A Bed of Roses

By Stephanie Booth
Sunday, February 12, 2006

He was a combat soldier in Iraq. She was a divorced mom in California. They flirted, fell in love, committed . . . and then they met in the flesh

Melinda Jackson is on a quest for silk rose petals. She is sure the Wal-Mart in Hinesville, Ga., will carry them, because the one near her home in Santa Clarita, Calif., does -- big bags that look like the real thing and are located near the scrapbooking supplies. She does a few slow turns through the aisles with her shopping cart. "They've got to be here somewhere," she says.

The store is crowded with exhausted mothers in sweat suits and sneakers. Teenagers with poorly dyed hair gossip and tease each other by the cash registers, and occasionally a soldier in desert camouflage can be seen fishing through a bin of discount DVDs or awkwardly cradling a screaming baby.

"There's camouflage everywhere!" Melinda whispers. Men in uniform are still a novelty to her. There simply aren't that many of them where she lives, in a nondescript suburb hemmed in by mountains and freeways north of Los Angeles. But judging by the sidelong glances she's getting here outside the gates of Fort Stewart, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River, she's the oddity -- a sportily dressed Californian with long strawberry-blond hair and a newly acquired Mystic Tan. Her flip-flops, tight Levis and flash of belly-button ring belie the fact that she's a 40-year-old mother of two. She's too sparkly, too sexy to truly belong in this small, swampy Army-centric town.

But the U.S. Army is the only reason Melinda is here, having taken two weeks off from her relatively new job as a project manager for a marketing firm and entrusted the care of her two daughters to a family friend and her former mother-in-law. It's why, months ago, she reserved her room at the Hinesville Holiday Inn Express. (A wise move -- the hotel is now sold out.) And it's why she's so determined to locate that $5 bag of rose petals -- the ones that would look just perfect sprinkled on the king-size bed of her hotel room.

Tomorrow, Melinda's boyfriend, Army medic Cpl. Joel Buchannan, will likely return from his third tour of duty on the front lines of Iraq. Like all the other girlfriends who have flown into town to meet their significants, Melinda is determined that everything will be perfect on this first night back on American soil. But she, perhaps, is taking a bigger gamble than most.

She and Joel, also from Southern California, have been dating for nine months. They've exchanged secrets and sexual histories, talked marriage, gotten her daughters and his 9-year-old son acquainted with the idea that there's an important new grown-up around. When Joel needed his Jeep registration and civvies for Georgia, Melinda got the key to his storage space and went looking. She retrieved Joel's Christmas presents from one of his sisters. Lately, his mother and grandmother have been calling her from California for updates on his return.

But there's one thing the couple hasn't done yet: met in person. Their whole relationship has taken place on the phone and online, with Melinda in California and Joel in Iraq, some 8,000 miles away.

After 10 more minutes of maneuvering through the congested aisles, it becomes apparent that, aside from a few bouquets of real daisies wilting near the entrance, this Wal-Mart has no flower petals of any kind. Undeterred, Melinda strides back to the arts and crafts section and pulls down a package of heart-shaped stickers. "These kind of look like petals," she says, turning the bag over in her hand, testing one of the hearts between her thumb and index finger. "And then I won't have to worry about them getting crushed."

She tosses them into the cart, convinced she's found something even better than expected. It's a feeling she has often. "Good karma," she calls it.

Before checking out, she makes a last detour through the greeting cards. She'd like to have one waiting for Joel in the hotel room. Standing under a sign that reads "LOVE," she picks up a turquoise-and-yellow specimen from the rack, then winces at the message inside.

"All the cards I read are like, 'Your kiss is this,' or 'I love the touch of your hand,'" she says, beginning to push her cart again. "I'm, like, 'I don't know what you feel like.' How can I get a card when that hasn't happened yet?"

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.

Her best friend, Dana, asks, perhaps only half-jokingly, if Melinda is "barfing from nervousness" yet.

"It still doesn't feel real," Melinda insists.

