An Old Acquaintance

You know how it is when you hear from an old friend that you haven't seen or even thought about for years. This little guy was my constant companion from the first day that I met him. They were included in our C rations and were/are called P38's but I don't know why. Mine went on my dog tag chain and was used for a lot of reasons besides opening cans. Gapping spark plugs comes to mind. The Army said that we should use a dime to gap the plugs in our generators but when we were in RVN, dimes and all other US money were, of course, made of paper. For those of you who never needed one, you might not understand either its utility or the fondness one can have for its companionship. I can only explain by stating that they were handy. For you intellectuals, maybe it was Pavlovian. P38=Food. I quit carrying mine quite a few years ago when the blade would not stay folded in. I ran across a website today that has quite a bit of history and reminisces about them and spent a good part of the afternoon trying to find where I left mine. It would be interesting to ask a group of people who were in the army back then if they still carried them on their key chains.

Rütli Field

Rütli Field is where, according to legend, that the leaders of three Swiss cantons met on August first of 1291 and swore to defend each other. The date, which represents the beginning of Switzerland, is now the Swiss national day much like our Fourth of July and the field, a national shrine. In German, the adjective eidgenoessich (as a sworn comrade) means, literally, "Swiss." In 1940, when war was likely to engulf Switzerland with an invasion from Germany, the Swiss general Guisan, himself reputed to be sympathetic to the Nazis, called the Swiss officer corps to the iconic Rütli Field and there bade them to defend the homeland to the last bullet-and then to use their bayonets.

Of course, Germany did not invade and some of the reasons included the likely resistance of not only the Swiss Army but also the population which could produce a "rifle behind every tree." Switzerland, despite its reputation as peaceful and neutral, has always been heavily armed. I read that in the 1800's, a young man in the region of Basel, could not marry unless he could show that he owned a rifle. In contrast to the rest of modern Europe, where arms are mostly strictly controlled, the able-bodied men of Switzerland keep and use their weapons on a regular basis. Indeed, they were the model for the modern German Schuetzen movement when they banded in 1861.