When 38-year-old Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty in June to murdering 16 civilians in Afghanistan, a few things didn’t add up.

Bales had received a dozen awards and been carefully psychologically tested before sniper training. According to his wife, Kari, in an interview by People Magazine, “he loved the kids over there. One time I sent him a teddy bear and Bob gave it to a little Iraqi girl…His belief was that they were reaching the next generation, and that things [between the two countries] could get better.”

And to add to the incongruity, Bales reportedly left his base at 1 AM, went into the village of Alkozai wearing traditional Afghani clothes and night goggles, and killed four people there, wounding six. Reuters reports that he then returned to the base at 1:30 AM to tell a fellow soldier “I just shot up some people.” Bales left the base again at 2:30 AM, writes the Antiwar News, and went to the village of Najiban, where he killed twelve more people. He also burned some of the bodies, which is considered desecration by Muslims, before returning to the base and turning himself in to his superiors with the words “I did it.”

Admittedly, Bales had clear issues as well. He had just seen a fellow soldier lose a leg, hadn’t expected to be back in Afghanistan for a fifth tour of duty, and wanted to be home with his wife and children. The NY Times reported he had used illegal steroids in the past, and CBS wrote he was illegally drinking alcohol and snorting Valium the night of the murders.

He was believed to still be suffering from a traumatic brain injury received during his fourth tour of duty, and also appeared to have PTSD, which the NY Times reports in a second article was likely mistreated by his home base. He’d been in trouble with the law for minor fighting, and was in debt and struggling with finances at home—but overall, had a career officials called “unremarkable,” The News Tribune wrote.

But with Bales’ own claims to remember little of what happened, his response to a judge’s questions about the shooting seemed even odder. “As far as why, I've asked that question a million times since then," Bales said, reportedly calm and steady. "There is not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things that I did.”

Although Bales pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, there’s a possibility he’s not guilty. The NY Times recently released 2 articles about a prescription anti-malaria medication Bales was taking called Lariam. The first is a writer’s shocking personal experience with the drug; the second describes how it is now a black-box labeled drug, as its neurological and psychological effects can be permanent. It’s one of the most-prescribed anti-malarials in the U.S., though no longer sold under its brand name, and it appears that its developers falsified or incorrectly performed safety tests.

There are numerous factors that may have contributed to Bales’ actions that night. But the one legal drug has “countless horror stories,” including mental hospital admissions, suicide, and murder-suicide. This is a drug that should never have been approved by the FDA in the first place, and should be removed from the market altogether now that evidence of its terrible side effects is out in the open. Above all, the military ought to discontinue use of Lariam, having seen what it can do, and investigate its own systemic failures and the ways in which Bales was let down before determining his guilt or innocence.
But that’s not the way the drug industry, the FDA, or the military work.

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