Military Facts

Iceland has no railway system or army!

The US Air Force researched a “Gay Bomb”: A non-lethal bomb containing really strong pheromones that will make the enemy forces attracted to each other. It won the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize.

The U.S. army packs Tabasco pepper sauce in every ration kit that they give to soldiers.

During World War II, the company that would become Uncle Ben's supplied rice to the U.S. Armed Forces under a government contract—their parboiled rice was prized because it could be air-dropped to troops without weevil infestation and cooked faster than regular rice.

A homing pigeon shot through the breast with one leg hanging by a tendon flew 25 miles to save 194 men trapped behind enemy lines. The survivors carved him a wooden leg. He still stands at the Smithsonian today.

During the Cold War, the US had planned to detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon.

A stray puppy was smuggled onto a troopship in a coal bin in 1917. He served 18 months in the WWI trenches, warned his regiment of mustard gas attacks, located wounded men in No Man's Land, and bit a German spy's leg until soldiers arrived. He is the most decorated war dog of WWI and the only dog promoted to sergeant through combat. His body is at the Smithsonian.

Nils Olav, a king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo, is the official mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard. The name and rank have passed down through three penguins since 1972 - knighted by King Harald V in 2008 and made Major General in 2023. At the 2023 ceremony, over 160 soldiers paraded past him so he could inspect the troops.

In 1963, the US Military created an artificial ring around Earth, similar to that of the planet Saturn. The ring was made of copper needles and was used for worldwide communications in the case that the Soviets disabled all other methods of communication.

Samsung is also a full time weapons manufacturer.

In 1948, Costa Rica abolished its military and spends the money on education and culture instead.

The first McDonald’s drive-thru was opened near a military base in Arizona “to serve soldiers who weren’t permitted to get out of their cars while wearing fatigues.”

As she tells it, Catherine Roberts dreamed her son Nat, deployed to Iraq, was wrapped in a quilt. She woke up in her Delaware sewing room and made one, then sent it to a wounded stranger at Walter Reed. Volunteers have since hand-sewn over 454,000 Quilts of Valor for veterans touched by war, about 3,000 a month. The 450,000th went out in July 2026. They are still sewing.

A small group of retirees in Bangor, Maine has met every troop flight through the airport since 1991. It started with one homecoming during Desert Storm. Volunteers give each soldier a handshake, a cookie, and a free phone call home. Some flights land in the middle of the night. Someone is always there. More than a million troops have walked through that line. Thirty-five years on, they are still waiting at the gate.

Bruce Willis's 8-year-old daughter Tallulah was selling Girl Scout cookies in Idaho in 2002 when she had an idea: send them to the troops. Willis bought 12,000 boxes. More than 8,000 pounds reached the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Arabian Sea, and the captain handed the very first box to a sailor who had been a Girl Scout herself.

During a war between France and England in 1697, Louis XIV ordered the release of a captured English engineer who had been building a lighthouse. His reasoning: "France is at war with England, not with humanity."

Sergeant Alvin York came home from World War I as a national hero. Hollywood wanted his story, and he said no for over 20 years. With only nine months of schooling himself, he raised money for a high school in his Tennessee mountain county and mortgaged his home twice to pay its teachers. A century after he broke ground, it still teaches the county's kids.

During World War II, dog lovers asked American families to lend their pets to the military. Owners signed up more than 40,000 dogs. Over 10,000 of them served as sentries, scouts and messengers. When the war ended, the military retrained the survivors to be family pets again. Many came home with honorable discharge papers.

In 2021, KPMG offered accountant Scott Ruskan a full-time job. He said no and joined the Coast Guard instead. On his very first mission as a rescue swimmer - the July 2025 Texas rising waters - he saved 165 people at a summer camp. He was the only rescuer on scene for four hours.

In 1989, the Soviet Union traded Pepsi 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer in exchange for Pepsi products. For a brief moment, PepsiCo had the 6th largest submarine fleet in the world. Pepsi's CEO told the National Security Advisor: "We're disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are."

Pepsi ran a commercial showing a Harrier jet for 7 million Pepsi Points. A business student named John Leonard did the math, raised $700,000, and mailed Pepsi a check demanding the jet. Pepsi said no. He sued. A judge ruled "no objective person could reasonably have concluded" the offer was real. Pepsi re-aired the ad with the price changed to 700 million points and a "Just Kidding" disclaimer.

Lucca was a Marine Corps bomb dog who worked Iraq and Afghanistan for six years. In more than 400 missions, no Marine on her patrols was ever hurt. On March 23, 2012, a bomb took her front leg. Her handler carried her out. She was walking again within ten days, and in 2016 became the first US Marine Corps dog awarded Britain's Dickin Medal for bravery. She retired to the Marine who had been her very first handler.

On September 26, 1983, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was alone at a nuclear command bunker when the early-warning system showed 5 American missiles inbound - confidence level: HIGHEST. Protocol demanded he report up the chain immediately. He decided the computer was wrong and reported a false alarm instead. The USSR reprimanded him for the paperwork.

A 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier named Smoky was the smallest soldier in the Pacific during WWII. At Lingayen Gulf, engineers needed telephone wire threaded through a 70-foot pipe buried under an active airfield - too narrow for any person to enter. Smoky crawled through in minutes, saving an estimated 250 ground crew from three days of digging in open enemy fire, with 40 planes parked nearby.