With formal charges looming against his client within days, the lawyer for an Army sergeant suspected in the horrific nighttime slaughter of 16 Afghan villagers flew to Kansas and was preparing for his first face-to-face meeting with the 10-year veteran. 
 
 A white van, believed to be transporting Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, leaves Kansas City International Airport Friday, March 16, 2012, in Kansas City, Mo. Bales is is accused of gunning down 16 Afghan women... (Associated Press) 
 
 The home of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, is shown, Friday, March 16, 2012, in Lake Tapps, Wash. Bales has not yet been charged. He was being flown... (Associated Press) 
 
 Boxes and a U.S. flag sit Friday, March 16, 2012, in Lake Tapps, Wash., on the front porch of the home of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians. (AP Photo/Ted... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Aug. 23, 2011 Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System photo, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, right, participates in an exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. Five days... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sunday, March 11, 2012 file photo, men stand next to blood stains and charred remains inside a home where witnesses say Afghans were killed by a U.S. soldier in Panjwai, Kandahar province... (Associated Press) 
 
 John Henry Browne of Seattle said he planned to meet Monday with Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is being held in an isolated cell at Fort Leavenworth's military prison. 
 
 Bales, 38, hasn't been charged in the March 11 shootings, which have endangered relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan and threaten to upend U.S. policy over the decade-old war. But formal charges are expected to be filed within a week and if the case goes to court the trial will be held in the United States, said a legal expert with the U.S. military familiar with the investigation. 
 
 That expert said charges were still being decided and that the location for any trial had not yet been determined. If the suspect is brought to trial, it is possible that Afghan witnesses and victims would be flown to the United States to participate, he said. 
 
 Military lawyers say once attorneys involved in the initial investigation of an alleged crime involving a service member have what they believe to be a solid understanding of what happened and are satisfied with the evidence collected, they draft charges and present them to a commander. That person then makes a judgment on whether there is probable cause to believe that an offense was committed and that the accused committed it. 
 
 That commander then "prefers" the charges to a convening authority, who typically is the commander of the brigade to which the accused is assigned but could be of higher rank. 
 
 Bales' defense team said in a statement late Saturday that "it is too early to determine what factors may have played into this incident and the defense team looks forward to reviewing the evidence, examining all of Sergeant Bales' medical and personnel records, and interviewing witnesses." 
 
 The lawyers' statement also said Bales' family was "stunned in the face of this tragedy, but they stand behind the man they know as a devoted husband, father and dedicated member of the armed services." 
 
 Military officials have said that Bales, after drinking on a southern Afghanistan base, crept away March 11 to two slumbering villages overnight, shooting his victims and setting many of them on fire. Nine of the 16 killed were children and 11 belonged to one family. 
 
 Court records and interviews in recent days have revealed that Bales had a string of commendations for good conduct after four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also faced a number of troubles in recent years: a Florida investment job went sour, his Seattle-area home was condemned as he struggled to make payments on another, and he failed to get a recent promotion. 
 
 Legal troubles included charges that he assaulted a girlfriend and, in a hit-and run accident, ran bleeding in military clothes into the woods, court records show. He told police he fell asleep at the wheel and paid a fine to get the charges dismissed, the records show. 
 
 Rebecca Steed, spokeswoman at Fort Leavenworth, said Bales would be able to meet with Browne in what is described as a privileged visit. Along with medical visits, such meetings are generally more private than others conducted in the prison. 
 
 Browne, 65, has represented clients ranging from serial killer Ted Bundy to Colton Harris-Moore, known as the "Barefoot Bandit." He has said he has handled only three or four military cases. Bales will also have at least one military lawyer. 
 
 Tall and stylish, Browne has been a prominent figure in Washington state legal circles since the 1970s, known equally for his zeal in representing his clients and his flair before television cameras. 
 
 _____ 
 
 Also contributing were Associated Press writers Manuel Valdes in Seattle, John Milburn in Topeka, Kan., and Deb Riechmann in Kabul, Afghanistan. ||||| The soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan villagers this month has reported suffering from severe nightmares, flashbacks of war scenes and persistent headaches after his multiple combat tours, his attorney said Wednesday. 
 
 Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales told his legal team that he has long woken up with night sweats, often replaying memories of a grisly episode that he and his infantry company witnessed in Iraq several years ago, according to John Henry Browne, a civilian lawyer. 
 
 Browne’s comments amounted to the most detailed public portrayal so far of Bales’s state of mind in the months leading up to an incident in which the soldier stands accused of committing one of the worst U.S. atrocities in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. 
 
