Eyewitness To History

Sometimes you happen upon the best stuff, purely by accident. Stuff that is so cool you can't believe it. I had this happen twice to me this past weekend.
   After my Dad died I asked my mother to send me one or two of his old Zippo lighters. She sent me eleven. It looks to me that most of these were souvenirs from his Coast Guard service, like the lighters from the USCGC Buttonwood or the USCGC Tamaroa, both vessels my father served on. Or the one from Okinawa engraved like a Japanese woodblock print. Too cool.
   But the history started when I found the one from the Kwajalein test site in the Marshall Islands. On one side is a cloisonne enameled diagram of the atoll, and on the other side a shield with 'KWAJALEIN TEST SITE,' and below that 'AMC' and 'NIKE-X', then the legend 'Kwajalein, Marshall Islands.'
   Now, I just happened to have done some research in college about Kwajalein and the military missile tests there. The AMC stands for 'Army Materiel Command,' the organization in charge of procuring and testing ICBMs, including the Nike-X. And my father was there during the first tests, he even got a souvenir cigarette lighter.
   Too cool. There was stuff he wouldn't tell me about his years of service in the US Coast Guard, and this is probably one of those things. He was, more than likely, sworn to secrecy and he kept his word. It would have been 1962-1963, at the height of Cold War tensions because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the US Government took the secrecy of its missile defense systems deadly seriously.
   But it gets better. I found another lighter, this one from Weisbaden, Germany. My father was never stationed in Germany (not a lot of Coast Guard stations there for some reason), but my grandfather was. In 1954. Which is the date on the lighter, a souvenir from the Rocker Club, the NCO club on-base.
   Cool enough, a lighter that's coming up on 60 years old, and never used because my grandfather had been forced to stop smoking by then. But the best part, the historical part, is the stamped legend on the back side. In little tiny print it reads 'Made in US Zone of Germany.'
   Even though the BRD - West Germany - was ostensibly independent, in 1954 it was still occupied territory, and was only declared its own country in 1955. So I have a lighter from that brief period after WWII ended until the BRD became officially sovereign.
   Sweet.
   I majored in History in college, so this kind of thing really boils my potato. The best gift my father could have given me. Thanks, Dad.