If any third party can claim responsibility for bringing Joel and Melinda together, it's Dana Giammaria, who met Melinda through work a decade back. She's the one who, three years ago, first persuaded Melinda to try online dating, assuring her that, no, she wouldn't feel like a prostitute if she uploaded a photo of herself and waited for men to call.

At the time, Melinda was just easing gingerly back into the dating pool. Her 18-year-marriage to her high school sweetheart had unraveled in 2002, she says, when, on a shelf in her husband's closet, she discovered a boxful of love letters -- all written to, or from, one of his co-workers. When her husband returned home that evening, Melinda says, she announced that if he didn't end things with his girlfriend and agree to marriage counseling, she would take their daughters and file for divorce. "You can't [make it] on your own," she remembers him scoffing. "Watch me," was her reply. And, just like that, her marriage was over. (For his part: "It's one of those things where she's blaming me and I'm blaming her," her husband says. "There was just a lot of bad stuff between us.")

Afterward, working full time and raising her daughters consumed most of Melinda's time. Every day, she'd wake at 5 a.m. to shower and get the girls ready for school. A daily fix at Starbucks -- venti 2 percent latte with whipped cream, no sugar -- fortified Melinda for her PT Cruiser's 45-minute commute to her Burbank office. She wouldn't get back home until 7 p.m., so whatever remaining energy she had left was spent on Brooke and Lenelle, now 18, or doing coursework online, working toward a bachelor's degree in marketing.

"Melinda's like me -- she doesn't need anyone in her life," Dana says. "She was never like, 'Boo-hoo, poor me!' But I thought online dating would be fun for her. Like any of us, you always want that special person in your life."

On her Yahoo! Personals profile, Melinda posted coy photos of herself in a white tank top and low-riding pink sweat pants. She titled it, "Looking for Prince Charming" -- a tongue-in-cheek homage to the 10 years she'd spent in the marketing department at Walt Disney Co. (The characters that dot her cozy bedroom -- a high-end figurine of Tinkerbell, an animation cel of Pocahontas -- are other relics from that era.) She didn't actively search for men on the site, but plenty came to her on their own. Among her would-be suitors were a number of troops overseas.

"So many guys in Iraq, mostly in their twenties, would start off their e-mail with something dirty like, 'Can I F you?'" she says wryly. "I was, like, this is a pickup line? Okay, pig. Delete!"

The handful of her relationships that moved offline could have made a wacky montage in a romantic comedy -- the one who wanted a commitment, but nothing physical; the one who couldn't stop surfing other profiles. All quickly fizzled out.

One afternoon last April, as Melinda sat doing homework at the computer in her bedroom, an instant message flashed onscreen. Melinda quickly logged onto Yahoo! to scan the sender's profile. "Livin' The Dream!" it was titled.

Joel Buchannan, 34, of nearby West Hills, Calif., described himself as an "open-minded, goal-oriented . . . jeans and T-shirt kind of guy," who loved riding horses with his son, scuba diving and rock climbing. Some servicemen hesitate to reveal they're in the midst of a war zone -- most women, after all, want to date someone at least on the same continent -- but Joel made sure it was obvious: His photos included one of him shirtless, holding an M-16 rifle, and one of him broad-shouldered in desert camouflage and sunglasses, a row of Bradley Fighting Vehicles behind him. Melinda gamely responded with an instant message.

Joel was writing from a base in Balad -- "Ambush Alley," he called it -- after finishing a grueling, but not uncommon, 36-hour shift. A combat medic, he'd spent a combined two of the previous three years overseas and was seven months into his third tour of duty.

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."

Within days of his first note, Joel began messaging Melinda regularly, greeting her with "Hey little hottie!" or "Hey lady! Wow! What a day!" During conversations that sometimes lasted four hours, they bonded over things large -- their devotion to their kids and their dedication to their jobs -- and small, like the fact that they both hate Chevys and love Fords.

Line troops don't get much sleep anyway, but Joel began sacrificing several of the four to six hours he was usually allotted to visit Camp Poliwoda's Internet cafe and score the only computer with a webcam. The 11-hour time difference and Joel's irregular schedule meant Melinda had no idea when he would contact her. She never sat home by her computer, but if he did come online while she was at home, she talked as long as he wanted. Several times she called in late to work, citing car trouble. And if Melinda was at the gym of her townhouse complex and Joel messaged, Brooke was under strict orders to call her on her cell phone so she could run right back.

