Joining their comrades in confectionary nationwide, Girl Scouts in Suffolk’s Troop 5357 devote much of their time for a stretch every year to hawking as many boxes of cookies as they can.

Invariably, generous citizens donate the cookies straight back to the 43 Girl Scouts.

In 2013, Shannon Lee and her daughter Claire started something with their donations that has caught on and now provides the girls insight into the sacrifices made every day by the men and women who enlist to protect America’s freedoms.

Lee organized to donate the boxes her daughter received — about 150 — to the veterans helped by Keeping Warriors Outdoors, a nonprofit her brother had started.

Then, as a reward for their hard work outside such places as Walmart, Lowe’s and Food Lion on all those chilly mornings, Lee and her brother took her kids out of school and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where they were able to distribute more of the donated cookies.

“We walked room to room, handing out to soldiers,” she said. “We just walked and handed out cookies.”

Last year, according to Lee, the troop leader decided the girls should join forces with their combined 800 boxes of donated cookies.

They sent them to the families of soldiers killed or injured in the 2012 Midland train accident, in which a freight train struck a parade float en route to a veterans’ benefit in Texas.

They sent cookies to Korean War and Pearl Harbor veterans. They visited nursing homes bearing cookies, as well as Vetshouse in Virginia Beach, a nonprofit providing transitional housing to homeless veterans.

“At the end of the year, as an incentive, we took the girls up to D.C. by train and went through Arlington National Cemetery handing out cookies,” Lee said.

The girls spent some time reflecting at The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“Then we went to the mall, and we just walked through the monuments and every girl had a backpack full of cookies,” Lee added.

Next morning, the girls visited Walter Reed, repeating what the smaller party had trialed the previous year.

“This year, we’re not planning to go to Walter Reed,” Lee said. “We may go the Langley Air Force Base hospital,” and return to Vetshouse.

While things like T-shirts and teddy bears are ordinarily used as incentives for more cookie sales, visiting the veterans gives the Scouts “a new understanding that the sacrifices these people make are tremendous,” Lee said.

The girls also plan to send a cookie package this year to the ship one of their mothers serves upon as a dental hygienist, Lee said.

“Her mom will clean the teeth from the cookies we send,” Lee quipped.

Paying tribute to Shannon Lee’s creativity, another troop mom, Megan Taliaferro, said in an email that the pioneer of the troop’s cookie donation efforts even “arranged for a VA nursing home to puree the cookies into smoothies for their elderly veterans.”

The girls are still accepting donations at Main Street United Methodist Church, 202 N. Main St.