'Nobody was that crazy': Documents show soldiers called Robert Bales 'paranoid' well before killings

Months before he committed an inexplicable massacre, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales showed a split personality to his fellow soldiers at a small outpost in Southern Afghanistan. As far as soldiers who outranked him were concerned, the Tacoma-area soldier was the “even keeled” combat veteran whom leaders could trust. “Nothing would have led me to believe he was capable of doing the thing that he did,” a higher-ranking Special Forces soldier later told military police. But the junior soldiers who took orders from Bales saw a different side to the four-time combat veteran from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. They called him “bipolar,” “crazy” and “paranoid” – the “control freak” who fixated on lights in the...