According to my wife, E-7 has gotten fairly competitive the last few rounds. She's seen good, experienced NCOs get passed over more than once, including in the most recent round.

The medical field at the moment has plenty of folks for the slots. There are many jobs that don't have a very big allocation of personnel. Those are the tight positions.

The whole idea of the Military Personnel System is to take care of the fighters to include making sure there is lots of upward mobility in those jobs. The medical department ends up sucking hind tit as it continues to be top heavy. Most of the jobs aren't that physically stressful with the exception of Combat Medic. Folks tend to stick around until the they either get promoted or get passed over and reach a retirement point (E-6s can only stay 20 years, E-7 24 years, E-8/9 30 years.
Combat arms on the other hand has quite a high "turnover rate". It sounds to me that he is just has 10 years in. This upcoming promotion board would be really looking at him as he is older than 30 and just has 10 years in. I pinned my E-7 on at 12 years in a very crowded and competitive field of Army Pharmacy. My last promotion to E-8 was as a combat medic (17 years). My record was really good and the board considered I should have been promoted in Pharmacy, however there weren't enough slots available. I was offed the promotion as a Combat Medic since that was may secondary job (like everyone else in the medical field) as a 1st Sergeant/Master Sergeant. The Pharmacy job field capped out at E-8 Master Sgt. If you get promoted to E-9 Sergeant Major you do it as a Combat Medic.

Cheers...

It's an insight into what matters a lot and what doesn't matter so much to the Afghani people. As SueDB says, life is cheap and faith is strong in Afghanistan (and the Middle East, for that matter).

Here, here!!

Right behind the investigators was a guy with a cash box to take care of "loose ends" like paying the families for the damage (1K to 2K dollars per death). That is really cheap compared to the US where Ford through their Pinto experience settled on about $250,000.00/per American in liability.

I grew up with Bobby and am still in shock. Absolutely something that the Bobby I knew would not do.

I saw a program some years back about the terrible effecs the falklands war had on the british servicemen who faught it. I can only imagine the horrible damage 5 tours would do to a person.

I think that I am responsible for the idea that Bales served five tours of duty in war zones. As the story unfolded, it became clearer that this was his first tour of duty in Afghanistan and thus his fourth tour of duty.

I agree with your point. What is odd is that some people, Sarah Palin included (listen to the end of her screeching video about being the mother of Trig), appear to believe that a soldier serves only one year in a combat zone. I doubt that this has ever been true of the American military.

In an all-volunteer military of its present size, it would seem inevitable that a soldier (of whatever rank) will serve several tours of duty in a combat zone, particularly if the U.S. has military operations underway in several countries.

There is a rather sickening take on this on the Antiwar.com blog. It states its mission

Justin Raimondo, the Editorial Director of the Antiwar.com blog, describes himself as an author for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His March 12, 2012, column was Who Are the ‘Terrorists’?: The pattern of American atrocities in wartime. Knowing that these excerpts are not fully representative of the entire column, I found these paragraphs to be especially disturbing:

Vietnam was an individual 13 month tour as was the tours in the Mid East a while ago. Now they do the tour (combat units) as the entire unit rather than have a unit of replacements constantly going in/out of country.

What the whole screed tell me is that you DON'T send soldiers to be policemen. Policemen are trained to calm things down and deal with the population. Soldiers have 2 jobs. Kill the other guy and destroy their things. Other uses are just sidelines that don't last long.

Abu Ghrab (sp) was a total failure of leadership teaching the values of the Army. You also had reservists that only train 1 weekend a month trying to use that training. When they exhaust the legal ways, then they tend to go to the "other" methods when the command does not watch (absent from the site) nor care about. Ask COL Karpinski (ret) (formerly General Karpinski)

It is about leadership and command/control. When you see a debacle, you can be sure the leadership FAILED somewhere along the line. The fact that more incompetent (can't make em talk the legal way, lets try some other things...). The ignorance of allowing a female to serve in an Arab Male Prison just shows how insensitive and incompetent the US Army can be. Alan West committed a war crime, but was elected to Congress - riddle me that. He use an unauthorized method of 'extracting information' and was disciplined for it, but not really hard. When incidents which involve senior officers get swept under the rug until someone finds out about it, and they get basically OFF -- It send signals to the enlisted folks that threatening to kill a prisoner, then discharging a firearm next to the victim etc is OK. Col West did it and he didn't get in trouble (not until later).

Florida voters disgust me sending a disciplined war criminal to Congress (even though he served his punishment)

The Army relies heavily - extremely heavily - on the mid-grade officers and NCOs. The staff sergeants, sergeants first class, first sergeants, captains, and majors are the core professional cadre for most units. Go much below those ranks, and people are still learning the basics of leadership. Go much above, and they become too few and far removed to have the same impact. That's probably always been the case, but it's particularly true in the modern volunteer force.

Soldiers in those pay grades almost always have more than 4 years in. The typical soldier in the mid-leadership positions probably has more like 8-12 in. It's very rare to see anyone in any of these pay grades who has yet to deploy. Most have probably deployed 2-4 times. And just looking at the number of deployments understates the burden.

