Video: Sgt Robert Bales was a 'happy guy, full of life' Happy guy, full of life. I really wouldn't expect it," Kassie Holland, a friend and neighbour of Bales, said. The Army Staff Sergeant, a four-tour combat veteran, is suspected of walking off his base in southern Afghanistan on March 11 and gunning down the 16 civilians, including nine children and three women, in a massacre that has brought American-Afghan relations to a new low. Steve Burling who attended high school with Bales in Ohio said he remembered him as a friendly young man, who was talented academically and athletically. "He was one of the better football players and captain and always a heavy lifter in the weight room, very outgoing, funny, big smile," Mr Burling said. The US Army said Bales had spent a total of 37 months in three seperate deployments in Iraq between 2003 and 2010 before starting a fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan. Bales' civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, said Bales had experienced violence firsthand during that period. He saw people killed literally standing right next to him and there was an incident right before these allegations where one of his fellow soldiers was mortally wounded. The soldier stands suspected of perhaps the worst single atrocity committed by a US serviceman in the last decade of foreign wars.