Two days after she learned that a roadside bomb had blown up her husband's Humvee in Afghanistan, Dena Yllescas began typing her first blog post for family in Nebraska. Her daughters -- ages 7 years and 9 months -- were asleep. Friends, who had rushed over with casseroles and cigarettes, had gone home. The 29-year-old Army wife sat at a laptop computer in her kitchen in Texas and described how her hands had shaken as she listened to an Army captain catalog her husband's injuries over the phone. 'I just wanted him to quit talking,' she wrote in the predawn hours of Oct. 31, 2008. A few paragraphs later, she described how she had struggled to tell her elder daughter, Julia, what had happened to her father. 'Did Daddy's legs get chopped off?' the 7 year old asked bluntly. 'Yes, baby. Daddy lost his legs but he is still daddy, and he loves you very very much,' she replied. She wrote a new entry every day for the next 32 days, opening a stoic and unusually eloquent record of what a military family endures after a soldier is badly wounded. Fourteen months later, more than 160,000 people -- the vast majority of them strangers -- have visited the site, yllescasfamily.blogspot.com. Many of them are drawn by a desire to connect with a war whose burdens are borne mainly by the tiny percentage of the population that is part of the military. Begun as a way to inform friends and family of Capt. Rob Yllescas' condition, the blog became a chronicle of Dena's own survival. (begin ital) Nov. 1, 2008: 'I looked under his sheets and his poor abdomen was so bruised it was almost black and he looked like he was 9 months pregnant.' (end ital) In the weeks that followed the bombing, Dena Yllescas (pronounced YES-cas) blogged from the waiting room at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where Rob was being treated; from his hospital bed; and from the small hotel suite where she was staying with her mother-in-law and mother. When there was bad news, she moved through it quickly and asked for prayers. On better days, she lingered over the small signs of improvement: the first time Rob squeezed her hand, the first time he shrugged his shoulders, the first time he seemed to meet her gaze. 'He actually LOOKED INTO MY EYES!!!!' Dena wrote two weeks after her husband's injury. 'I could feel that he was actually THERE.' She described holding up a picture of their two children for her husband, a broad-shouldered, intense Army officer, and wondering how close to hold it to his eyes. 'I'm not sure if he was able to see it well,' she conceded in her blog. Someday her husband would read the posts, she told herself. He would take solace in how far he had come. In the meantime, many of the 921 residents of Osceola, Neb., where the Yllescases had met, graduated from high school and married, began reading her posts religiously. Every morning, Dena's father, Alan Gissling, ate breakfast at the town's only restaurant and talked with friends about the latest entry -- on Rob's falling bilirubin levels, which suggested that his liver was recovering, or on Dena's dream that her husband had rolled over and spoken to her. President George W. Bush visited the hospital to pin a Purple Heart on her husband. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by as well. 'Don't call me unless it's good news,' Dena's father told her. 'I'll read the blog.' At the huge Fort Hood, Texas, Army post where Rob was based, the blog became a daily ritual for thousands, said Paige Tyler, a close friend of Dena's whose husband was in Rob's battalion. 'It was unreal,' she said. 'I had family and friends -- people who had no idea who Rob Yllescas was -- asking me about Rob and Dena.' (begin ital) Nov. 29, 2008: 'Pray, Pray, Pray, PRAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A little while ago I had to make the toughest decision of my life. They found a huge blood clot in the main part of Rob's brain. I could either let it be and let him die a peaceful death or I could choose to do an emergency craniotomy on him.' (end ital) Dena opted for the surgery. To reach the clot, which was obscured by swelling, Rob's doctors had to remove a small portion of his brain. At 11:16 p.m., Dena wrote that her husband had made it off the operating table. But the doctors put his odds of surviving at less than 10 percent. Rob made it through the night of Nov. 30 but the next morning suffered a massive stroke. A scan of his brain showed no hope for recovery, and on Dec. 1 Dena pulled her husband off life support. He was 31 years old. Dena's blog entry that day was only nine sentences long. She didn't write about how panicky she felt as she watched Rob die. She also didn't include his time of death on the blog. 