 Military officials and witnesses have alleged that Bales left his base in the pre-dawn hours of March 11 and methodically killed Afghan villagers — most of them women and children. He allegedly attempted to burn the bodies before returning to the base. 
 
 Browne, in an interview, did not acknowledge any wrongdoing by Bales, but the lawyer said his client told him that, on the night of the shootings, he returned to his base in southern Afghanistan with only a foggy memory of what had just happened. Bales, Browne said, remembered the smell of gunfire and of human bodies but not much more. 
 
 The lawyer stressed that Bales did not confess, as military officials have said, and seemed surprised when his weapon was taken away. 
 
 Bales, 38, is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., pending a full military investigation. He faces the possibility of a death penalty on charges of premeditated murder. 
 
 Military officials have not offered any possible motive for Bales’s alleged actions, and the formal charges against him shed no light on the issue. 
 
 Unnamed military officials have said that Bales “snapped” as a result of marital and financial stress and that those factors were compounded by his consumption of alcohol that night, according to news reports. Bales had recently been passed over for a promotion, and he and his wife were under financial strain. This month, they put their Tacoma, Wash., area home up for sale for $50,000 less than the purchase price. 
 
 In recent years, Bales had several brushes with the law after incidents in which he was alleged to have been drinking. 
 
 Browne disputed any suggestion that alcohol may have played a role in the massacre in Afghanistan, calling such allegations “silly.” He said Bales had “two sips” of an unknown liquor that a Special Forces soldier had smuggled onto the base in a Gatorade bottle. 
 
 Browne, who met Bales face to face for the first time last week, said his client did, however, describe suffering symptoms strongly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his combat experiences. 
 
 “There was a time when everyone in the room was crying when he described what he saw,” Browne said of the meeting that he, partner Emma Scanlan and a military defense lawyer had with Bales. Browne said the “horror of war” become a routine backdrop for Bales, who also reported “seeing bodies all over the place” and “putting body parts in bags” in Iraq. 
 
 Bales, who joined the Army in 2001, served three tours in Iraq. The second tour, during which he reportedly experienced a particularly harrowing incident, lasted from June 2006 through September 2007. Browne declined to discuss that episode, saying it was classified. 
 
 Bales did not share the seriousness of the PTSD-like symptoms with his wife, Karilyn, because he did not want to worry her, Browne said. In an interview with NBC News over the weekend, Karilyn Bales described her husband as a “very tough guy” who had shielded her from “a lot of what he went through.” 
 
 In a statement, a spokesman for Karilyn Bales said that her husband had told her about headaches but that there was never any discussion of PTSD. 
 
 “It never occurred to Kari to ask her husband, ‘Are you having nightmares?’ ” the spokesman, Lance Rosen, said Wednesday. “If he was having them, I can understand that he might not want to tell his wife. It would worry her. Soldiers are trained to be stoical.” 
 
 Browne said Bales also attributed his headaches to a concussive brain injury he suffered in Iraq when the Stryker vehicle he was riding in hit a roadside bomb and flipped over. No one was killed, but Bales was unconscious for an unspecified period. 
 
 Bales also lost a portion of his foot as a result of unsanitary conditions in his Iraq base that led to a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infection. 
 
 Before leaving for Afghanistan in December, Bales had been training to be an Army recruiter, Browne said. It was a role Bales appeared ideally suited for because of his longtime mentoring of younger soldiers — and he was told that he could begin the new job soon because his unit would not be redeployed. 
 
 Bales told his legal team that he remained a loyal soldier when he was shipped out unexpectedly on a fourth combat tour but was disturbed about the lack of a clear mission in Afghanistan, Browne said. As Bales and others in his unit sought to help the Afghan police secure an area, they fended off attacks from people who appeared to be civilians and Afghan allies. 
 
 “It was dispiriting,” Browne said. “He said he was really confused about why they were” in Afghanistan. 
 
 Staff writer Julie Tate contributed to this report. ||||| Pentagon officials on Friday identified the soldier who allegedly killed 16 Afghan villagers as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a trained Army sniper who had served three tours in Iraq and suffered war wounds. 
 
 Bales, a 38-year-old married father of two who enlisted in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was flown Friday to a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to await possible criminal charges, according to a U.S. Army statement. 
 
 Bales is accused of leaving his base in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province; shooting 16 people, including nine children; and attempting to burn their bodies before returning to the base and turning himself in. He could face the death penalty, military officials have said. 
 
 The incident has sparked significant backlash in Afghanistan, straining already difficult relations with the United States over conduct of the war there. 
 
