Lembcke: Was Sgt. Bales 'broken'?

Lembcke: Was Sgt. Bales 'broken'?:

'via Blog this'

"By 2008, most major news organizations had done feature stories or specials on the mental health status of veterans. The most gripping was a New York Times series begun in January of that year. According to the Times, 121 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were charged with homicide for killings committed after their return home. About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends and children. Some of the veterans' lawyers successfully cobbled war-trauma defenses, an injection of PTSD-as-alibi thinking into the culture. 

...

There are stones yet to be turned over in Bales' case. In the matter of his buddy's leg being blown off, for instance, what did he actually see? But for now, it seems too simple to merge his murderous outburst into the "profoundly broken" and failed-at-life narrative. The thought that he may have killed in order to establish his combat bona fides is unsettling but more suggestive of what else is broken. It isn't the Robert Baleses of America that need fixing so much as the America that expects from its men what they can't possibly deliver. 

"'Cool."

That's the way Sgt. Robert Bales described his combat encounter in Iraq in 2007. Bales is now charged in the March 11 killing of 17 Afghan civilians, nine of them children. As we search for ways to understand this horrific event, we need to look beyond the character of Sgt. Bales, and even his record of military service, to the culture of American masculinity."