Next Time, Bring Some Chocolate

Okay, I know I just posted earlier today with one of my more serious-type blog entries, but an unusual and obscure news article involving a small European nation was too rich to pass up:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070302/ap_on_fe_st/mistaken_invasion

I'm sure that somewhere, some company that sells maps (think Rand McNally or Thomas Guides or Google maps) is just salivating over the opportunity to turn this into a really bad commercial that I will have to add to my YouTube favorites list. How often do soldiers on military exercizes wander by accident into neighboring countries? Hopefully, not very often.

In fact, this particular incident, as unintentional as it is, marks the first Swiss invasion of anywhere since 1521, when the Swiss were feared all over Europe for their fierce armies of pikemen, and when they were defeated in battle around Milan. After that the Swiss Guard could be seen in the Vatican City area, but mostly for show (obviously pikemen are not so feared militarily nowadays). The Swiss, except for being invaded by Napoleon in 1798, have been at peace since then making excellent watches, chocolate, and serving as the bank deposit headquarters for would-be billionaire dictators all the world over. Who knew they harbored secret desires to take over their tiny neighbor, the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein, which happens to be the last surviving principality of the Holy Roman Empire.

Perhaps the Swiss were concerned that the little nation, whose population of 34,000 is only slightly larger than that of my hometown of Plant City, would defeat them in the preliminaries for Euro 2008 (a highly competitive soccer tournament). Perhaps the nation of Liechtenstein, which has no army, was too tempting of a target for Swiss operations of "regime change."

Of course, it appears that it was just some lost soldiers who couldn't follow directions in the dark and refused to admit they were lost. I've done the same thing myself (most notably in the Wilderness of Virginia), and the worst it ever did for me was waste a couple of hours worth of time and gasoline in impenetrable forests that are so bad that two Civil War battles were fought there when large armies got lost near Catherine's Furnace among the second-growth forests (Chancellorsville in 1863 and the Wilderness in 1864).

At any rate, at least there are no hard feelings on both sides. One would hate for the Swiss to face a nasty UN resolution for aggressive acts against its peaceful neighbors. We wouldn't want that to happen...