(Illustration by Stripes Okinawa)
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Our 800-pound upright piano was being carried by two men down four flights of stairs from our Patch Barracks apartment to their truck. That German-Turkish moving crew displayed feats of superhuman strength like I’d never seen before.
It was 2010, and our family was PCSing to Florida after three years in Germany. We believed that hardy crew had safely packed our 18,000 pounds of worldly possessions for a successful trip back to the U.S. And they did. Every kitchen utensil, shoe, ballpoint pen, Lego block, refrigerator magnet, mattress, family photo and Band-Aid were sealed into crates.
Well, except for one small thing. A Ziploc bag containing coins. Not the pennies on the kitchen windowsill. Not the change from pants pockets that sat on our dryer. Not the lunch money stash on the hallway table.
The coins that didn’t get packed were my husband’s military challenge coins. He’d wrapped them in tissue paper before placing them into the Ziploc bag, then fitted the bag snugly inside his wooden humidor box.
Months later, the crates were unsealed and every item carried into our base house at Naval Station Mayport. Unlike other moves, nothing looked broken or lost. Our piano was unscathed and still in tune, my beloved ceramic Christmas trees hadn’t suffered so much as a flea bite, and Lilly’s Polly Pockets were still wearing their tiny shoes.
But when the last crate was emptied, my husband Francis searched for his humidor. He found it wrapped securely in paper, inside a sealed box marked “Office.” The humidor felt strangely light.
Sure enough, it was empty. His coins, every one of them, were gone.
“I’ll file a claim,” I’d said, trying to comfort him. But the coins were irreplaceable. Not only would he never find those same coins again, they weren’t worth enough fair market value to justify the hassle of filing a claim.
Francis had to come to terms with losing the special coins he’d collected during three years at U.S. Africa Command and a year-long deployment to Djibouti. Coins given to him from embassies and remote units in Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Yemen. Also, he’d never see the coins he’d acquired during duty in Iraq, Poland, Norway, Italy, Alaska and Virginia.
Most special to him was the first coin he’d ever received in 1996 while stationed at Joint Analysis Center, Molesworth, England. As a young intelligence officer, Francis was placed in charge of 30 analysts assessing the military capabilities of other nations. One afternoon in a WWII windowless Royal Air Force hangar, Francis gave a presentation about his group’s mission to visiting Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, the highly decorated Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
As attendees dispersed after the presentation, General Hughes reached out to shake Francis’ hand. Francis’s palm met the general’s, and he detected a cool circle of metal.
“Nice job today. Keep up the good work,” the general said.
At home that night, Francis showed me his first challenge coin, explaining that the medals were a form of recognition for a job well done. As the years passed, he collected more coins, displaying them in a rack atop his rolltop desk. He cherished them as unique “memory chips” from moments in his military career.
For a time, Francis beat himself up for not carrying his challenge coins with him during that PCS move. But then, he got on with it. Today, he has another rack atop his rolltop desk, chock-full of more coins collected from duty in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Texas, Japan, Korea and the Naval War College in Rhode Island.
Years after he retired from the Navy, Francis received an unexpected surprise. He’d forgotten that, early in his career, he sometimes had two of the same coin, so he sent the duplicates to his father. His brother found those coins while sorting out their mother’s belongings after she’d passed, and sent them to Francis to restore at least some of his early collection.
We learned the hard way that while the Navy can move almost anything across the ocean, sometimes it’s the smallest things that carry the most weight.
Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com
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