Ugly Americans

And paranoid, too.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters.

The harmless "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

In the countries of the Commonwealth, where history and sacrifice are not so disposable as in ours, they have an odd custom called 'Remembrance Day'. Unlike our Memorial Day, it does not serve as the start of the summer grilling season, and is observed in November, on the anniversary of the end of WWI.

The blood-red poppy flower, which bloomed across the battlefields of that war, was immortalized in the poem In Flanders Fields, and has been associated with Remembrance Day across the globe for decades, particularly in Canada.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance -- inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nanotechnology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

One has to hand it to the cunning Canadians. Most spy agencies wouldn't be so clever as to hide their spy devices in plain sight, coloring them bright red and centering them on the faces of 30 million coins along with the legend "Remember/Souvenir".

I realize that, living in Seattle, I get a lot more Canadian culture than my cousin in Florida, but for goodness sake, it's Canada! The country on our longest border, biggest trade partner, etc., etc. If we're sending military contractors there who don't even recognize a basic element of the culture in the nation most similar to ours, what does that say about our chances in places like the Middle East or Asia? A guy ends up with a couple quarters in his pocket that he didn't remember putting there, and he freaks out, because the Canadians happen to have a cool way of putting a colored coating on their coins, which he's never seen before, and a picture of a poppy, which he doesn't recognize, and that adds up to ... spy technology and a warning from the Defense Department?

Yes, that would be the Defense Department that, rather than remembering the fields of Flanders, or even the jungles of Vietnam, is now bloodying the sands of Iraq.

Sometimes we are a pathetic, sad excuse for a civilized country.