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It's an old adage that the Internet helps erase the barriers of time and space to bring people together. The New York Times examines how this has made it an important lifeline for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Military deployments have a way of chewing up marriages, turning daily life upside down and making strangers out of husbands and wives. But for this generation of soldiers, the Internet, which is now widely available on bases, has softened the blow of long separations, helping loved ones stay in daily touch and keeping service members informed of family decisions -- important and mundane.

Most soldiers deploy with a laptop in hand and a hookup to the Internet in their barracks. Others, particularly those with young children, pay for Web cameras, a trend that began in earnest two years ago.

Mental health experts and military commanders say that the tens of millions of dollars spent on technology in Iraq for Internet cafes, computers and Web cameras have helped ease the isolation of soldiers' lives, as well as the turbulence of coming home, an often-bumpy transition from combat to kiddie pool and from commanding to compromising.

But there's a downside, too, experts note, when soldiers in a war zone are distracted by issues back home. And, as you might expect, the military is finding it much more difficult to prevent inadvertent releases of classified or sensitive information.