'Putting the time down made it feel too final,' she recalled. On the evening of Rob's funeral, she and a half-dozen other wives from her husband's battalion met at Dena's childhood home in Nebraska. It was cold and snowy. The wife of the battalion executive officer, whom Dena had always considered a bit prim, flopped onto her back and made a snow angel. Soon the wives -- all of whom had husbands still serving in Afghanistan -- were pelting each other with snowballs. 'I swear, only military wives can lift each other up after the day we had,' Dena wrote the next day. Dena sold the home she and her husband had built outside Fort Hood and bought a new house in Lincoln, Neb., about an hour from the tiny farming community where she was raised. Her father, who had retired from running an auto parts store, tended Rob's grave, which lay at the back of the Osceola town cemetery, just a few steps from a 1,000-acre cornfield. He planted grass on the freshly dug dirt mound, carting water from his house in buckets, and decorated it with a dozen American flags. (begin ital) Dec. 13, 2008: 'My world as I know it has turned upside down. My whole adult life I've only known the military.' (end ital) For the first five months after Rob's death, Dena talked to her old friends at Fort Hood on an almost daily basis. 'It was definitely a rough ride for her,' said Paige Tyler, Dena's friend from Fort Hood. Before bed, Dena would often catch herself setting her cellphone on her nightstand in case Rob called from Afghanistan while she was sleeping. The deployment to Afghanistan had followed two year-long Iraq deployments, and Dena had become accustomed to waiting for her husband. In early May, she was digging through her daughter's pink backpack when she found a family portrait Julia had drawn earlier in school that day. Rob wore a camouflage uniform of green polka dots. Across the top of the drawing, Julia had written in blue crayon: 'To Daddy: I miss you. I love you.' A few days later, Dena wrote on her blog, 'It is so hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that he is never coming home to us.' Her blog entries increasingly focused on the mundane details of her new life. In the fall, she finally sold her husband's F-250 King Ranch diesel truck. She cleaned out his gloves, sunglasses, fishing license and credit card receipts. 'His presence was all around that truck,' Dena wrote on Oct. 7, Rob's birthday. Before the new owner drove it away, Julia kissed it. 'Don't touch that spot,' Julia told her mother. Dena avoided some subjects on her blog. In September, she visited Fort Hood with her new boyfriend, whom she began dating in July. A few military friends refused to see her. 'We weren't ready for it, which is kind of funny because she is the one who lost her husband,' Tyler said. Dena's boyfriend drives a snowplow part time, works construction jobs in the summer and is working to be a golf pro. 'He's the total opposite of Rob, who was a hard-core Army officer,' Tyler said. 'But Dena is the one who lost her husband. It is her reality, and we have to respect it.' On the morning of Oct. 28 -- the one-year anniversary of the call informing her that Rob had been hurt -- Dena packed off her children to school and day care and updated her blog. She had spent the previous day struggling to recall her husband's last call from Afghanistan. 'I always said, `I love you. Be safe,' ' she recalled in an interview. If she said those words during that final call, she couldn't remember. 'I think I've decided that one year later is worse than when it actually happened,' she typed just before 8 a.m. 'All day yesterday, I kept counting down the hours until `doom day.' ' She was certain that the next 34 days, spanning the date of Rob's injury to the anniversary of his death on Dec. 1, would be the hardest of her life. Every room in her home contains at least one picture of her deceased husband. Dena had some rough days in the month leading up to the anniversary of Rob's death. But the month passed more quickly and with less heartache than she had expected. (begin ital) Dec. 1, 2009: 'Yesterday we came back to Osceola and Julia didn't go to school today. This morning I went to the gravesite. What a difference one year makes. It's full of grass ... I decided to try to make a sad day into a happy one. I surprised Julia with a new puppy. He is havanese, black and white, and absolutely ADORABLE!' (end ital) On her blog that day, she posted a picture of Rob's grave, surrounded by American flags and framed from behind by the brown stalks of fall's corn crop. Below the photo from the grave site is a snapshot of Julia holding her new puppy. 'I know my heart will never be 100 percent whole. I will never be 100 percent happy,' Dena said in the interview, just before Christmas. 'But the anniversary of Rob's injury and death helped me see that are bright spots in my future.' 