101st Airborne Division Patch

The eagle on the 101st Airborne patch was a real bird with a name: Old Abe, the bald eagle the 8th Wisconsin Infantry carried into Civil War battle on a perch beside its colors. He went through the fights at Corinth, Vicksburg and Nashville, and when the 101st Division took its shoulder insignia in 1921, it took his head. Twenty-one years later the division became airborne, and the eagle went with it into Normandy, Holland and Bastogne. Its soldiers have called themselves Screaming Eagles ever since. Today the 101st is the Army's air assault division, based at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee line.

The division was activated at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, on August 16, 1942, under Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, who told his first recruits the 101st had no history but a rendezvous with destiny. On the night before D-Day its paratroopers, the 506th Currahee regiment among them, jumped onto the Cotentin Peninsula behind Utah Beach and went on to take Carentan. In September 1944 the division dropped into Holland for Operation Market Garden and held its stretch of the corridor for 72 days. That December, surrounded at Bastogne, it answered a German surrender demand with Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe's one-word reply, "Nuts!", and held until the siege broke on December 26. The division became airmobile in 1968 and air assault in 1974, and in Operation Desert Storm it flew the longest air assault to that point, deep into the Euphrates River Valley.

This is the classic version of the patch. A white eagle head faces left on a black shield, beak open in gold over a red tongue, eye set hard. A separate black Airborne tab, lettered in gold, rides above the shield, the way the patch has been worn on the left shoulder for generations. It is embroidered at 2.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall, with a cut edge that follows the shield and tab. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on as well.

The 101st has been in most of the Army's hard fights since World War II. Its brigades fought in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. Its Apaches fired the first shots of the Gulf War air campaign, its soldiers took Mosul in 2003, and its headquarters ran Regional Command-East in Afghanistan in 2008 before the whole division deployed there in 2010. The Air Assault Badge started in this division in 1974 before going Army-wide, and the course is still taught at Fort Campbell. Soldiers wear this eagle on the left shoulder while they serve in the division, and many keep it on the right shoulder as a combat patch for the rest of their careers.

Put it in a shadow box with a set of jump wings, on the jacket a Screaming Eagle wears to reunions, or on the ruck of a young soldier headed to Fort Campbell for the first time. It also makes a good gift for a son or grandson who wants to know where his grandfather jumped. Few patches carry this much history in 3.5 inches.