A Bed of Roses

They chatted for the next two hours -- about work, their kids, cars, the armored personnel carrier he rode on missions -- and occasionally dipped into mildly flirtatious banter.

Finally, Melinda begged off. She didn't think much of the exchange -- with a year of Internet dating behind her, she'd grown a little jaded about quick connections. "I had no idea if I'd ever hear from him again, and if not, whatever," Melinda remembers. "I'd been through this so much, and sometimes you just wind up being friends."

But she did hear from Joel again. He says he couldn't get their conversation -- or her photos -- out of his head. Plus, she'd come around at just the right time.

In 2005, the Defense Department put the divorce rate among officers and enlisted at 3.1 percent -- counting only those who had legally ended their marriages within the fiscal year. But Gene Thomas Gomulka, a retired Navy chaplain and author of The Survival Guide for Marriage in the Military, says the unofficial, overall figures are much higher, maybe closer to 70 percent. It's a tossup as to what's to blame, he says: youth, financial instability, the stress of year-long deployments. Among his own circle of friends in Iraq, Joel estimates that 60 percent have divorced, dealt with infidelity, or both. One of the casualties was his own first marriage.

It was a particularly brutal breakup. Just weeks before he first wrote to Melinda, Joel says, he'd taken a mid-tour leave only to have his wife of three years refuse to see him. Joel wasn't that surprised; he says that he'd been "really dissatisfied" and they'd been talking about divorce. He spent his precious two weeks off sleeping alternately at a sister's house or at his mother's. Finally, a buddy filled him in: His wife was seeing another man. The night before Joel flew back to Iraq, a mutual acquaintance served him with divorce papers. ("Six months after we married, I realized, 'I can't do this,'" Joel's ex responds. "He wouldn't come and see me.")

As with many jilted GI's, once Joel was back in theater, it was straight to the personals. "It's like she's with someone else, I'm here alone, I'm going to find someone to talk to," Joel says. That connection "is a real strong release."

While soldiers in Iraq may be lonely, horny, brokenhearted or just in need of someone to listen, human nature says that none of these emotions is peculiar to deployment. Soldiers online get plenty of solicitations themselves, especially when they're good-looking GI's like Joel or Nick Kauffeld, the 9th Field Artillery captain.

Kauffeld -- who, like Joel, is stationed at Fort Stewart -- was on Yahoo! Personals before he was sent to Iraq at the beginning of last year. Just weeks before he was deployed, he got a note from a woman who was relocating near him from Connecticut. Her fiance of three years, she wrote, had left her for another woman on Christmas Eve. Would Kauffeld like to go out? Be pen pals? Forty-eight hours before he shipped out, they met at a local pub. Less than two hours later, they were back in her hotel room.

"When a girl willingly writes you and knows that you're in Iraq, you have to kind of ask yourself about their motivation, or what it is they're looking for," he writes now. "Of course we're easy boyfriend targets -- what else are we going to do here? It's like 95 percent men. What do we have to lose?"

Maybe a little peace of mind. Over the next few months, Kauffeld and his new friend argued electronically about everything from commitment to politics, following fights with silences of up to six weeks. His two-week leave, spent entirely with her five months later, was a disaster for both. (In an e-mail to him, she called it an "evil science experiment.") When he broke up with her via e-mail, she posted all his private e-mails to her on her blog. And yet by summer the couple was, to some degree, back on -- e-mailing and flirting via the Internet.

At war, chaplain Gomulka says, "your needs are so great that [an online relationship] is almost like offering a person in the desert a glass of water. It tastes so good." Soldiers may put up with more than they normally would, or experience the connection as deeper than any they've had before. The danger, Gomulka adds, is "once you get home, it's just water again. The threat and loneliness you felt are no longer there."

Melinda wasn't the first woman Joel had contacted online. But the ones that came before were "like talking to a cucumber," he says. "There was pretty much nothing there." With Melinda, the attraction "initially was the fact that she is so damned pretty," he admits. But after they spent some time chatting, "I started to become interested in her . . . We just had a lot in common, and she was a really interesting woman."