99% Invisible - 156- Coin Check

Episode Date: March 11, 2015

The United States Military is not known for being touchy-feely. There’s not much hugging or head-patting, and superiors don’t always have the authority to offer a serviceman a raise or promotion. When a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I once went to a small business and tech conference in San Francisco, and among all the people hobnobbing in hoodies or khakis, a man emerged in full military attire. Dark green uniform with ribbons on his chest and tiny pins all perfectly affixed. Crew cut whole nine yards. He was a marine lieutenant colonel and he was by far the most interesting person in the room. I was just glued to him. Anyway, as we parted ways, he handed me this coin like thing. I mean, it was bigger than a coin. It was about an inch and a half in diameter or neatly decorated with the icon of the lieutenant

colonel's unit. And heavier than anything I'd care to keep in my wallet. I felt incredibly honored, but I didn't know what it was or what the hell I was supposed to do with it. I also got a coin like thing. It was from a tour guide at the Pentagon. I asked him what it was and he was like, eh, it's just something we do. Producer Avery Truffleman. I told my housemate Ben about my coin and he was like oh yeah I have one of those. It was my grandfather's. It is. I woke Ben up before I came to work so we sound really sleepy. So his coin is from the 101st Airborne. It's got the 101st Airborne insignia and chose a couple of there.

The places that they fought via NAM World War II. On the back it says Randevi with Destiny, which is their motto, their creed, I don't know. Did he ever tell you like about this? I actually never met him. This is the only thing that I have of his. Every night I figured out that these coins are called challenge coins. And they are coins, but they're not currency, and they're not quite metals. Challenge coins are something different. Everything that I say here today is my own personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect

the position of the Marine Corps. Roger that. Carrie Fosher is not in the Marines. She's a cultural anthropologist at Marine Corps University. She's encountered challenge coins many times throughout her career. I would imagine that except for the brand new people coming in, everybody will know that they exist. The degree to which they are used varies a great deal.

This can depend on which military branch you serve in and your rank, but it goes further than that. There are so many different uses, so many different kinds of things that the coins can symbolize, depending on the context in which you're looking at them or somebody is giving them. Kerry says that one of the meanings of the coins is made apparent in the act of giving or exchanging them. The coins are literal tokens of gratitude, of appreciation, or love, or sympathy. They are a powerful and tangible form of connection within an institution that is not known for

being very touchy-feely. It can be difficult in certain contexts to express emotion, especially if it's across the ranks. And I do think that the coins are used in that way, as a physical symbol of affection or gratitude. So across ranks, people might be given a coin for a job well done, because there are only so many ways to show appreciation within the military. You can't give a person a raise, you can't give them a promotion. ways to show appreciation within the military. But of course, as Avery and I learned, these coins are occasionally given out to civilians. Most of the time I would give a coin just to say thank you for helping me out. That's Chris McGraft.

He's a chief petty officer in the Navy. And I collect and trade challenge coins. Chris says he gives coins out to co-workers, old friends, anyone who doesn't be solid. And for that reason, you end up finding these coins in places where you would not expect to find any connection to the military. You know like in the hands of Wimpy podcasters like us. And the coins are a way to establish relationships outside of the institution.

When these coins get sent out, they're a physical reminder of both the fact that the military is there, but perhaps more importantly that it's not some faceless, monolithic structure sitting in the Pentagon. There are human beings involved and they are human beings who can develop a professional of personal relationship with somebody outside the military. When I received my coin from the Pentagon tour guide, he just kind of unceremoniously handed it to me. But within the military, when a sailor, a soldier, a pilot, or a marine gives a coin,

they don't just hand it over. There's a traditional handshake. Of course there is. The handshake is used whenever someone is transferring one of the coins over, and essentially you have the coin sitting in the palm of your hand. And then, with the coin in your palm, you firmly grasp the hand of the person you want to give the coin to. And then you flip both your hands over so it ends up in their hand. Chris has an amazing collection of challenge coins.

