On the Characteristics of Coins

I had never heard about the advent of challenge coins and military coins until very recently. neither a member of one of the armed forces nor of any secret society that has them.  I’d never truly considered the possibility of being a member of an organization that would ever use them:  the only military guys I’d ever known– the young ones especially– each had a regimented sense about them that I didn’t understand.  In any case, I had no idea that with all of their shouted mottoes and their clean-cut hair, their uniform gestures and catch phrases and movements, that each would have their own coins.

Military service has enjoyed a resurgence in the perception of sanctity in contemporary life, but when I was a child we were far less forgiving of the men in uniform.  My family specifically mistrusted the military when I was a child, primarily because my father, who was of an appropriate age to be drafted into any branch of the services during the Johnson-led portion of Vietnam, had very specific and largely negative opinions of the men he knew who went into the conflict willingly.  His favorite stories about that time had mostly to do with dodgers and protesters.  One of his favorite stories was about a fraternity brother of his.  The day he was to have his physical, the fraternity brother smoked a huge joint, ran ten miles, smoked another huge joint, then showed up to his physical.  He wasn’t accepted.

Those were the sorts of stories I heard about the military:  avoiding it. The notion of a series of special coins that signified a membership in one of those branches was totally out of reference for me.

The only non-currency coin I was ever aware of as a child concerned the sort of promotional coin ads that aired on daytime TV.  My favorite commercial was the one that featured the Ronald Reagan solid gold coin, issued just after his family announced that he had developed Alzheimer’s.  This was before Reagan had been anointed the patron saint of the conservative movement in America.  The ads ran every morning in between soaps and daytime game shows and sold for some ungodly amount plus shipping and handling.  That, of course, was about making a buck.  These coins are about preserving legacies.