Joel, it turned out, had much to talk about. He first enlisted in the military at 17, and combat had knocked him around since: He'd endured a broken ankle, cracked ribs, a gunshot to the chest, total loss of hearing in his left ear and numerous friends killed in action. But, he assured Melinda, "I'm not some weirded-out vet." Melinda found him warm and very funny -- the kind of guy to nickname one of his fellow troops "Holstein" because he'd taped a picture of a cow up by his bed.

Melinda's daughter Lenelle was skeptical of the relationship at first. "I was, like, 'Oh great, another Internet boyfriend,'" she giggles. Lenelle is petite and pretty, with platinum blond hair and a shy drawl. "I was, like, 'Can't you just meet someone normal without a computer?' But the more she kept talking to him and the more stories I heard, the more real I thought it was."

As one of the oldest guys in his unit, Joel wouldn't have dreamed of sharing his fears and desires, anxieties and emotions with those around him-- he knew the younger guys looked up to him, and anyway, they were going through the same things themselves. But online with Melinda -- who never judged or lectured -- he found himself able to talk freely.

"My interpreter was hit in the neck with shrapnel," he wrote in July, after an ambush. "Sliced the jugular vein and the carotid artery. My squad leader was hit in the back . . . I am still literally covered in blood." The squad leader survived, but the interpreter died three weeks later.

Thousands of miles away in Southern California, curled up in front of her computer, a cookie-scented candle glowing on top of her dresser, Melinda understood Joel needed, as he said, to "rant." Occasionally, she typed something reassuring like: "That is so sad. They should be thankful you are there though . . . I think it is an awesome thing you are doing."

"It is difficult for people to understand the dynamics of what really happened to you, if they have not experienced it themselves," Joel explains via e-mail. "Talking to Melinda is a relief from the things that happen here, like a mini-vacation. Sometimes it felt like that first breath you take when you have been underwater for too long."

From her side, Melinda loved what Joel saw in her: He was openly appreciative of her independence, admired her goals and the way she took care of her girls, and he regularly told her she was beautiful. ("In 20 years, my husband never did," she says.) If their conversations circled around to her ex, Joel always promised he would never betray her.

Melinda began sending him care packages: cheesecake mix, cans of Chef Boyardee, pictures of horses Brooke and Lenelle had drawn. She got a co-worker to burn CDs of his favorite music -- Eric Clapton, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Social Distortion. Feeling flirty one day, she e-mailed off a few lingerie shots taken with her digital camera when the girls weren't home. "To me, it was not a big deal. But then," she concedes, "there's that part of you that wonders if he'd asked any other girls to send some, too."

It's an entirely realistic concern. In an essay Buzzell penned for Nerve.com, he detailed the almost comic level of sexual frustration and predation he witnessed during his tour of duty: the empty tubs of Vaseline piled up in port-a-johns, the mad run on new issues of FHM and Maxim magazines (porn not being allowed in theater), the soldiers who persuade women to take off their tops on webcam, then offer their buddies a peek. On sites like AdultFriendFinder.com (touted as "the world's largest sex and swinger personals site"), a search for men in Iraq yields photo after photo of buffed Americans with their pants down -- many boldly requesting to hook up with not just one woman but two.

Still, Melinda decided to believe, to trust in her burgeoning relationship in ways that would have been unthinkable back when her first military suitors were sending offers her way. When, in late June, Joel requested a pair of her panties, she mailed him a new black thong from Victoria's Secret.

Despite her leap of faith, Melinda wasn't sure this peculiar relationship was "real" until one evening in early July, after she and Joel had been corresponding for over two months. Joel was gearing up for a mission while they chatted. She watched as he strapped on his ammunition and medical gear, teasing, "But it looks soooo cool" when he complained it was preventing him from reaching the keyboard.

Then Joel looked directly into the webcam and abruptly typed: "I really miss you, I don't know how I can miss someone I've never met, but I do."

