Feb
Cold Irony
I have shipped some odd items to incongruous places. For instance, in the late 1990s I shipped several boxes of Confederate toy soldiers from New York to a customer inTennessee. There was the time I shipped New York City souvenirs to hillbillies in Kentucky. I shipped two books about General Sherman from New Jersey to Atlanta, Georgia. (Apparently, he is a big hero there, and deservedly so.)
Recently, this shipping phenomenon added a new item. There are several soldiers stationed in Iraq who like to build military models. One is on a forum that I use. He had requested help getting hobby supplies. I put together a package for them. Among the things I sent were some model kits and fifty of the soldiers which I had hand cast. (They were unpainted.) The metal soldiers included figures representing several eras: Revolutionary War, Knights, War of 1812, Napoleonics, Civil War, Scottish skirt men and World War II figures. It sounds rather odd to be sending toy soldiers to real soldiers in a war zone. However, the things get stranger when you figure that several of the World War II soldiers were Afrika Korps. Think about it: sending the tin Afrika Korps into a war zone in the desert.
The fellows in Iraq genuinely appreciated the package. I had put in a few Yule figures with everything else. Now a tin snowman stands in a prominent place on a sergeant’s desk in Iraq, where temperatures can climb to 120 degrees.
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For those who do not know, the Afrika Korps was an elite German unit during World War II. They made their mark in combat in the Sahara desert.
