year
later, Bales was charged in the municipal court of a town near
his home after a single-vehicle rollover that damaged property,
AP reported. He told police he fell asleep at the wheel and paid
a fine to get the charges dismissed, AP said.

Bales’s wife wrote of decorating Easter eggs, swimming at a
local pool and trying to keep up with dishes and laundry.
“Quincy is a much better egg hunter than last year, which was
really fun to witness and enjoy with Bob,” she wrote.

In August 2009, Bales left for Iraq for a third time. “I
had bad dreams and a pit in my tummy from missing Bob,” Karilyn
wrote. “Thankfully I got a text message from Bob at 2pm, he was
on the plane to Maine.”

Home Auction Scheduled

Two months later, the couple’s Auburn house was scheduled
to be auctioned at the entrance to the King County
Administration Building.

The Baleses owed $15,644.19 on the house plus $1,333.46 in
trustee’s fees, according to the auction notice. The auction
subsequently was canceled without explanation. A Bank of America
Corp. filing in King County in August 2011 said the couple was
$16,978 in arrears on the rental property.

The home, visited yesterday, is a discolored light blue.
Tire rims, an oil pan and part of a drivetrain rust outside in
the driveway. A “Do Not Occupy” sign from the Auburn building
department is displayed on the door, along with other signs in
the window warning against unauthorized entry.

The homeowners association president, Bob Baggett, said the
couple had lapsed on making $120 annual maintenance dues
payments for at least two years.

‘Hard Times’

“I suspect they fell on hard times financially,” Baggett
said. “It could have been a matter of priorities.”

In March 2011, with their household further expanded by son
Bobby, Bales failed to win promotion to sergeant first class,
Karilyn wrote in her blog. The family was “disappointed after
all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made
for his love of his country, family and friends.”

Bales, with 10 years of military service, would have
received about $431 more a month for a total of $5,673 a month
in salary if he had been promoted to sergeant first class,
according to a pay calculator on the website of Army Times
Publishing Co.

They hoped to make the best of the situation by going on an
“adventure” instead — with assignments in Germany, Italy or
Hawaii their top options, Karilyn Bales wrote.

“Who knows where we will end up,” she said. “I just hope
that we are able to rent out the house so we can keep it. I
think we are both still in shock.”

Instead, in December, Bales left for Afghanistan, the Army
says.

“He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle
East were over, and then literally overnight that changed,”
lawyer Browne told reporters last week.

‘Force Protection’

The accused soldier’s job in Afghanistan was providing
“force protection” for a Special Forces compound, according to
a U.S. official familiar with the case.

The Panjwai plain where he was based is densely dotted with
villages whose local mullahs helped found the Taliban movement
in 1994. The district has remained a Taliban stronghold since
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, took
control in heavy fighting in 2006.

U.S. forces there typically conduct joint patrols with the
Afghan National Army in the villages surrounding their bases,
seizing homemade bombs, weapons caches and hashish, according to
ISAF news releases over the past seven months.

On March 12, villagers in southern Afghanistan buried 16
men, women and children shot dead in their homes after the
killings by the accused soldier later identified as Bales.

‘Short Sale’

Back at home, Karilyn had approached realtor Phillip
Rodocker to list their house in Lake Tapps as a “short sale,”
for less than the mortgage balance, according to Rodocker, who
listed the house. Purchased for $280,000, it went on the market
March 12 for $229,000. Karilyn called on March 13 and asked to
cancel the sale because of a “family emergency,” Rodocker
said.

Bales’s friends say they don’t want to believe the charges
are true. Blevins said he exchanged Facebook messages with the
soldier about three weeks ago in which Bales said he was looking
forward to his son’s 3rd birthday.

“They always say you never know somebody, what’s in their
heart, but that kid’s got the biggest heart anywhere there is,”
said Blevins’ sister Michelle Caddell, who also lives on the
street where he grew up. “I can’t see that kind of person
living inside there, unless something completely destroyed his
whole entire being.”

To contact the reporters on this story:
Peter Robison in Seattle at
robison@bloomberg.net;
James Nash in Los Angeles at
jnash24@bloomberg.net;
Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at
avekshin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
John Walcott at
jwalcott9@bloomberg.net;
Jeffrey Taylor at
jtaylor48@bloomberg.net