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through his fingers then by rolling it on the floor, to establish communication with a traumatized boy who is mute and withdrawn after escaping his kidnapper.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:
“She might have been old once and now, miraculously, young again—but with the memory of that other life intact. She seemed to know the world down there in the dark hall and beyond for what it was. Yet knowing, she still longed to leave this safe, sunlit place at the top of the house for the challenge there.”
—Paule Marshall (b. 1929)
“A war undertaken without sufficient monies has but a wisp of force. Coins are the very sinews of battles.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)