Snaps and snails and puppy dog tails. Sugar and spice and all that's nice. The differences between boys and girls are older than Mother Goose's 1916 nursery rhyme-and as new as the ways they respond to current events.

In Orange County, Calif., 17-year-old Shauna Fleming's national campaign to send thank-you notes to American soldiers has warmed more than 2.5 million warriors' hearts. In La Plata, Md., 14-year-old Zeke Peterson has taken a practical-and arguably more male-approach, sending soldiers something they can use in the field.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.-By mid-December, passengers at Charlotte's busy international airport form long lines and slouch over small piles of luggage, resigned to the holiday crush. Beyond the crowded security checkpoints, Terry Tellison and Jesús Rodriguez squeeze through the teeming food court and climb up a set of winding, red stairs. A sign at the top tells the young men with heavy backpacks and worn combat boots that they're in the right place. It reads: "USO: Until everyone comes home."

As the Air Force F-4 burned through the sky just north of the DMZ, a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile streaked up to meet it. The SAM exploded a hundred feet away, strafing the American jet with metal shards and setting both engines on fire.

Shortly after Kevin Radman arrived at the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Va., last summer, his sergeant instructor ensured that each member of the unit had access to a chapel service. "He did not ask how many people were religious, he asked what sort of religion you were," recalls Mr. Radman, now a second lieutenant. The sergeant needled the lone candidate who said he was an atheist. He'd better find God, he said, because "you need to find something to hold on to."

Still reeling from a series of sexual assault accusations in 2003, the Air Force Academy has slipped into yet another public-relations nightmare in recent weeks. Critics have charged the well-ordered institution with letting religious fascism run wild. The supposed culprit: old-fashioned evangelicalism.

Patrick McCarron joined the Virginia National Guard in the wake of 9/11, says his wife Inna, because "it just shook him so much. He wanted to do something." So Mr. McCarron, who worked in maintenance at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., spent the next few years as a "weekend warrior." They knew he could be shipped overseas but, like many Guard and Reserve recruits, "thought it would be a more local-type thing," she says, probably helping with homeland security.

During chow-time at a U.S. Army base outside Baghdad, Spc. Amanda Pagac has lately heard the soldiers of B Company, 118th Medical Battalion, tossing around one particular adjective.

"Slime!" they call out between forkfuls of dinner.

It's not the food they're bashing. The epithet-among others, she says-rings out whenever Sen. John Kerry's face appears on the dining facility TV.