Andrew Baldock, the prosecutor in Fairbanks, said that what occurred that night was a serious crime that deserved severe punishment.

Carlson had hit his wife three times in the face. He had threatened that there would be "blood" if she called police. He had fired nine shots, five in the direction of a responding police officer. "You can certainly see the intent to kill," Baldock said.

The charge he thought most appropriate after considering all of the evidence: attempted murder.

Like a lot of district attorneys in towns near big military bases, he was seeing more and more current and former soldiers with no criminal histories doing some "crazily violent things," he said in a recent interview. There was a 38-year-old Iraq veteran who had held his family hostage at gunpoint. A few months before that, a soldier being treated for PTSD had aimed his gun at state troopers, who shot him. On the night of Carlson's shooting, another soldier - also based at Alaska's Fort Wainwright - had shot his friend in the head, killing him.

Most of the time these cases involved heavy drinking and allegations of cheating spouses or girlfriends, Baldock said. Usually, the defense attorneys claimed their client's untreated PTSD had caused the violence. Baldock found it almost impossible to untangle the various causes.

Immediately after Carlson's arrest, a detective asked him if he was suffering from PTSD. "It used to be years ago that we never had to ask soldiers about this, because we weren't at war for frigging 13 years or whatever it's been," he said to Carlson in an interview that was captured on video. "But now we have to ask . . . because we've got so many guys like yourself coming back from that s---hole that are dealing with, you know, over there."

"I was always able to deal with my own s----," Carlson replied, his hands clenched together, elbows resting on mud-stained jeans. "I never had anyone help me out."

Because Baldock had to get the case to a grand jury quickly, there was not time to dig into Carlson's service history. The prosecutor's job was to focus on the facts from the night of the shooting, all of which told him that Carlson was a danger to the community who had fired his gun deliberately and need to be punished.