The foremost question on the minds of millions of Americans, Afghans and others these days is this:
What prompted 38-year-old Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to leave his Army post in the middle of the night, walk a mile to an obscure village and slaughter 16 Afghans, including nine children?
Did he simply snap under the pressure of four tours of wartime duty? Did stress from domestic and financial troubles push him to violent sublimation? Did he lose his mind?
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales
The question is profound because there is little in his background — military and personal — that points to a logical conclusion. There’s no “ah-ha” pinpointing of a past experience or criminal history that satisfies one’s curiosity.
In an Op-Ed column published in The New York Times yesterday, David Brooks, a learned and reflective man, posed a general hypothesis that, in my opinion, comes close to yielding the answer.
The column, titled “When the Good Do Bad,” says that Bales’ actions should not be totally surprising because people who seem “mostly good” frequently commit monstrous deeds.
Brooks cites a study conducted by a University of Texas professor who asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and “if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay.”
Brooks says Professor David Buss was “astonished” to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women “had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies.”
Brooks writes:
“These thoughts do not arise from playing violent video games, Buss argues. they occur because we are descended from creatures who killed to thrive and survive. We’re natural-born killers and the real question is not what makes people kill but what prevents them from doing so.”
That deep-seated instinct clashes, Brooks says, with the commonly held view that most people are innately good. But an earlier worldview, Brooks goes on to note, was that “people are a problem to themselves.”
“The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside.”
Brooks notes that John Calvin, a 16th Century, French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation, believed that “babies come out depraved.”
Brooks concludes by saying:
“According to this older worldview, Robert Bales, like all of us, is a mixture of virtue and depravity. His job is to struggle daily to strengthen the good and resist the evil, policing small transgressions to prevent larger ones. If he didn’t do that, and if he was swept up in a whirlwind, then even a formerly good man is capable of monstrous acts that shock the soul and sear the brain.”
The phrase — “policing small transgressions to prevent larger ones” — really struck home with me.
Don’t we all struggle with that? Another way of putting is that we try to hide and shackle the demons within. Normally, when we screw up in a relatively small way — like offending a friend or saying something mean to a spouse or partner — we try, afterwards, to think it through and figure out how we could have avoided the offense, how we should have exercised patience to circumvent a regrettable course of action. And, normally, we say to ourselves, “I won’t let that happen again. Next time, I’m going to be think through my options and refrain from lashing out.”
The Bales case — and the question “Why?” — reminds me of a local case, perhaps the most shocking and notorious murder in the history of Olathe.
It was the early-morning hours of Feb. 28, 1982, killing of 25-year-old David Harmon, who was married to a woman whose father was superintendent of this area’s Church of the Nazarene.
Harmon, a loan officer at a bank, was bludgeoned while he slept in the duplex that he and his wife, Melinda Harmon, rented. He was beaten mercilessly and viciously, struck more than a dozen times, full force, by an attacker wielding a crowbar. It was so bad that one of David Harmon’s eyeballs popped out of its socket and landed on the floor several feet away.
Police completely botched the case, partly because Melinda’s father, William Lambert, intimidated detectives; threw a fit at police headquarters and refused to let them interview his daughter, even though she was an adult and police could have persisted.
Mangelsdorf (KS Dept. of Corrections photo, 2011)
The person wielding the crowbar was a 21-year-old man named Mark Mangelsdorf, who was either conducting an affair with Melinda or wanted to. Melinda aided and abetted the murder, and, in fact, was in the room when the beating started.
Because the investigation was “a board certified disaster,” as Marek Fuchs wrote in his 2009 book about the case, “A Cold-Blooded Business,” Harmon and Mangelsdorf got away with murder for 23 years.
After the murder, Harmon and Mangelsdorf went their separate ways, with Harmon marrying an Ohio dentist, Mark Raisch, and having children with him.
As for Mangelsdorf — here’s where the analogy to Robert Bales comes into play — he became a big executive, first with Pepsi and later with a couple of other companies and ended up in a $1.3 million, three-story house in an area abutting Long Island Sound. He was married to another executive, and they were respected members of the community.
Melinda Raisch (KS Dept. of Corrections photo, 2010)
In 2005, however, the case was reopened, and both Raisch and Mangelsdorf ended up coming back to Kansas and pleading guilty to second-degree murder. (An interview that Harmon gave to two resourceful Olathe detectives proved to be the turning point.)
Each was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Both remain in custody — she in Topeka, he in Lansing — but both apparently are now eligible for parole.
Where Bales was able to contain his demons until he was 38, Mangelsdorf lost control of his at age 21 but then managed to corral them and go on to live an exemplary life.
In his book, Fuchs uses a different metaphor for the Mangelsdorf case — a lion getting out of its cage.
