Wife of sergeant accused of 17 murders: He was ‘big kid himself’

Reporting from Seattle — 

In her first media interview, Karilyn Bales — wife of the Army staff sergeant accused of murdering 17 Afghan civilians — says it’s hard for her to believe her husband could have committed the killings. She also says she didn’t notice behavior indicating that he could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This is not him. It’s not him,” she told NBC’s “Today” show in an interview near her home in Washington state. She described the 38-year-old soldier as a man who loved children and who wanted to avoid further combat deployments in order to spend more time with his own two kids.

“He’s like a big kid himself,” she said.

Robert Bales, a veteran of three deployments to Iraq, was on his fourth assignment, this time in Afghanistan, when the shootings occurred during the pre-dawn hours of March 11 near a small Army outpost in Kandahar province.

Five of the dead were women; nine were children.

Bales said her husband had not appeared to be suffering ill effects from his previous deployments, and had not even mentioned a head injury he suffered in Iraq until he returned.

“Not until he came back and said that he, you know, had been blown up. He shielded me from a lot of what he went through. He’s a very tough guy,” she said. “He kept a lot from me.”

She said Bales never seemed to exhibit classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, an affliction that haunts many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I don’t know a lot about the symptoms of PTSD, so I wouldn’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t have nightmares, you know, things like that. No dreams.”

Karilyn Bales kept blogs over the past several years that described what looked to be a typical military family life. She cared for their children, ages 3 and 5, and hoped that her sniper-trained husband could get an assignment, perhaps as a military recruiter, that would allow him to be home more.

Instead, she got a version of the phone call military spouses dread most.

“I was actually at the grocery store that morning, and [got] a phone call from my parents, and they said, ‘Well, it looks like … some Afghan civilians were killed by a U.S. soldier,” she said. “I saw 38-year-old staff sergeant, and I don’t think there are very many of those, and I probably prayed and prayed that my husband wasn’t involved. And then I received a phone call from the Army saying that they would like to come out and talk to me.”

She was relieved. A phone call meant he wasn’t dead.

“They held my hand and they just said that perhaps, you know, they thought that he had left the base and gone out and perhaps killed the Afghan civilians,” she said. “And that was really the only sentence. And I just started crying.”

Bales, an employee of a Seattle-area marketing and public relations company, has cared for two young children during her husband’s time at war. She’s had to set up a legal defense fund to help pay the cost of hiring a private lawyer to defend her husband in military court against 17 counts of premeditated murder.

“Contributions to the defense fund are welcome only from donors who (1.) grieve with Mrs. Bales over the lives that were lost that night, and (2.) believe that in America everyone is entitled to a fair trial,” said the announcement from her attorney, Lance Rosen.

“Over time, the truth will come out. That’s why we have due process under the laws of our country,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, due process is very expensive.”

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