Posted 10 years ago
jonima
(113 items)
Here is my collection of pins and patches from a military exercise called Combined Endeavor '98. This was held at Sembach Air Base, Germany. It was a compatibility exercise between several Allied countries and several former Soviet Union countries, testing communications equipment compatibilities. As always, pins and patches became very popular trading items between the countries. The pins are from Macedonia, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Estonia, Finland, Holland, Romania, England, Norway, Uzbekistan, Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Latvia, Switzerland, Lithuania, and Slovenia. The patches are from Belarus, France, Poland, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. Macedonia, and a couple others that I don't remember and forgot to write down. There was a lot of hard work during that exercise, but we had a lot of fun too.
These are Great!
Thanks, Sean. It was quite the experience working side by side with countries that we were prepared to go to war with not long before that.
Fantastic collection & thanks for sharing.
Thanks, blunderbuss, and thanks for the love, folks! If you had those tiny bottles of Jack Daniels or some American Colonel insignias at this exercise, you were a god to some of these countries.
Yup, familiar with that currency! God Jonima, I wish I had that collection! Bet there are a lot of good & maybe fuzzy memories to go along with it?
Yes, lots of good memories. Funny thing was, some of the countries had people with them whose sole purpose was to download porn so they could take it back and sell it. They could make a lot more money doing that than what they got paid for being in the military. Our network security guys got NO rest during that time.
Been there too, Jonima!! Shared memories from afar! I sold 3.800+! LOL!!