During my last four years in he Air Force I was fortunate to pull some "Joint-duty" assignments and interesting temporary duty's around the world. When I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia I worked in an Army Infantry Detachment and got stuck as the Safety NCO because nobody else wanted the job. I mean what is an AIR Force weenie going to do with the Army? LOL. Here is one of the challenge coins I gave out when I saw safety in action... Bone
Challenge Coins Now that is cool, way cool. I have some research on challenge coins and I placed a short article in the Georgia Numismatic Association Journal. The legends and myths can be hard to untangle. Much of the tradition was undocumented, passed from person to person. Much it was reinvented as soldiers re-engaged the same problems. Unit coins probably trace to the Boer War. The British decommissioned mercenaries (irregulars) with a handshake and in the hand was a shilling. There is a story -- otherwise undocumented from World War I -- in which an aviator had ordered medalets for his unit with their insignia on it and it later saved his life when he was brought down near French lines. During WWII "short snorters" were signed notes. That tradition all but disappeared after the war. During Korea, one Col. William "Buffalo Bill" Quinn had unit coins made for his 17th Infantry. During VietNam, soldiers were supposed to carry a 1 Dong coin and those without one had to buy a round of drinks. Challenge coins as we know them grew steadlily but quietly in the 1970s and 1980s and by the mid-1990s were common. This story comes from the First Gulf War: WITHIN days of his liberation from a prisoner of war camp, Sgt. Troy Dunlap received two Iraqi coins from an employee of the hotel where he and the other U.S. POWs were being housed by the Red Cross following their release. "One for you and one for me," he told Maj. Rhonda Cornum who also had been taken prisoner when their UH-60 helicopter was shot down by members of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard during Operation Desert Storm. "We joked that we could use them like military coins. ... We planned how we would use the Iraqi money to 'coin' our friends when we got back to Fort Rucker," Cornum wrote in her book, "She Went to War." (much, much, much more... more than you care to know...)
I love challenge coins and grab them whenever I find them. The different styles and subjects are endless.
