Hundreds of soldiers and Marines based in North Carolina flocked to magistrates to be married in early 2003. Young and headed to Iraq, they were joining a romantic tradition as old as war and marriage. Now, many are contributing to the military's high wartime divorce rate. The register of deeds in Onslow County, which is home to Camp Lejeune, issued 479 marriage licenses in the first two months of 2003, nearly 50 percent more than the same period in 2002. Cumberland County, where Fort Bragg is, issued 644 licenses, up nearly one-third.

Since then, units have deployed repeatedly, keeping new spouses apart -- in some cases nearly as much as they have been together. Meanwhile, recruiting has fallen, and the Pentagon knows it must keep marriages healthy to shore up re-enlistment.

That means it needs to save unions such as the ill-starred marriage of Seth E. Kilkuskie and Lakiesha N. Carter.

Carter, a 19-year-old single mother, spotted the handsome 20-year-old Marine in a Jacksonville gas station one night in October 2002. He noticed her, too. He got her number, and that night they talked so long that her cell phone battery drained twice.

"I don't know if it was just that we were both lonely," she said. "Everything got really, really serious, really, really quick."

About three months after they met, they were talking about his coming deployment and the extra pay and benefits he could get as a married Marine. "One Wednesday, we just went down and got married," she said.

That was in January 2003. Things started going wrong almost as quickly as they'd gone right. Money was tight. They didn't know each other as well as they thought.

"I'm stubborn, he's stubborn. Sometimes it got childish," she said. "Marriage is supposed to be about compromise, but neither one of us was willing to do that."

Within months, they split.

"All we ever did was struggle," she said. "I think we got married too quick, considering how young we were." Kilkuskie, who is in Iraq, could not be reached.

The ingredients of wartime romance -- love, impulse, young hormones and looming separation -- can also be a recipe for divorce, said Lt. Cmdr. Breck Bregel, a Navy chaplain at Camp Lejeune.

"There's just this idea out there that 'I'll be better off financially, or my fiancee will.' But there's maybe not that foundation. They may not have known each other very long. Or, being young, they might not have really developed that intimacy, that knowledge, that trust that make up a good foundation for marriage."

There were 5,700 divorces among active-duty Army soldiers in 2001, according to Pentagon statistics. By fiscal 2004, the number had nearly doubled, to 10,500. It dipped in fiscal 2005 but was still nearly 25 percent higher than before the war.

The divorce rate among Marines was steadier. Still, nearly 75 percent of all military marriages that begin during a first enlistment end in divorce, Bregel said, compared with the national rate of about 50 percent. A big problem behind many failed military marriages is little known outside the service: misconceptions about pay.

More money is available to married personnel -- about $12,000 on top of an annual $23,000 for a Marine lance corporal with three years of service if he moves off the base, and a couple of hundred dollars a month more during deployments. But the young Marines often don't understand how much extra they'll have to shell out for vehicles, rent and other monthly bills.

Some fail, some prevail

Bradley J. Urias, then 20, and Ashley L. Petersen, 18, were married by an Onslow magistrate Jan. 15, 2003. He shipped out for the Middle East the next month and came home in July. The marriage lasted only a few months longer.

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