Shevaun Pennington seemed to be the same as any normal 12-year-old experiencing growing pains. She listened to loud punk rock, surfed the Net for hours and talked endlessly of "her boyfriends" despite never having been on a proper date. No one could have guessed that the person she referred to as her "American boyfriend" was something other than the figment of an excitable school-girl's imagination. The "boy" in question was in reality Toby Studabaker, a 31-year-old American Marine who, two weeks ago, discharged himself from the US military to meet the child he had befriended in his e-mails. Together, they...