Ten Hut!

Since October military publicists have sent out frequent bulletins touting Stevens's pageant successes and public appearances. And the Utah National Guard is counting her speaking engagements as military duty.

For six years Stevens was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 211th Aviation Regiment. She was moved to Medical Command in June and now works on recruitment.

Since returning from Afghanistan in April 2005, Stevens has given numerous speeches about the experience and how to make the most of trying situations. For 12 months she lived at Bagram Airfield, 27 miles north of Kabul, tending injured soldiers and dodging rocket attacks. "At first I was nervous. I couldn't believe I was 20 years old and going to war," Stevens says of her deployment.

Nor could her parents. Stevens enlisted three months before her high-school graduation and six months before the 9/11 attacks. Even then her parents worried that the military might change her. "My personality is fun and goofy, and they thought the Army would take that away," she says. But once in Afghanistan Stevens took on the role of morale booster, surprising despondent soldiers with bread made with a bread machine her mother shipped to her and birthday cakes baked in an oven constructed from aircraft parts. She held muffin-eating contests and staged Family Feud game show nights. She even planned the occasional girls' night out for the 30 or 40 females on the base. "That was the first time I ever painted my nails," she says.

"She was always lifting someone else up, making their day better," says Chief Warrant Officer Layne Pace, an Apache pilot and member of Stevens's Guard unit.

Venturing "outside the wire" is dangerous; a lot of soldiers never do it, Pace says. Not Stevens. She delivered care packages and medical treatment to villagers, using her persistent smile to win the confidence of Muslim women and "standoffish" young girls.