A ship built to smuggle 32 million cigarettes past Irish customs spent nine years rotting at a dock, too contaminated to sell and too expensive to scrap. This year it sits on the seafloor off Ireland’s west coast, crusted in barnacles and sponges, home to fish that had no reason to be there before. This week also brought a smaller, more local version of the same idea: a 20-year-old program that turns one Marine veteran’s gratitude into a livelihood for other veterans, one free lunch at a time. Both stories, in their own way, are about something built for one purpose finding a far better one.
A Free Lunch With Twenty Years of History Behind It
On Wednesday, Nov. 11, veterans and active-duty military members can walk into a Little Caesars between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and get a free HOT-N-READY Lunch Combo. No coupon, no app. Just proof of service — a military ID, a DD-214, or a veteran designation on a driver’s license — shown at the counter.
That part is simple enough. The part worth sitting with is where it comes from.
Little Caesars’ founder, Mike Ilitch, served in the U.S. Marine Corps before he built the pizza chain. In 2006, that service became the seed of something bigger than a Veterans Day promotion: a Veterans Program aimed at helping honorably discharged veterans move from military life into owning something of their own.
Through the program, veterans can get discounts on franchise fees, equipment, and supplies, plus help with financing and marketing to open and run their own Little Caesars locations. A free lunch is the part you can see on one Wednesday in November. The harder, longer work — a veteran walking out of the service and into business ownership, with a company covering some of the cost of that leap — has been running quietly for twenty years.
It started with one man’s memory of his own uniform. It has since become a door other people get to walk through.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
What’s Left of a Smuggler’s Ship, Two and a Half Miles Offshore
In the summer of 2014, Irish customs officers boarded a 197-foot vessel called the MV Shingle and found nearly 9,900 pounds of illegal tobacco on board — about 32 million cigarettes. They seized the ship. Then nothing happened to it for a very long time.
Legal proceedings held the Shingle at Dublin Port for three years. After that, rust and asbestos made it unsellable for any other use, and the cost of scrapping it outright was too high to justify. So it just sat there, tied to the dock, for roughly nine years — racking up costs equivalent to about $2.24 million before anyone found a use for it.
In 2024, a local environmental program called Killala Bay Ships 2 Reef took the Shingle and ethically sank it two and a half miles off Ireland’s west coast, turning a liability into an artificial reef. According to Ireland’s Revenue Commissioners, marine life “colonised” the wreck almost immediately — the kind of fast growth that signals a vessel can genuinely support a new ecosystem rather than just sit on the bottom.
Dr. Jose Maria Fariñas-Franco, a marine ecologist at Atlantic Technological University, has watched the reef develop and called the growth “quite impressive, to be honest” for how little time the wreck has spent underwater. Underwater footage now shows the hull covered in barnacles, sponges, and sea squirts, with fish moving through it.
This isn’t an isolated trick. Decommissioned ships, offshore structures, and even cleaned-out subway cars have been sunk elsewhere to build reefs, and some research has found artificial reefs can host denser fish populations — including larger predators — than natural ones nearby. Scientists are still studying how much of that is new life versus life drawn away from existing reefs, which is a fair question. But off Ireland’s coast right now, a ship that once existed to move something illegal and harmful is, instead, holding a small ecosystem together.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
Neither of these stories is about something being created out of nothing. A ship meant for smuggling became a home for sea squirts and sponges. One veteran’s memory of his own service became twenty years of other veterans getting a real shot at owning something. The raw material was already there — it just took someone deciding not to let it go to waste. If something in your corner of the Boro got a second life this week, we’d like to hear about it.