As SueDB has pointed out, the Vietnam-era Army relied on individual replacements. The units remained in the combat zone, and individual soldiers rotated through the units on a 12-month cycle. This practice received a great deal of criticism, and was abandoned in favor of the current practice of rotating entire units as a block. That, combined with the deployment tempo, has led to an army where the combat arms soldiers have spent most of the last decade in one of three states: deployed, just back from deployment, or preparing for a deployment. In addition, the Army has undergone quite a bit of restructuring during the current conflicts, with the restructuring being squeezed in between deployments. Preparing for deployment typically involves one or more multi-week training deployments. Meanwhile, the training side of the house has had to restructure training to account for lessons learned, increase training to account for the increase in the size of the military, and do it all without having received a substantial increase in personnel or funding of their own.

In practical terms, what this means is that the mid-level leadership of the army (not to mention a lot of the more senior leadership) has spent most or all of the last 10 years either deployed or working long hours. That's not good for family stress. Many of these same families - including the Bales family - have been very hard hit by the housing downturn. VA loans make it possible for soldiers to buy homes with little money down, while frequent moves can result in families having little choice in when to enter the real estate market. With home prices that are either stable or rising, that hasn't typically been a problem. But a lot of homes lost a lot of value. The income side is a slightly different picture. The active duty member of the family has job security, but the civilian spouses do not. When the Army says move, it's time to move. If the new locale is hurting more economically than the old, and the civilian spouse can not find work, that's the way it is. And even on-base preferential hiring can't do much to offset that if the federal government is shrinking and/or there's a hiring freeze in effect.

Active duty soldiers who have been deployed have a substantially higher risk for various types of mental illness. That's well-known. There has not been anywhere near the volume of research on the rates of mental illness among the families of deployed soldiers, but the research that has been done suggests that there are substantially elevated risks for depression, anxiety, and other conditions. The family stress, in turn, is obviously going to lead to more stress on the soldier. I know divorce rates have taken off. I'm pretty sure substance abuse has, too.

There are a lot of people under a lot of stress. That group includes the majority of the current mid-grade officers and NCOs in the US Army, and the majority of their families.

None of this excuses murder, and I'm not trying to. I'm just trying to explain why a soldier snapping - no matter how obscenely vile the consequences may be - does not surprise me.

With all of the Vietnam vets I have seen/treated/served with as you, this doesn't surprise me as John Wayne Gacy was just one in a huge group of people also. You just don't know about some folks.
There were many rumors of trophy taking in Vietnam; fingers - in which my neighbor participated in when he was drafted and sent to Nam. Nice guy when he left...he was really dark, strange, and very aloof when he came back. Had developed one hell of a temper. Almost killed his old man (who was a prick anyway) one time.

CBS tweet on Bales' debt:

https://twitter.com/#!/CharlieKayeCBS/s ... 6625027073



No details, but this would be hard to understand. Military is usually pretty concerned about this kind of problem and works with troops to get it taken care of ... or else. When I was in the Navy, the commander (a Captain) at a base where I was stationed got eased out for getting in over his head. It's also hard to understand from the point of what an E-5 earns.

Well, that explains the million bucks, but it doesn't explain why the Army would enlist someone with that kind of problem. They had to have known.

Shag: It was common practice for troubled young men to go into the army to escape jail time. Teenage boys during the Vietnam era would get special permission in some cases if they were younger than 18, to join the army from the judge and serve tours instead of time. While the military tends to work you over on the physical, I think it turns a blind eye to trouble on the doorstep.

This soldier though seems to have a white-collar crime tendency prior to enlistment. Perhaps LMK will weigh in here as IANAP. Some types of non -violent criminal behavior might suggest a strong bipolar disorder which may not manifest until adulthood. And such a disorder can potentially trigger violent problems in the future. Bipolar issues can be mild in some people but extreme in others. And here we have the most extreme example imaginable. Should the military court be lenient? I am sorry to say no, but I don't believe in the death penalty either. If he had the intelligence to fleece a couple of a million dollars prior to his enlistment, I have to think he was cognizant of what he was doing when he murdered 16 people. That was an act of rage. The fact he slipped off base without anyone seeing him says he knew what he was doing.

This New York Times article has some of the personal side story of Robert Bales:
"At Home, Asking How ‘Our Bobby’ Became War Crime Suspect",http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/us/sgt-robert-bales-from-small-town-ohio-to-afghanistan.html?_r=1&ref=robertbales

Tol - I was there in the 60s, and some of my high school buds had their options handed to them by a judge. Also served as a recruiting officer for several months in the early 70s and know that the military will overlook misdemeanors and even lesser felonies when recruiting people, but they will not knowingly sign up someone who's dragging around several hundred thousand dollars in debt. My wife is a retired Air Force officer and she agrees.

What I'm saying is that there's a high probability that Sgt. Bales concealed some of his background when he enlisted.

I also believe his actions were far too calculated to be explained as an act of rage. It's a lot more complicated than that and hopefully we'll get some answers from the investigation and trial.

But who says he doesn't have a fund somewhere that is paying off the debt???

From the same article:



It sounds like he might have been running away from his problems.

Now they know where he is going to reside for the balance of his lifetime.

More news on a 2002 assault charge against Bales.

Casino Incident Involved Bales

Man flees crime, joins army, gets sent to front. Isn't this the plot of The Nine Tailors?

Or any old French Foreign Legion movie.

Our military and ex-military members can speak most knowledgeably to this, but militaries have for a very long time played a role in getting young lives restarted on a better path. That was probably true for the Athenians. I hope that the U.S. military continues to be capable of doing that. It seems that they might not have succeeded with Robert Bales, but at least he had a chance after his financial blowup.