COLORADO SPRINGS AND ORANGE COUNTY — They nicknamed themselves the Lethal Warriors, and during two tours in Iraq, the soldiers of the Army's 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry regiment confronted some of the war's cruelest fighting, hunting insurgents through the warrens of Baghdad and Tikrit amid roadside bombs, mortar fire and close-quarters firefights. By June 2007, in what one field commander called the "heart of darkness," the unit was losing a soldier a day in a body bag or on a stretcher. Over two tours, 33 of them had died.
On Nov. 30, 2007, Kenneth Eastridge, a wiry, heavily tattooed survivor of the fighting, found himself at a rough Colorado Springs bar called the Rum Bay, not far from the unit's Ft. Carson base. Eastridge, a high school dropout from the projects of Louisville, Ky., had joined the Army to escape what seemed the dead-end prospects of civilian life, only to run repeatedly afoul of Army rules and face a court-martial.
So on that cold night just two days after his discharge, Eastridge was at loose ends again, in the company of two other war-coarsened vets from his unit, Louis Bressler and Bruce Bastien.
Police say the trio plotted a robbery in the company of an Army private, leaving Bressler worried that the private would divulge their plot. Later that night, police say, Bressler shot the soldier to death with a .38-caliber revolver.
Now Eastridge, 25, sits behind bars in a Colorado prison, having agreed to a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony.
The Army was quick to downplay any link between what he and the other soldiers saw in Iraq and the allegations against them.
"Anybody that does crimes of that nature, it goes deeper and farther back than anything in the U.S. Army," said Lt. Col. Brian Pearl, the 2-12's commanding officer. "Nothing here has trained them to do what they are charged with."
Yet there is a larger story of those who fought with the 700-soldier unit: a string of alleged robberies, domestic violence and senseless murder.
Six of the veterans are behind bars, implicated in four separate shooting incidents and five slayings since August 2007. The killings stretch from Colorado to an Orange County beach town, where a veteran of the company is accused of beating his girlfriend to death.
In October, a soldier who served in Iraq with another Ft. Carson unit was charged with slitting a woman's throat and leaving her to die in the foothills near Colorado Springs, prompting U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) to urge a "swift and thorough review" of the accused soldiers' records.
He asked whether the Army, in its zeal to meet recruiting numbers, had issued the soldiers waivers for felonies, serious misdemeanors or mental health issues. The Army has launched a task force to examine the question.
"This is an Army-wide issue and something that has to be paid attention to at the highest levels of government," Salazar said in an interview.
What connects these killings, if anything, remains unclear. But some associated with the cases find it impossible to dismiss the common backdrop of Iraq as coincidence.
"Think about Vietnam," said Amanda Philipps, one of Eastridge's public defenders. "This is just the tip of the iceberg."
Sheilagh McAteer, one of Eastridge's lawyers, who serves on a task force examining crime by Iraq veterans, said she has seen a spike in drug abuse and domestic violence cases.
"It's all anecdotal, but it appears there's some kind of connection," she said. "It's going to get worse before it gets better. There are now guys who are coming back from their third tour."
Although some of the accused were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the significance remains murky. Bressler was convicted Nov. 19 of conspiracy to commit murder in the death of the Army private, Kevin Shields. Ed Farry, Bressler's attorney, said his client's diagnosis played no role in the case. "These people aren't monsters and they aren't killers simply because they have PTSD," Farry said.
What went wrong with the soldiers? Did Iraq blow open preexisting psychological fissures or create them? Was war just a detour in a life headed for trouble anyway?
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A troubled life
In September, as he awaited his sentencing and his time on the witness stand, Eastridge, whose arm bears a tattoo resembling a Nazi SS badge, recalled in a jailhouse interview that trouble found him early.
Eastridge said his mother was a drug addict who left the family when he was 10. Two years later, he was playing with his father's shotgun when it went off and killed his best friend. He was convicted of reckless homicide and given probation. He quit high school and decided to enlist.
"I didn't have nothing else," Eastridge said.
Faced with his juvenile record, the Army gave him a waiver. During his first tour in Iraq, from August 2004 to July 2005, he suffered a head wound when his Humvee ran over a bomb but was never treated by a neurosurgeon, his lawyer says.