Some don't look like regular coins at all. I've got one here, shaped like an ninja star. I've got another one shaped like a crown. You know, this one is a, it's shaped like a cougar profile view, but the teeth are open and you can actually use it as a bottle opener. The bottle opener could actually be quite practical because in addition to being gifts and heirlooms and tokens of appreciation, challenge coins are used to play a drinking game and if you're in possession of a coin, you can be in on the game. Jordan Haynes, a veteran of the Air Force, plays like this. If I was at a bar, I would have the coin in my pocket, and if I felt, you know, emboldened, I would pull a coin out of my pocket, and I would, I would throw it down on the bar,

or I might tap it, and maybe haul her out, coin check! And all his buddies and crew members would take out their coins. We expect them to reply with their coin doing the same thing. So now you've got all this craziness going on, because people are slamming their coins down and yelling out coin check. Go in check! And they go down the line, and each person pulls out their coin.

Hopefully what happens is somebody doesn't have their coin. And if they don't have their coin, then boom. The person without their coin buys everyone a drink. But the person who does the coin check is liable for round of drinks if everybody does have their coin. So starting the coin check is also a gamble. And not all of the branches of the military

are into the drinking game. I will say that I have not seen Marines initiate that kind of game. They would certainly participate if somebody from another service did that. But those who play the game are in it to win it. Some have their coins on them. Always. That little useless coin pocket you have in your jeans,

I've actually found a use for it and it's for my challenge coin. You gotta be on your toes, you know what I mean? If you're in a shower, you know, take your coin with you. If you're out running, whatever you're doing, you can carry the coin with you. You could be coin right here in the studio. As far as the history of challenged coins, there's sort of an apocryphal story

that traces them back to World War I, when an American army officer supposedly had some special coins minted for his men. And then one of those men was captured by French soldiers who mistook him for a German, and then he used his coin to prove that he was an American. So the coins have also always been about identity. They do tell a story about how the or the organization wants to be perceived. What do they think are the most important things that they can communicate about themselves to an

outside audience in a graphic form. And since identity in the military has a lot to do with hierarchy, there is also a hierarchy with challenge coins. As you move up through the ranks, you know, the challenge coins become more essentially valuable because they're harder to get. It's harder to get a chief-enabled operations coin. It's even harder to get a secretary of the Navy coin.

It's incredibly hard to get a presidential coin. Yes, the president has a coin. There's a really lovely video of Obama giving his coin to a woman who lost her brother in Afghanistan. And the military isn't the only institution to use challenge coins, although they were the first. Now some police departments make coins and some fire departments. NASA gets coins minted. Sports teams have coins. Jimmy Buffett has a coin. Jimmy Buffett the singer yeah. That's Jordan Haines again. He's the one who told us about the drinking game. A lot of these performers you know if they're doing a USO tour

they'll have their coin with them in return to whoever presents them a coin. In addition to being a collector of coins, Jordan is actually in the business of making coins. He's made over three million of them, including Jimmy Buffett's. I am the founder and CEO of CoinForce.com. CoinForce is one of the private men's that designs and manufactures challenge coins. I'm holding a coin that I brought with me to the studio,

a diamond-shaped coin that we made for astronaut Lindgren. It's got his name on it, it's like just super awesome coin. My god, we do awesome work. You don't have to be a president or an astronaut or Jimmy Buffett. You too can have a coin. You can design your own and then just go online and order it. That's basically what the military does. Most of the time a unit gets together and talks about what they want on their own and then just go online and order it. That's basically what the military does. Most of the time a unit gets together and talks about what they want on their coin and then gathers the money for it themselves. So we're not using taxpayer dollars. It's all buy our own for our own. So we are fundraising

internally or we're doing car washes. Because coins are not in the budget, there's no set procedure for making them and no rules, which means the design process is very informal. Nine times out of ten in the Navy, someone takes that sketch and they use clip art and put it into PowerPoint and then send it off to the manufacturer. PowerPoint, Microsoft, PowerPoint. PowerPoint is installed on every government computer and it's for us, it's free. And then Jordan at CoinFor, or whoever the manufacturer is,

