Challenge Coins in Popular Culture
- At the end of the long-running American adventure drama television show JAG, the two main characters decide to marry, then flip the challenge coin of retired Rear Admiral A. J. Chegwidden to decide who will resign his or her military commission to accompany the other to a new duty station. The final image freezes with the coin in the air; the audience never sees it fall.
- Colonel Eli McNulty coins Samantha Liston in E-Ring when she is in the running to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and a General is trying to put a stop to it. At one point the General initiates the 'Coin Check' to show that she should not have a senior job as she has not seen combat and, of course, Liston has no challenge coin – thus proving his point.
- In the NCIS episode "Cloak" (11/18/2008), the SecNav gives Tony his coin, apparently as a means of identification. Tony relates to Ziva David the meaning of challenge coins, explaining that they are a form of bragging rights for who has "rubbed elbows" with the biggest brass. He also states that they will never have to buy drinks again.
- Jessica Simpson and her fellow basic training graduates get coined in Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous.
- In the "Betrayed" episode of the adventure drama television show Chase, Deputy US Marshal Annie Frost, is shown to carry around her challenge coin regularly. A recent addition to the Marshal team, Luke, later expresses his frustration at not earning his challenge coin yet- however he earns it at the end of this episode.
- In "Foundation", episode 18 of Criminal Minds Season 7, (aired on 3/21/2012), Special Agent Derek Morgan uses a challenge coin, first flipping it through his fingers then by rolling it on the floor, to establish communication with a traumatized boy who is mute and withdrawn after escaping his kidnapper. To give the boy hope, Morgan also tells him the version of the origin story of challenge coins with the downed WWI pilot crawling through no mans land only to be captured by the French then rescued by his challenge coin being recognized. Morgan lets the boy keep the coin, and in a closing scene, Morgan is shown picking up another coin to carry with him from a collection of 13 more coins displayed prominently on his desk.
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Famous quotes containing the words challenge, coins, popular and/or culture:
“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“A war undertaken without sufficient monies has but a wisp of force. Coins are the very sinews of battles.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)