 The suspect’s name had been a closely kept secret since he allegedly surrendered to authorities after the shootings on Sunday morning. Officials confirmed his name after news organizations began reporting it Friday evening. 
 
 Bales’s attorney, John Henry Browne, has said that Bales did not want to deploy to Afghanistan in December, had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his deployments and had suffered a head injury during a deployment in Iraq. Bales also had seen one of his fellow soldiers lose his leg in an explosion hours before he allegedly went on a rampage, Browne told reporters. 
 
 Army Capt. Chris Alexander, 28, who was Bales’s platoon leader during a deployment in Iraq, said in an interview Friday night that he “saved many a life” by never letting his guard down during patrols. 
 
 “Bales is still, hands down, one of the best soldiers I ever worked with,” Alexander said. “There has to be very severe [post-traumatic stress disorder] involved in this. I just don’t want him seen as some psychopath, because he is not.” 
 
 Bales, a member of the 3rd (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, lived with his wife and young children in Lake Tapps, Wash., about a 20-minute drive east of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma. He attended high school in a Cleveland suburb but spent the past several years in Washington or on military deployments overseas. 
 
 His family was moved onto the base in recent days for their protection, officials have said. 
 
 The neighborhood where Bales lived includes many military families, according to neighbors. The family lived in a two-story beige house with a cedar-shake roof and a small front porch. 
 
 In 2007, Bales was part of a long, bloody battle in southern Iraq in which 250 enemy fighters were killed and 81 were wounded while members of Bales’s unit suffered no casualties, according to an Army account that described the battle as “apocalyptic.” 
 
 “I’ve never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day,” Bales was quoted as saying. “We discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.” 
 
 Bales said of the battle that “the cool part about this was World War II-style. You dug in. Guys were out there digging a fighting position in the ground.” 
 
 He also described an intense firefight as his unit tried to secure a downed helicopter: “It was like a match lit up. It looked like a toy with a candle lit underneath it.” 
 
 He received more than a dozen medals and badges for his service overseas and for good conduct, according to the Army statement. But in her blog last year, his wife, Karilyn, said he was disappointed that he was not promoted to sergeant first class. 
 
 In a post dated March 25, she noted “all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends.” 
 
 “I am sad and disappointed too,” she wrote, “but I am also relieved, we can finally move on to the next phase of our lives.” 
 
 That meant a different duty station, hopefully in Germany, Italy or Hawaii, she wrote. 
 
 In previous blog posts she wrote of how difficult it was for her while Bales was deployed during the pregnancy of her first child but how excited he was to learn that their first born was going to be a girl. “Our baby girl will most definitely be Daddy’s Little Girl!” she wrote. 
 
 Government officials, in some news reports, have said Bales may have been drinking on the night of the shootings and was agitated by marital problems at home. Browne disputed that, saying the reports were “very offensive.” The couple had financial problems but nothing severe, he said, adding that they had “a very strong marriage.” 
 
 Family members of Bales could not be reached for comment Friday night. 
 
 While living outside Tacoma, Bales had brushes with the law, according to court records and news accounts. In 2002, he was charged with misdemeanor criminal assault, according to the Tacoma News Tribune. The charge was dismissed after he paid a $300 fine and completed an anger management assessment, the newspaper reported. 
 
 Then in 2008, witnesses told police they saw him running from a single-car rollover, the newspaper reported. 
 
 Witnesses told the News Tribune they saw a “white man wearing military style uniform, shaved head and bleeding” running into the woods. Bales later told a police officer that he had fallen asleep while driving. Bales received a 12-month deferred sentence and paid a fine of $250 and the charges were dismissed, according to the report. 
 
 With limited facts about the motive in Sunday’s shooting, some veterans groups and mental health advocates fear that the image being stitched together from the loose assemblage of facts is of a crazy veteran gone wild. 
 
 “The main concern is that we’ll be back where we started with a stigma that all veterans that return are broken in some way,” said Ryan Gallucci, deputy director of national legislative service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. 
 
 On Friday, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, which is in charge of training and equipping soldiers for war, said the Army has done a “very, very good job of sustaining” troops through multiple combat deployments.” He said the decision of whether to send soldiers on multiple deployments are made “on a case-by-case basis.” 
 
 “There is not a cookie-cutter solution or rule that says this guy can handle two or three [tours],” he said. “It’s about taking care of soldiers.” 
 
 Some fear that the stereotype of veterans as unstable at best and violent at worst will be resurrected. Many veterans spoke out against a headline about the shootings in the New York Daily News this week that read, “Sergeant Psycho.” 
 
