Salvation Army Ready to Invade Vermont

NEW HAMPSHIRE – Tensions are running high in New England as the Salvation Army is mobilizing a substantial force in New Hampshire, along its western border, in readiness for an invasion of Vermont. General Shaw Clifton is the supreme leader of the worldwide charity and social service organization, and will be leading the troops. Military experts are surprised that he is not delegating command of code name Operation Rolling Thrift Shop.

General Clifton admitted that it is silly to have a code name that is not a secret to anyone with cable news, but “that’s what military men do – invent nifty code names. Who wants to keep secret something that rolls off the tongue like the words ‘Operation Rolling Thrift Shop?’”

The Salvation Army has called to the front 50,000 of its American junior and senior officers to lead a half-million man and woman volunteer fighting corps. There was much internal argument about whether ground forces should wear the same capes they use to collect donations outside of supermarkets and malls. In the end, as one volunteer put it, “the cape makes the Salvation Army. We will cross the border looking like a mass of eccentric French playwrights.”

They will also be employing 2000 T-72 Russian tanks that an Albanian arms dealer had left in a Salvation Army donation cup outside a Walmart in Nashville, Tennessee. Also, every soldier will be carrying an M-16 rifle, courtesy of a Fort Bragg clearance sale, and a hand-bell for intimidation purposes.

General Clifton claims that the reason for the invasion is that Vermont “is too secular, too radical, too earthy-crunchy, to say nothing that they wear those silly hats with the ear flaps. They are destabilizing the region.”

Said Lieutenant Janice McCoy: “You wear hats like that, you deserve to get driven into Lake Champlain.”

Yet there are people who say that the real reason for the attack is not due to ideology but rather to the acquisition of these same flapped hats. “It gets cold during Christmas time standing out there ringing a bell for hours on end,” confided one volunteer to a bevy of microphones and TV cameras, but who asked that her name not appear in print. “We need those hats.”

Cynics in Massachusetts say that’s is all about the hats, nothing more, that the Salvation Army is using regime change in Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, as a ruse to gain a monopoly of this precious resource. In other words, those who control the fur-lined-cranial-warmers market control the economic life-blood of the region.

The mission of the Northern Army is to overrun Montpelier and then occupy Middlebury and St. Albans and thereby encircle Burlington in preparation for, in the words of Captain Wes Fargo, “liquidating those hippy bastards.” The Southern Army will make sure that every last pretentious, no-talented literary student at Bennington College never gets the chance to plague America with their over-baked coming-of-age novels.

The invasion will take place on Christmas Eve. Said General Clifton: “And bells will be ringing.”