Sergeant Bales’s Shame and Ours

It’s hard not to be haunted by the story of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. Everyone in Norwood, Ohio, where he grew up, seemed to like him: outgoing, a joiner, a middle linebacker who played above his size, thoughtful toward others. He enlisted in the Army after the September 11th attacks, out of patriotism and righteous anger.

Three deployments over six years in Iraq, including one during the “surge” with intense fighting. A wound that cost him part of his foot, then a head injury in a vehicle accident. Frustration at being unable to find and kill the enemy. Over the years, as the deployments pile up and the mission gets lost, he starts to sound jaded, coarsened. Ten years in, he misses out on being promoted to sergeant first class, and he doesn’t land the recruiting job he wanted, or the coveted posting to Germany or Italy. Instead, he’s sent back to the wars—this time to a remote combat outpost in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, where he sees a buddy lose a leg to a land mine.

Back home, his wife loses her job when Washington Mutual goes under, and there are mortgage problems on their house in Washington state. You couldn’t write a more succinct history of what went wrong in the decade after September 11th.