Military Wives Rally Around Wife of Accused Afghanistan Shooter Robert Bales

Military Wives Rally Around Wife of Accused Afghanistan Shooter Robert Bales
by Jesse Ellison Mar 22, 2012 5:43 AM EDT

Since the slaying of 16 Afghans allegedly by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the ‘silent ranks’ of military wives are rallying around one of their own, recognizing they could easily have found themselves in Karilyn Bales’s shoes.

Most of us will, blessedly, never be in Karilyn Bales’s shoes. We will never know what it is like to discover that the person we married, the father of our two young children, has been accused of mass murder. Most of us wouldn’t even be able to begin to imagine how we might feel, or what we might do.

But most of us aren’t married to men in the military. Those who are—the more than one-million-strong ‘milspouses’ who make up the ‘silent ranks’ of the U.S. Armed Forces—can imagine it all too well. In the days after the news broke that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, had allegedly killed 16 Afghan civilians, many veterans and service members hastened to distance themselves from the horrific act, rejecting the notion that PTSD or combat stress could be blamed for the soldier’s actions. But while the men scurried, the women rallied, taking to their blogs and social networks to voice their unconditional support for Bales’s wife, whom many even began to call ‘Kari.’
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