Ready to start a new life together

On a balmy August night at the Turtle Bay Resort in Hawaii, with spotlights playing off the waves, Phil Dana went down on one knee in the sand and asked Julie Elkins to marry him.

Julie, a 25-year-old Santa Rosa bank teller, cried a bit and then said yes to the man she had met online on MySpace and began living with two years before.

“I had a hunch he might ask,” Julie recalled. On a scale of one to 10 for romance, the spot Phil picked to propose was “like an 11,” she said.

Two days later, Julie was back in Santa Rosa, working, planning their wedding and mostly hanging out at her apartment with two cats and a Jack Russell terrier-Chihuahua mix named Toby.

Phil, a 27-year-old specialist with the California National Guard, was back on duty with the 235th Engineer Company patrolling the rough roads of southeastern Afghanistan, looking for buried bombs that account for more than two-thirds of coalition casualties.

His year of living dangerously is almost over, and Julie's year of sleep-deprived and nightmare-riddled nights is, too.

Phil and Julie, who has already picked out her wedding dress, plan to get married at the Villa Chanticleer in Healdsburg next October. The couple might move to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, where Julie would like to open a beauty shop.

Phil, who will leave the National Guard in April, wants to earn a master's degree in business administration, go to flight school and possibly start a commercial helicopter business.

“I want to start my life, and don't want to raise kids over a computer and headphones from overseas,” Phil said by e-mail from Afghanistan.

Since the 235th departed last fall, the computer has been the young couple's lifeline. “Thank God for the Internet,” said Julie, who checks her e-mail first thing every morning. “Just a hello is all the reassurance I need.”

Phil said he has spared Julie the details of his mission, clearing more than 6,200 miles of Afghan roads. The 150-man company has earned 60 Purple Hearts for wounds and 130 Combat Action Badges for coming under enemy fire since January.

Julie doesn't want to hear the details from Phil, nor does she follow the news about the war, she said. But she knows Afghanistan has grown more deadly in the past year, and the imagined horrors have ruined her nights.

“I'll be crying in my dreams,” she said. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, her heart pounding with anxiety.

She takes Ambien every night, but still gets only four hours of sleep at best. She can function on two hours, she said. Julie works six days a week at the bank to keep her mind occupied, and would go in on Sunday, as well, if it were open, she said.

When Phil was home on leave, Julie said she “slept like a baby.”

The daughter of a retired Army master sergeant, Julie grew up in Sonoma and graduated from Sonoma Valley High School in 2001.

Phil, who graduated from Concord High School, moved to Sonoma County in 2003 and joined the National Guard the following year.

Their chats on MySpace began in November 2006, when Phil was on his first deployment to Afghanistan. Their first date was seeing Nicolas Cage as the devil's bounty hunter in the movie “Ghost Rider.”

The funny thing about their attraction, Julie said, is that Phil was not her type. He's a blue-eyed, fair-haired strongman, 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, and she had favored tall, slender “goofy-looking guys,” she said.

“He's a big man, he can throw me over his shoulder,” Julie said, and she's no shrimp at 5-foot-10.

They moved in together in 2007, with Phil set for his second tour in a year.

“It came pretty quickly,” Julie said. “The next thing I know, here it is — goodbye.”

Phil said he proposed in Hawaii so “time would go by quicker for her with planning for the wedding.”

He calls once or twice a week, and she has dinner with his mother regularly. Friends try to drag her out at night, but Julie said it's tough to be around them and their boyfriends.

Off work, she said she prefers to hole up in the apartment, try to get some sleep and plan for the wedding.

By Thanksgiving, they should be back together.

“I knew that if she could stay with me through this I could spend my life with her,” Phil said.