It Takes a Big Man to Know the Value of a Small Wars Coin
I’ve got mine.
It is pretty weighty, moreso than a Liberty silver dollar. And it is a slick presentation.
Carl Prine will tell you how:
….Maybe it’s my unnatural nocturnal fear of monster Jasminocereus talking, but this morning I plunked down my annual contribution to SWJ.
Yes, I routinely squabble with the peeps who run the joint, but it remains the world’s best clearinghouse of ideas about irregular wars, military strategy and other topics of interest to laymen and professionals alike.
The Small Wars Journal Foundation is a 501C3 nonprofit. The founders don’t seem to have made any moolah off of it and they mostly get by with slave labor from cranky Army majors.
Those unpaid editors bring us not only the best essays of the COINdinistas but also (and increasingly) the ripostes of dissenters who don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
They’ve been endorsed by Rolling Stone. Yeah, I know, but you should still help out SWJ before you take a long, slow pee on Rolling Stone.
If you’ve served in uniform, some REMF general from some dank cavern in the E-Ring bestowed on you a crappy command coin in lieu of actually learning your name during a visit you didn’t deserve to suffer.
You never got rid of it because it’s the size of a turkey platter, but you also don’t display it because the Pentagon shop’s command coin isn’t exactly akin to the green-monkey-screwing-a-skull medallion the hip SF guys flipped you after that one crazy mission outside the wire, right?
Well, SWJ is running a special: Give them $50 and they mail you their Challenge Coin. And it’s worth displaying, probably because it says “Small Wars Journal” so it makes everyone who sees it think you’re a lot smarter than you actually are.
I know that’s my excuse for flashing it. That, and my wife won’t let me show anyone the monkey coin.
May 8th, 2011 at 12:13 am
Zen and Dave, I’m in! I’ve a handful of these coins (I’m an old boat sailor and we didn’t "do" coins) from my days in the arms control arena. After spending about a year in the ROK, you knew to have a coin if you walked into a club/had drinks with colleagues.