“Mark managed to put the lion back,” Fuchs wrote. “And keep him locked up. This was not a crime committed at a distance, but close-up, one that sent a man’s eyeball flying across the room. And while it was partially a crime of passion, he had planned it for months, lying in wait with a crowbar in his possession for a full week. But the lion was, forever afterward, caged and gentle.”
Unfortunately for the world, and particularly for the victims and for the United States’ world image, the lion in Sgt. Bales got out, too.
Unlike Mangelsdorf, though, Bales probably won’t be getting a chance to re-cage the lion and redirect his life in conventional society.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
An excellent reminder, Jim, that we are all capable of horrific things.
Still, we should not forget the absolutely tragic aspects of this soldier’s case. This guy did 4 tours of combat; that’s FOUR TOURS!!! For anyone here, safely at home, I think what he went through, on a daily basis, is just impossible to imagine. I do not envy anyone who might be asked to judge him, or his actions.
I think it’s awful that the troops have to go on so many deployments; I would think once, twice at the most, is plenty. Iraq was a waste of time, money and lives, and now that bin Laden is dead, I don’t see why we can’t get out of Afghanistan.
Jim, I think the amazing thing here is that we haven’t seen more of these bad-situations-turned-ugly given the fact that we’ve been over in Iraq and Afghanistan for several years now, and any number of soldiers have had to endure multlple tours of duty. Yes, we are all quite capable of doing ugly things under the right circumstances. The apostle Paul could not forget his role in the stoning of Stephen and had to live with that the rest of his life, and even after his conversion to Christianity it really bothered him to know that he continued to do evil when he so desired to do good. That internal war never ends.
I am not sure comparing these two is really comparing apples and apples. One was motivated by lust; the other very likely by tremendous life or death situations over four tours of duty in a war zone while he was likely losing his home and possibly family back in the states. Bales also had a brain injury and lost part of his foot.
A more fair comparison might be between Bales and Lt. William Calley who was involved in the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam.
inside each of us is a demon just waiting for it’s chance..as soon as i heard the story i immediately thought about calley and my lai. there are stories like this in every war..at some point we all break under the pressure, be it “in-country” or at home the pressure can be unbearable and the demons work their way to the front. we’ll never know what made bales do what he did and he has already lawyered up so the legal system will now really muddy the waters..the one thing we can be sure of is that this will not be the last time this will happen..all we can hope for is that those on the front lines can control their demons and come home safe…
Who in the hell are WE to judge? Both situations are tragic and neither will ever be able to be explained with any scientific certainty or moral understanding.
Man’s inhumanity to man is evident from the beginning of time, whether that be Biblical or evolutionary.
I’ve certainly had fantasies and dreams of torture and homicide that would make Hannibal Lecter cringe. Modern psychology says it’s normal and healthy to have those “fantasies.” For some, the fantasy itself is release enough. For some, it is not. We can slice and dice all manner of post mortem cranium looking for fact, fiction and anomaly for answers. Unless there’s an app that allows us to brain scan for those every day, we’re back to Sh*t Happens.
We all have moral lines that we are unwilling to cross. Be that cheating on a spouse or bludgeoning someone to death with a tire iron. Problem is we’ll never know where that line is until we walk up to it.
There are no coincidences in life. Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is crystal clear; other times not so much. Until we all accept the challenge of our Lord and Savior and put the safety and existence of our fellow man ahead of our own, shi*t will continue to happen. And for those non-believers, you have to admit that the idea of putting your fellow man’s needs ahead of your own is a noble and worthy goal.
Rev. Smartman — Thank you for putting the asterisk between the “i” and the “t.”
Only out of respect for you and the decorum you are trying to maintain Fitz!
We continue to wear the mantle of “Best Family Blog” in Kansas City. (I’ll have to convince the Pitch to establish that as a category in its next “Best of…” survey.)
Much of my time in grad school was spent trying to understand what created the “good” Nazi. Was this something unique to Germany, totalitarian regimes in general? I plowed through the Authoritarian Personality research and much of the social history of the Third Reich in books like Proctor’s Racial Hygiene and Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s and Milgram’s studies along with several others in that genre and pretty much came to the conclusion that anyone, regardless education and training, regardless of country, race, creed, or nationality was capable of becoming the good Nazi. One final piece in that puzzle was supplied a couple of years back when a researcher at the Truman Library stumbled onto some notes President Truman had made regarding the conduct of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, comparing them unfavorably with the Nazis.
Lest some readers misunderstand the term “good Nazi,” I’ll clarify that what the term refers to would better be expressed as the “perfect Nazi.”
Ever the editor. Thank you.
I don’t know if he’s still there, but there was a professor at KCMO, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, who also did research in this area in a book entitled Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times. Never found the time to meet him.