"When he signed off, he blew me a kiss, and I remember this feeling coming over me," smiles Melinda. "I never cry -- just ask my girls -- but I just sat there with tears in my eyes thinking, 'I love him.'"

Four more pairs of panties, in various styles and colors, would follow overseas. Joel, in turn, displayed them, along with Melinda's photos, on a wooden shelf above his bed.

Although Joel is not scheduled to arrive until 9 this evening, Melinda is ready to walk out the door of her hotel room at 5. The makeshift "rose petals" are gently scattered on the turned-down bed, two disposable wineglasses stand waiting on a nightstand, and the room is sweetly ripe with Melinda's perfume, aptly named Ultimate Seduction.

A cold front is arriving in the area tonight, according to a maid at the Holiday Inn Express, who grumbles that she's had to work nine days straight because so many soldiers have been returning from Iraq. Melinda is wearing an outfit she modeled for Brooke and Lenelle before leaving home: faded jeans and a sheer, gold-toned blouse accentuating her small waist. Her blazer doesn't even have pockets, but she doesn't care. The goal is to look good, not to keep warm. She doesn't want to eat dinner, although she's had only half a tuna sandwich today. And she doesn't want a drink because what if she's in the bathroom when Joel arrives?

At 8, she's finally driving through Gate One of Fort Stewart in her rented Chevrolet Cavalier. The maid was right; a gusty wind has picked up, and the air is unpleasantly cold. Melinda gets lost finding the visitor parking lot, and when her cell rings, showing an unfamiliar number, her first reaction is exasperation.

"Hey, baby."

"Who is this?" she snaps.

"What do you mean, 'Who is this?' Who do you think it is?" says Joel. He's borrowed a fellow soldier's cell phone to call her. They're forming up, he tells her. He'll be there soon.

"Did you get the car? Do you have a hotel? Are we all squared away?" he wants to know before he hangs up.

"Baby, don't worry," Melinda is beaming now. "I took care of everything."

Homecoming ceremonies at Fort Stewart typically take place on Cottrell Field, an unglamorous expanse anchored by bleachers. To someone who didn't know better, it would seem like a high school football game is about to take place.

There are clusters of yellow, blue and red balloons and hand-lettered signs reading "Do You Remember Me?" and "The Boys Are Back!" About 600 people make up the crowd: grizzled old men in baseball caps, smelling of cigarette smoke; young women with glossy red lips and fresh French manicures; babies bundled so thoroughly in Polarfleece suits and hats that their round, startled faces are barely visible.

The cold, dark sky feels charged with anticipation.

Melinda stands at the foot of the bleachers, the wind whipping her hair across her face. "It's so cold!" she says, but she is smiling. "I can't believe Joel called!"

A lieutenant colonel standing next to Melinda asks politely whom she's waiting for. When Melinda explains she'll be meeting her boyfriend for the first time, he raises his eyebrows. "Good luck with that!" he chuckles, not unkindly.

Melinda shares in the humor. She knows how ridiculous it all sounds. Via the online boards, she's followed other women's stories of overseas relationships like hers, most of them careening in and out of commitment. (Just within the last few days, Nick Kauffeld's friend has publicly declared them permanently broken up -- she's now dating someone else.) Even Joel himself, she says, has worried about what will happen if they just don't click.

"'What if you hate me?' 'What if you hate how I chew my food?'" she mimics him. "But I'm not like that. I'm not like most girls. I'm not a gold-digger or a drama queen. I have two kids, so I'm used to adjusting."

Melinda's biggest worry, in contrast, is the distance that separates them. In a week and a half, she will return home. Joel is still waiting to see if his transfer to Fort Irwin, Calif., will come through, but he also wants to get his national paramedic's certification at a school in Georgia. And Melinda recently had an interview with ABC in Burbank about marketing Power Rangers -- a job she would love to have. And yet.

"We already spent nine months apart," she says. "I don't want to have a relationship where we only see each other once a month. I don't want to be getting married when I'm 50."

She may, she thinks, put out some feelers for a smaller job in Savannah, instead.

