Wife of accused soldier kept blog on anguish of Army life

She detailed her pregnancy, with her husband a world away. She described the knot she got in her stomach from missing him. She wrote of her disappointment after he was passed over for a promotion. But mostly, Karilyn Bales - the wife of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers last week - relayed the simple anguish of life as a military spouse, tending to a home with two young children, with a husband summoned for repeated deployments. "Bob left for Iraq this morning," she wrote in her family blog on Aug. 9, 2009. "Quincy slept in our bed last night." Though much of the family's online presence appears to have been removed in recent days, the fragments that remain capture the daily travails typical of any family with a loved one stationed abroad. A little less than a year ago, in March 2011, Ms. Bales wrote on her blog that her husband had not received a promotion to E-7, sergeant first class. The family was disappointed, she said, "after all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends." But Ms. Bales was also relieved, she wrote, because she hoped that the Army might allow the family some autonomy in choosing its next location, after Sergeant Bales had spent years at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. She listed her top choices: Germany ("best adventure opportunity!"); Italy ("2nd best adventure opp"); Hawaii ("nuff said"); Kentucky ("we would at least be near Bob's family"); and Georgia ("to be a sniper teacher, not because it is a fun place to live"). In some of these locations, Sergeant Bales's chances of being deployed to a war zone would probably have been lower. Wherever they went, Bales said, she hoped to rent out their house in Lake Tapps, Wash., she wrote, "so that we would have it to come back to when our adventure is over." More often, Bales focused on ordinary struggles. She described surprise phone calls and solo doctor's appointments, attempts to clean the house while Sergeant Bales was gone and the "bad dreams" she woke from after a nap on the day he left in 2009. She recalled discussions of baby names with him while he was away, and celebrating Easter one Sunday early, so that Sergeant Bales could decorate eggs with their daughter, Quincy, before leaving home again. In 2006, while she was pregnant with Quincy, Ms. Bales wrote that though she was careful not to wish the days away, "I only want the days to go by fast when it comes to Bob coming back home." A few days later, Bales wrote about a common tic she shared with her unborn child: "I get the hiccups all the time these days, I always think that Bob is thinking about me." One morning, she continued, she could feel the baby hiccupping in her belly. "I guess Bob was thinking about her too," Bales wrote. When Quincy was born in December 2006, Ms. Bales wrote, she received a call at the hospital. "It was Bob calling from the airport in Kuwait!!" she wrote. "It was so good to hear his voice. I told him how the birth went and he got to hear Quincy squeaking in the background." In August 2007, she described some of the child's first words. "Much to Daddy's happiness," she wrote, "she now says 'D' as in Dadadadadada." Bales's post from March 2011, about the Army promotion, appears to have been the blog's latest entry. In it, she seemed to hint at why she maintained the site in the first place. The collection of posts was a "time capsule," she wrote, and she hoped that her children would one day "enjoy reading about the decisions that Mom and Dad went through during their lives." With a relocation expected, she said, the family's coming months would be full of change. "I am hoping to blog about it and look back in a year," she wrote, "to see how far we have come from right now."