A Small Sip From The Apocryphal Chalice

You may remember that apocryphal stories are those stories that are not true.  However, some of us are so taken by their sense of poetic justice that we dispense them thinking if we are diligent in our dispersal, they will become factual to at least some percentage of the receptors and that they will attest to the veracity of the story and it will become true by proclamation.  I suspect propaganda works this way.  

I digress.

Ever since we began warring among ourselves and others, we have found it necessary to take trophies from the people we bested.  We started with the valued possessions of our enemies and moved on (I was going to say progressed, but that would be a shameful thing to think) to making slaves of our foes and then to taking their body parts.  The Plains Indians, ever more civilized than we were, began the practice of counting coup (the "p" is silent).   The idea here was to get close enough to one's enemy so that you could touch him or steal something from him.  The more coup counts that could be documented, the more bravery that could be attributed to the warrior doing the "couping."

As time passed and we Americans became more and more enthralled with firearms, our soldiers began taking firearms from the bodies of our enemies and bringing them home as trophies of war.  Now some of these weapons qualified as heavy artillery, so our military leaders, through the use of regulations, made the act of bringing home enemy ordinance a serious crime complete with commensurate punishment.  It is the story of one man's attempt at sending a military trophy home from the front that we will examine in the following apocryphal story.

Sometime during the second world war, one enterprising GI liberated an enemy rifle and stripped it down to as many small pieces as he could.  He then began sending these parts home to his wife.  You need to know that all mail sent from the war zone was censored in the event that the mail was intercepted by the enemy, so our smuggler could not alert his wife as to what he was doing.

Week after week his spouse received all sorts of parts of various sizes and shapes while having no idea what the end result was going to be.  Eventually, the parts stopped coming.  She spread them all out on the dining room table and correctly surmised that it was some kind of rifle.  So, being the dutiful wife, she took it to a local gunsmith who confirmed it was indeed a rifle and told her that he would reassemble it for ten dollars.  The woman thought that was fair price and in about a week she stopped by the gunsmith shop and picked up the reassembled firearm.  From there she went directly to the post office and mailed the gun back to her husband.

I hope that's true.  Don't you?