At 9:30 p.m., just after the Red Cross truck has run out of free hot chocolate and apple cider, there is a groundswell of screams from the bleachers. Turning the corner and coming into view are two yellow Penske trucks, followed by a small fleet of white, unmarked buses carrying the soldiers themselves.

After what seems like an eternity but is likely no more than 10 minutes, the emcee shouts something that is lost in the wind, the Army band begins to play, and the troops, about 300 of them dressed in light desert camouflage, almost magically appear on the opposite side of the field and begin marching in step toward the bleachers.

There is thunderous applause, cheering, whistling. More than one woman begins to cry. Melinda simply stares, a smile frozen on her face.

The soldiers, stern and unblinking, halt just before the bleachers. An officer steps up to a microphone on the field and officially welcomes them "back to the coastal empire" of Georgia. Only after the national anthem is played, followed by a halfhearted rendition of the 3rd Infantry Division's song, "Dogface Soldier," are the troops finally allowed to break ranks.

The happiest kind of chaos erupts. There is a rush on the field, which quickly becomes a tangle of teary embraces. Soldier after soldier, eager to be recognized, pulls off his helmet. It's startling to see how young most of them are, some still wearing braces on their teeth.

Melinda holds the glittery peach-colored sign she made (I LOVE YOU! JOEL. WELCOME HOME.) in front of her chest, as limousine drivers do at the airport. "I'm just going to stay here," she says. "Joel will find me."

Twice, soldiers walk by, pausing to stare uncertainly at the sign.

No, Melinda thinks. No.

And then, as if in a movie, the knot of people breaks, and out strides Joel. He is older, more handsome than his comrades, and he has a swagger that causes others to turn and stare. Helmet still fastened under his chin, four yellow silk roses in his front pocket, he walks directly toward the bleachers and points his index finger at Melinda. You.

And then he is lifting her up, rocking her back and forth until she is almost caught off-balance. She looks up at him, shuts her eyes, and they share a long, hard kiss, the welcome home sign crushed and forgotten between them.

For the moment, at least, her Prince Charming has come home.

Having an online relationship with a deployed soldier is "a less than ideal circumstance for starting a marriage," says Shelley MacDermid, co-director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. But, she adds, "that doesn't mean it won't work."

"The road is steeper. You haven't gotten a chance to meet each other's families or understand the rhythms of your everyday life together . . . When you're worried if the other will ever be able to return home, that makes you much more motivated [to make the relationship work] than if you're living a boring life and someone's bugging you to do the dishes."

Four days after their first meeting, though, Joel and Melinda seem to be adjusting amazingly well. Joel is driving Melinda's rental car, and they are on their way to Tybee Island to have lunch at a place called the Crab Shack. They tease each other like an old married couple. "Joel snores!" Melinda announces. "He said he didn't snore, and he does. He told me to just roll him over, but I don't want to wake him up. I bought earplugs, but by the time I get up to put them in, he's already rolled over anyway."

"She's everything I expected," Joel says. "It really feels like we've known each other for years."

Melinda's met several of his fellow medics who, once Joel is out of earshot, mention how much he's looked forward to meeting her.

Like any military operation that has gone according to plan, though, there are also details -- kinks -- to work out. Joel is still decompressing from a year of combat: Large crowds, loud thumps and even dead animals by the side of the road (a popular Iraqi hiding place for explosive devices) make him seize up inside. Melinda woke up one night to find him patting down their bed in his sleep, looking for the gun he no longer carries.

"It's not going to be a fairy tale all the time," she allows. "We had all that romance, just not in person. Now we've cut to the chase."

Gathering up Joel's uniform to take to the laundry a day or so earlier, Melinda felt something hard in the chest pocket. Fearful, suspicious, she fished it out -- only to recognize the crystal clear stone, which contained the word "Kisses" inside. It was one of the first things she'd ever mailed to Joel, along with a note that read, "I'm sorry I can't be there to kiss you, but carry this with you every time you need a kiss."

It's been in his pocket the whole time.

Stephanie Booth is a freelance writer. She can be reached at stephaniebb@gmail.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.