will take that mock-up and finish a final design on real professional grade software. A design studio does not use PowerPoint to design a challenge coin. Oh, that's a relief. The individual coins take on a whole new meaning when a bunch are displayed together. And a lot of military folks make elaborate displays

or even custom furniture to show off their collection. Of course, some displays are much simpler. In Clinton's presidential portrait, he's posing in front of his collection of challenge coins and they're in a simple wooden display. But these coin displays are not like a flashy show of achievement at all. It becomes less a display of look at me and more a display of a lot of long, quiet, hard work over the course of decades.

The coin show all the professional and personal relationships established over the course of a career. So if you're in the army and have coins from the Air Force and your collection, it shows that you've collaborated across military branches, which can be really hard to do. The coins are physical proof of hard-fought relationships.

To me, the coins are full of interesting contradiction. They're a combination of gravitas and tradition, with levity and joy. Like my friend Ben, if he wanted, could go take that heirloom of his grandfather's time in World War Two and Vietnam and go win a beer with it. You might not do those two things with the same coin. Some people might, but that's just one of the lovely contradictions that you find all over military life. In a world as regulated and rigorous as that of the United States military, the coins have this fluid quality about them. They're different coin check rules for different branches,

the coin's use and popularity varies. The history doesn't have a set telling, the design doesn't have set rules. There is obviously a very regimented, very structured, very rule bound aspect to the military, but challenge coins and a lot of other things that are routine parts of daily military life mitigate that structure. Challenge coins are a reminder of the human elements of the massive U.S. military, a reminder that some servicemen constantly carry. I've been coinchecked at airports, been coinchecked at trade shows, I've been coinchecked at airports. I've been coinchecked at trade shows. I've been coinchecked everywhere.

Now my, now my home's off limits. Don't be like crawling up my balcony at 3 a.m. to do a coin check on me on my property. But you catching outside of my property, and you know, game on. There's no way I'm climbing up on that dude's balcony at 3 a. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Truffleman with Katie Mingle, Sam Reanspan and me Roman Mars, special thanks to Ben Klas for waking up so early.

We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxelin, in architecture and interiors firm, in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. Now, before we go, this is not an advertisement. I just want to tell you about something our pals at Radio Lab have been making over the last few months. It's a very cool experiment and if you haven't been Austin, you're headed there for a South by Southwest or if you live there, you should check it out. Radio Lab has made a story that you can only hear with a GPS-tiggered audio iPhone app

called Detour. The reason I specifically wanted to mention it is because a few weeks back, every did a story about Austin's moonlight towers and one of the stories that haunts the origin of the towers is the legend of the servant girl annihilator. And that's a lot of what Radio Laps Austin's story is about. The writer O Henry was living in Austin back then in 1885. He wrote this one letter I'll never forget.

He said, town is fearfully dull except for the frequent raids of the servant girl and eye-lators who make things lively during the dead hours of the night. The murders all happened during this big moment of change in Austin's history and it really shook Austin. When the servant girl and eye-lator showed up in Austin we never heard of a serial killer. Nobody had. This was way before Jeff Redommer, before Son of Sam, even before Jack the Ripper. So if you want this totally immersive GPS triggered guided prequel to the Moonlight Tower story, Radio Lab has done it. And going on a tour with Radio Lab is literally the best thing you can do in Austin during South by Southwest.

I've been there many times, so I just thought that if you're already there or you're going to be there for the conference, download the DTore app and load the tour that's called the year that broke Austin. It's totally free and you're totally gonna dig it. We are a member of Radio Topia from PRX. If you subscribe to all the shows in Radio Topia, tweet at me at Roman Mars and say, I'm a Radio Topian and I'll retweet that, and I'll fave star it, and I'll praise your good taste. You can subscribe to them all at radiotopia.fm.

If you want to see pictures of challenge points, you got a lot of them at 99pi.org.