Ten Hut!

Stevens "took chances and put herself in harm's way," and she's doing it again as Miss Utah, Pace says. "When you put yourself out there to be judged, that takes guts," he adds. "She's got substance. She's not all fluff … We're all pulling for her."

With that encouragement comes a lot of teasing—like "there she is" serenades and such suggestions for the talent competition as assembling an M16 onstage, blindfolded.

But mostly, Pace says, soldiers marvel at Stevens's ability to go from one extreme to another. On a recent Saturday she wrapped up a three-day Homeland Security conference on how to train teenage emergency responders, her pageant platform. Two days later she was sitting in a local hair salon, learning about "personality fans" and "color readings" from a personal design consultant. She nodded enthusiastically and never rolled her eyes—not once.

The military did not promote Stevens's candidacy immediately. "It took a few months for the Army to realize what they had," acknowledges Pace, who, along with Stevens, is working to build an orphanage in Afghanistan. "They finally recognized that Jill presents a very positive image of the military."

It's good exposure for the pageant, too. "She has a very interesting background, right out of the Middle East with a war going on, and she's obviously getting a lot of attention," says Miss America's McMaster. And attention is something the organizers "crave," according to Gerdeen Dyer, founder of a new industry Web site, pageant.com. Dyer was among the first reporters to highlight Stevens's military service in an interview more than a year ago. A veteran himself, Dyer finds it odd the Army would get involved in promoting her pageant run.

"They're usually pretty hands-off when it comes to anything that isn't officially military," he says. Nonetheless, he hasn't heard any grumbling about the publicity, nor does he expect to. "The pageant culture is very conservative. It would be bad form to criticize the military," he says.