 Tom Tarantino, the deputy policy director at Iraq and Afghanistan of America, said that without the facts, “you have this wired mind-set in the public consciousness and immediately everyone goes to the ‘Sergeant Psycho’ thing.” 
 
 Many veterans advocates have dismissed simple theories about what set off the killings. 
 
 “There are plenty of service members with stress and trauma who are drinking and self-medicating every day to deal with their conditions, and they don’t go out and gun down a bunch of women and children,” said Josh Renschler, the director of Men of Valor, a service member support group. 
 
 He argued that while bouts of rage can be caused by traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder, they alone are not sufficient to explain killing of this magnitude. 
 
 Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist and author who was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work with veterans, wondered about the soldier’s relationship with the Special Operations forces — which can be very standoffish to outsiders — that he was attached to at a remote outpost in Afghanistan. “To me this is a presumptive case of leadership failure,” he said. “Whoever was directly responsible for this soldier did not do his job in the sense of getting to know him.” 
 
 Flaherty reported from Tacoma. Staff writers Craig Whitlock, Peter Finn and William Branigin, staff researchers Julie Tate, Lucy Shackleford and Madonna Leibling, and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report. ||||| Image caption A photo showing Sgt Robert Bales (left) has been removed from a military website 
 
 The US soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in their homes remembers "very little" of the incident, his lawyer has said. 
 
 John Henry Browne made the comments after he met Staff Sgt Robert Bales at a US army prison for the first time. 
 
 The killings have undermined US relations with Kabul and led to calls for Nato to speed up their planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. 
 
 Sgt Bales, 38, is being held in solitary confinement pending charges. 
 
 He arrived at the military detention centre in Kansas on Friday after being flown from Kuwait, the US Army said. Formal charges are expected within the week. 
 
 Sgt Bales is the only known suspect in the killings - despite repeated Afghan assertions that more than one American was involved. 
 
 His wife, Karilyn, has issued a statement expressing her condolences to the victims and their families and saying what reportedly took place is "completely out of character of the man I know and admire". 
 
 'Emotional' meeting 
 
 Mr Browne met his client at Fort Leavenworth on Monday to begin preparing his defence. 
 
 He told the Associated Press that Sgt Bales had "some memory of some things that happened" in the early hours of 11 March. 
 
 Staff Sgt Robert Bales Aged 38 
 
 Two children 
 
 Enlisted in 2001 
 
 Three previous tours to Iraq 
 
 Injured twice 
 
 "He has some memories of before the incident and he has some memories of after the incident. In between, very little," Mr Browne said. 
 
 Pressed on whether Sgt Bales could remember anything about the shooting, Mr Browne said, "No," but added: "I haven't gotten that far with him yet." 
 
 Mr Browne was more unequivocal earlier,telling CBS NewsSgt Bales "doesn't have memory" of the alleged massacre. 
 
 He also played down Sgt Bales' consumption of alcohol on the nights of the killings, saying he had had a "couple of sips of something but he didn't have a full drink". 
 
 Earlier, Mr Browne described his meeting with his client as "emotional". 
 
 "What's going on on the ground in Afghanistan, you read about it, I read about it, but it's totally different when you hear about it from somebody who's been there," Mr Browne told AP. 
 
 He suggested his client was not fit to serve because of injuries he had suffered on previous tours of duty. 
 
 Image caption Sgt Bales and his wife were reportedly having trouble making their mortgage payments 
 
 Mr Browne has represented a number of high-profile clients including serial killer Ted Bundy and a teenage thief known as the Barefoot Bandit. 
 
 In her media statement, Karilyn Bales said she too wanted to know what happened and "know how this could be". 
 
 She said the Afghan victims and their families "are all in my prayers, as is my husband, who I love very much". 
 
 Bales' 'troubles' 
 
 The sergeant's past brushes with the law included charges for assault and fleeing a car accident. 
 
 Sgt Bales paid fines in both cases and had to attend anger management classes for the assault, after which the charges were dropped. 
 
 He and his wife had reportedly struggled to make the payments on two properties they had bought. 
 
 It has now also emerged that - along with another man and his company - Sgt Bales owed a reported $1.5m (£950,000) from an arbitration ruling nearly a decade ago which found him guilty of securities fraud while he was working as a stockbroker. 
 
 The Pentagon has previously said that Sgt Bales could face charges that carry a possible death penalty. 
 
 Such a trial could take years, contrasting with Afghan demands for swift and decisive justice. 
 
