The Coin Check Was Never Really About the Beer

Photo by Łukasz Nieścioruk on Unsplash

Earlier this week The Havok Journal ran a piece about a veteran who taps an 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment patch hanging in his gym’s doorway. When a kid asked what he was doing, he said he was saying hi to his buddies. If you haven’t read The Power of a Patch, it’s worth five minutes.

I make challenge coins for a living. I never served, so I won’t try to tell anyone here what that patch means. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between a patch and a coin, and it comes down to one thing. A patch stays where you hang it. A coin goes where you go.

The coin check is built on that difference. The rules change from unit to unit, but the core is simple. Someone slaps a coin on the bar, and everyone in the group has to produce theirs. Whoever can’t buys the round. If everybody has one, the challenger pays.

People tell it as a drinking game. It works more like a habit. Nobody wants to buy the round, so you carry the coin. You carry it to the bar and out to the field, long after you’ve stopped thinking about why. Every time your hand finds it in your pocket, the unit is there with you for a second.

Then you get out, and nobody checks anymore.

The structure that made you carry it is gone, and the people are scattered across a dozen states. A few days before the patch story, the Journal published “Community, Not Push-Ups, Keeps Veterans Alive,” and its point is hard to argue with. What helps is staying connected to people who get it.

Most groups try to solve that with a reunion. A reunion is a good thing. It’s also one weekend a year, and the other fifty-one weeks run on a group chat that goes quiet a month after everyone flies home.

Bring the check home

Here’s an idea any reunion organizer can steal. Make a coin for the group you have now, the one that still shows up. Then keep the check alive, with one change.

Anyone in the group can call a coin check by text. Everyone has an hour to reply with a photo of their coin. Whoever can’t produce it doesn’t owe a round. They owe a phone call to the person who called the check.

That’s the whole rule. It’s a dumb little game that gets people talking on a Tuesday. The guy who never answers the group chat will answer a coin check, because nobody likes losing. And the call he owes is the point.

What to put on it

The coin should belong to the group you are now, not only the unit you were. Put the group’s name on it, along with the years that matter: when you served together, and the year of the first reunion. Add the place everyone still brings up, whether that’s a FOB or a town nobody back home has heard of. If you plan to make a new one every few years, number them, so each member’s set grows over time.

Order a few more than you have members. Some will go to guys who couldn’t make the reunion. Some should go to families who ought to have one.

Be careful with official emblems. Branch logos and unit insignia are trademarked, and each service runs a licensing office that controls how they appear on products. If you want them on the coin, check with the branch first. Plenty of groups skip the question and build the design around their own name and dates, which tends to be the part people care about anyway.

Small runs are easy to get now. If you need a starting point, you can browse challenge coin designs from units, departments and groups we’ve made coins for at MZIHO. We make them from 25 pieces per design, so a group the size of a squad can have its own. Give yourself about six weeks before the reunion. You approve a digital proof before anything gets made, which leaves time to fix a misspelled name or a wrong year.

The patch in that gym doorway is a way of saying hi. A coin can do one thing the patch can’t. It can ask a question at eleven at night, from a guy three states away: you still got yours?

Somebody has to answer.