Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, (R) 1st platoon sergeant, Blackhorse Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, is seen during an exercise at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, in this August 23, 2011 DVIDS handout photo. [Photo/Agencies]

TACOMA, Washington - Robert Bales built a life around a call to arms. A call that emanated from the ashes of the World Trade Center in New York and took him to the mayhem of faraway Iraq and Afghanistan. A call he may have heard one time too many.

The 38-year-old US Army staff sergeant suspected of gunning down 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, had struggled to make financial ends meet and was disappointed at being sent back into a war zone for a fourth time rather than an easier posting in Germany or Hawaii.

Bales was a high school football star from Ohio who enlisted in the Army after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. He married Karilyn Primeau in 2005 and soon they moved into a four-bedroom house near a clear Seattle lake. The couple had two children, but Bales was absent for three tours in Iraq, where he was commended for valor. His wife, a public relations executive, blogged enthusiastically about their life.

Today, his family has the lake house on the market for less than they paid for it and a second home, with a mortgage larger than its market value, has been abandoned for two years, a red notice from the city warning it is uninhabitable.

Bales was denied a longed-for promotion to Sergeant First Class in March 2011. Then his family missed out on the adventure they felt they deserved - a posting in Europe or Hawaii - when Sergeant Bales was sent to a fourth tour abroad, in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, he was celebrated and proud of the heroism of US troops. "We ended up helping the people that three or four hours ago were trying to kill us," he said in a 2009 Army publication describing the rescue of a downed helicopter that turned into a pitched battle, after which victorious US troops gave aid to enemy casualties.

"That's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy," he said.

But in Afghanistan something apparently went very wrong. Authorities believe he left a small camp of US soldiers in the middle of the night Sunday, taking his rifle with him and massacring 16 civilians, mostly children, in two villages near Kandahar.

"Please keep (Staff Sergeant) Robert Bales in your prayers. I know his alleged crime is terrible, but he is not a terrible person. He's one of the best guys I've ever served with," Chris Alexander, an Army Captain who served in Iraq with Bales, said on his Facebook page shortly after Bales was identified as the shooting suspect.