A Bed of Roses

Call it "Sleepless in Seattle," Iraqi Freedom-style. Woman and man meet over the Internet, strike up a friendship via instant messaging and find themselves powerfully drawn to each other. Melinda admits it sounds like "something a freaky person would do." But to Joel and the nearly 159,000 other U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, online dating, or what some troops jokingly call "pimping the Internet," allows a luxury previous generations didn't have: the chance to keep meeting and wooing Stateside, even while fighting abroad. In Iraq, says Joel, "everybody is talking to somebody online."

"We want soldiers to have high morale and be on their game, and one way of doing that is by keeping them in touch with friends and family," says Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Defense Department spokesman, explaining why rooms of Internet-ready computers have become standard in most forward operating bases, or FOBs. "The average serviceman in Iraq and Afghanistan is as technologically connected as a civilian back in the States."

The mom-and-apple-pie version of this cyberspace connection has a deployed wife blowing a kiss to her husband via webcam, or a fourth-grader sharing instant messages with Dad in Iraq -- situations that certainly happen every day. But, just as at home, Internet use on the front lines has a gamier side, too, driven by the isolation, sexual frustration and taut-wire emotions of troops at war. Most simplistic: The Internet is a promise of sex. Troops in Iraq are by far predominantly male; nearly 50 percent are between the ages of 20 and 24. Especially when a deployment is ending or the next leave beginning, many are looking for female comfort when they get home.

"Hooking up is what every soldier wants to do," types Nick Kauffeld, 27, an Army captain in Joel's division, who's finishing up his second tour of duty. "Most guys just want to make sure they get laid when they get home."

But an overload of testosterone is not the only, or the deepest, reason single soldiers go online.

"Being deployed is the loneliest experience you can ever have," says Colby Buzzell, who wrote a memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, about his year-long tour as an Army machine-gunner. "If you're married or dating, it's bad enough to be away from them and in Iraq. But if you're single and out there in the middle of nowhere? It's even worse. A lot of guys I know would come back from a mission and rush off to the Internet cafe to talk to a woman they just met the day before. It gave them something . . . some kind of human contact."

At Camp Poliwoda in Balad, Iraq, where Joel is based, the concrete room containing 20 Internet-ready computers and one webcam is a bigger draw than the chow hall. The most popular destinations in cyberspace are, by far, the dating sites -- hubs such as MilitarySinglesConnection.com or MilitaryFriends.com, as well as more civilian portals such as Match.com, HotorNot.com and the wildly popular Yahoo! Personals. The server crashes frequently, and sometimes mortar rounds hit nearby, but inside this 24-hour Internet cafe and others like it, the hunt for sex and affection is just as hot as it is at a college bar on Friday night.

And while the adage is that no one ever meets the love of his or her life while drunk in a bar, the fact is, sometimes it does happen. So maybe, just maybe, Joel and Melinda think, there's true love to be found online from Iraq, too.

The morning after the Wal-Mart excursion, still wearing the oversize flannel shirt she slept in, Melinda sits cross-legged on her bed and fields one cell phone call after another. Her 10-year-old daughter, Brooke, has called from her grandma's house to whisper, "I'm bored!" Joel's own grandmother, Pauline Coleman, whom Melinda has met several times, anxiously wonders what Melinda has heard about his flight.

Triumphantly, Melinda tells her the good news: At 5 this morning, after no less than 25 phone calls in a 96-hour period, she finally confirmed with the Army's Family Readiness Group that Joel will be on the plane landing at nearby Hunter Air Force Base tonight, with the homecoming ceremony at Fort Stewart set to begin at 9 p.m.

"Can you believe it?" Melinda excitedly asks. "If I hadn't called back and asked them to check the flight manifest one more time, I might have missed him!"

One thing she is, is resourceful. Joel had told her he'd be able to call with several hours' warning during a stopover in Kuwait, but online military wife and girlfriend support groups (Melinda belongs to several) warned her otherwise: Phone lines, women said, often stretched for five hours. So Melinda took care of the problem before it became one.