From An Old Sea Dogs Ditty Bag ... Military Script

From the Mail Bouy:

A former shipmate share a memory from old Navy days.

We did it years ago when the military overseas paid GI’s in script.

From “five cents” up to “$20 bills”… that is how we got our walking around money…. Good anywhere on base and even down at the French bistro in the village near our radar site in Morocco, at a discounted price (we had to take our script to the Air Base an hour away to trade our script for Francs, or if you could justify it, American dollars).

The Bistro owner would use the script he would obtain to get GI’s to buy him cigarettes and other items at the BX at the air base.

A black market if you will, and while you paid 20 to 30 percent more for a glass of wine and a baguette (tasted so much better than the chow we were getting), one would gladly pay it.

But then the day arrived, strictly unannounced, when the armored weapon-carrier arrived with the heavily armed AP’s (probably one of the future Smitty or Larry’s sergeants) and you had to exchange you script on the spot for brand new and different colored script.

That left the “black-market” guys holding their old script.

By the way, one of my hapless squadron members had been stupidly sending script home as a simple saving plan (instead of taking out an allotment and having half his pay sent to a bank). Try as he might, he was out the few hundred dollars (remember we were making $90 to $150 a month, depending on your rank back then).

PS…. Interestingly, script helped the balance of payments as the 350,000 or more GI’s operating around the world at the time (the Cold War) were paid in script.

So the 350,000 times $100, per month, wasn’t seeing “Greenbacks” flooding Europe, Japan, Korea, and all the other places we operated (North Africa, the “Phil,” Panama). That’s $35,000,000 a month.

Not a lot when you think of how many “Greenbacks” leave America every day to pay for foreign oil (billions)now but I remember at the time that there were a lot of economics types who worried that our dollar was going to suffer.