Wife of Army Sergeant Accused of Killing 16 Afghan Civilians Ran a Blog

The wife of a solider accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians kept a blog, wherein she shared the sadness of living thousands of miles from her husband while raising two children as well as excitement about adventure the future might bring.
Details about Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who was recently jailed, transferred from Afghanistan to a holding cell in Kuwait and then to the brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., were kept under a tight lid for nearly a week after the incident. His wife’s blog, however, remained open to the public until early Sunday morning, reports The New York Times.
The blog reveals intimate details about Sgt. Bales and his family. When he was passed up for a promotion in March of last year, his wife wrote about being upset with the decision made “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 Bales’ wife mostly wrote about the basic day-to-day struggles of life as an Army mom.
She wished the Army would let her husband pick his next assignment, hoping for locations such as Germany (“best adventure!”) or Hawaii (“nuff said.”) She talked about surprise phone calls from her husband — one to discuss baby names when she was pregnant and Bales was abroad. In other entries, she talked about wanting her husband back home in Washington state.
“I only want the days to go by fast when it comes to Bob coming back home,” wrote Bales’s wife.
Bales’s wife gave birth to their daughter Quincy while her husband was in Kuwait. She received a call from Bales soon after delivery — and that story became a blog post.
“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 the last post on the blog, Bales’s wife wrote that she wanted the site to be a kind of “time capsule” for her family.
“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.”
Recently revealed details of Sgt. Bales’s life suggest that he may have struggled with financial payments and repeated run-ins with the law. U.S. officials are expected to charge Bales “within a week.” The killings sparked violent protests of U.S. and NATO’s presence across Afghanistan and came immediately after a separate controversy involving the improper burning of copies of the Quran by NATO troops.