10 Cents Pusan; Officers' Open Mess

APO 96259 was the Army Post Office designation for Pusan during the Korean War. These scrip notes were issued by the Officers' and NCO Open Mess to control alcohol and goods sales on base — a common informal monetary system in forward areas where U.S. military payment certificates weren't always practical for small in-house transactions. The perfin security feature, punched rather than printed, was a low-cost way to prevent scrip from leaking into the local Korean economy, where even fractional American-issued paper carried real exchange value.

Mess scrip of this type was typically destroyed or voided at the close of a rotation, making surviving examples genuinely uncommon.