Troops Facts

A small group of retirees in Bangor, Maine has met every troop flight through the airport since 1991. It started with one homecoming during Desert Storm. Volunteers give each soldier a handshake, a cookie, and a free phone call home. Some flights land in the middle of the night. Someone is always there. More than a million troops have walked through that line. Thirty-five years on, they are still waiting at the gate.

Bruce Willis's 8-year-old daughter Tallulah was selling Girl Scout cookies in Idaho in 2002 when she had an idea: send them to the troops. Willis bought 12,000 boxes. More than 8,000 pounds reached the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Arabian Sea, and the captain handed the very first box to a sailor who had been a Girl Scout herself.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have made 87 USO tours since 1979, when their first trip took them to South Korea. By the USO's own count, no other entertainment group has toured more. They have performed on flight decks and in war zones across more than 40 countries. This spring they were back aboard a Navy aircraft carrier. They still go every year.

In the mid-2000s, a Wisconsin dentist began paying kids a dollar a pound for their leftover Halloween candy. His own children told him it was a terrible idea. He sent the candy to troops overseas, and thousands of dentists across the country joined in. One military charity alone has shipped nearly 600,000 pounds of donated candy. Dental offices still collect it every November.

Brittany Bergquist and her 12-year-old brother Robbie saw a news report about a soldier's $7,600 phone bill from calling home. They started with $21 to help, then found a way to recycle old phones into calling cards. Their charity now reports more than 400 million minutes provided to deployed troops, and over 3,000 drop-off sites still collect old phones.