 The Taliban called off peace talks in the wake of the deadly rampage, in which men, women and children were shot and killed at close range. ||||| The military on Friday identified the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers earlier this week as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two who had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments and had, his lawyer said, an exemplary military record. 
 
 The release of Sergeant Bales’s name, first reported by Fox News, ended an extraordinary six-day blackout of public information about him from the Pentagon, which said it withheld his identity for so long because of concerns about his and his family’s security. 
 
 An official said on Friday that Sergeant Bales had been transferred from Kuwait to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he had a cell to himself in the medium-security prison there. His wife and children were moved from their home in Lake Tapps, Wash., east of Tacoma, onto Joint Base Lewis-McChord, his home base, earlier this week. 
 
 Military officials say Sergeant Bales, who has yet to be formally charged, left his small combat outpost in the volatile Panjwai district of Kandahar Province early in the morning last Sunday, walked into two nearby villages and there shot or stabbed 16 people, 9 of them children. 
 
 Little more than the outlines of Sergeant Bales’s life are publicly known. His family lived in Lake Tapps, a community about 20 miles northeast of his Army post. NBC News reported that he was from Ohio, and he may have lived there until he joined the Army at 27. Sergeant Bales’s Seattle-based lawyer, John Henry Browne, said several members of the sergeant’s family moved to Washington after he was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord. 
 
 Mr. Browne said the sergeant joined the Army right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then spent almost all of his career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he was part of the Third Stryker Brigade in the Second Infantry Division, named after the armored Stryker vehicles. 
 
 The killings have severely undermined longstanding NATO efforts to win support from villages in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and have shaken relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai, who this week told Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who was on a visit to Afghanistan, that he wanted American forces out of villages by next year. 
 
 Pentagon officials, who have been scouring the sergeant’s military and health records for clues, have said little about what they think motivated the killings. But one senior government official said Thursday that Sergeant Bales had been drinking alcohol before the killings and that he might have had marital problems. 
 
 “When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues — he just snapped,” said the official, who had been briefed on the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the sergeant had not yet been charged. 
 
 Mr. Browne has disputed those assertions, telling reporters on Thursday that the sergeant’s marriage was sound and questioning reports about drinking. On the day before the shootings, he said, the sergeant had seen a fellow soldier lose his leg from a buried mine. 
 
 Mr. Browne, who said he had had a short conversation with Sergeant Bales because he was worried that their phone call was being monitored, added that the sergeant had thought he could avoid this deployment and was upset when he could not. 
 
 “The family was counting on him not being redeployed,” Mr. Browne said. “He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.” 
 
 He added, “I think that it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back.” 
 
 The Bales family lived in a two-story, wood-frame house beneath tall fir and cedar evergreens in Lake Tapps, an unincorporated section of Pierce County, Wash. Kassie Holland, a neighbor, said that as far as she could tell, they were a happy family and the sergeant was a devoted father to his young children, a daughter, Quincy, and a son, Bobby. “There were no signs,” Ms. Holland said when asked whether Mr. Bales seemed troubled. 
 
 The Baleses’ house had a lock box on the front door on Friday. Phillip Rodocker, a real estate agent, said that he was contacted by Ms. Bales on March 8, three days before the shooting in Afghanistan, and that she told him she wanted to sell the house in Lake Tapps. 
 
 Reporting was contributed by William Yardley and Serge Kovaleski from Lake Tapps, Wash., Isolde Raftery from Seattle and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
– Taliban leaders are insisting that US Staff Sergeant Robert Bales didn't act alone when he allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians as they slept. "We don't think that one American was involved," a Taliban official told CNN, without offering further details. "The foreigners and the puppet regime" in Afghanistan "are blind to the truth of what happened here." But whatever the case, Bales should be "prosecuted in Afghanistan, and according to Islamic law," he added. "The Afghans should prosecute him." The comments followed a move by the Taliban last week to cut off talks with the US because of American officials' "ever-changing position," said a spokesman. Meanwhile, more details continue to emerge about Bales, including his and his family's difficulty with repeated war tour deployments, and an arrest record that includes an assault on a girlfriend, and a hit-and-run in 2008. In the accident, a bloodied Bales was seen running into a nearby woods, reports ABC News. Bales said he fell asleep at the wheel, and paid about $1,000 in fines and restitution, according to AP. The case was dismissed. Bales' platoon leader told the Washington Post that Bales was "one of the best soldiers I have every worked with," and that he saved "many a life." Bales' attorney hopes to meet in Kansas today with his client at the Fort Leavenworth military prison.