101st Airborne Division Operation Desert Storm Patch

On February 24, 1991, the 101st Airborne Division carried its 1st Brigade about 60 miles into Iraq and built Forward Operating Base Cobra in a single day. The division's command report called it the largest air assault ever conducted in a single day. Inside 96 hours, the division moved three brigades more than 350 miles. For the Screaming Eagles, Desert Storm was the war that put the air assault idea to work on a scale no one had seen. This patch carries that campaign, and the map it was fought across.

The 101st Airborne Division deployed in the late summer of 1990 for Operation Desert Shield, and 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry landed in Saudi Arabia on September 15 and set up at Camp Eagle II near Dhahran. Through the first months the Eagles screened the Kuwait-Saudi border as an early warning force for two other divisions. When the Desert Storm air war opened on January 17, 1991, Lt. Col. Dick Cody led six AH-64 Apaches of the 1st Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment against Iraqi radar sites, and the division fired the first shots of the war. Before the ground war the brigades shifted about 300 miles west to Tactical Assembly Area Campbell. UH-60 Black Hawks and CH-47 Chinooks carried the 1st Brigade to FOB Cobra, and the next day the 3rd Brigade went deeper into the Euphrates River valley to cut Highway 8, the road from Baghdad to Basra.

The patch is 3 inches wide and 4.25 inches tall, a khaki shape with an arched top and a brown merrowed edge. 101ST AIRBORNE runs across the top in black, with OPERATION on a banner below it and DESERT STORM stitched along the bottom. In the center a sand-colored map lays out the theater, with IRAQ, KUWAIT and SAUDI ARABIA labeled in black, three names every Eagle of 1990 and 1991 can still place without a map. Over the left edge of the map sits the black shield with the white eagle head, yellow beak and red tongue, under a yellow-lettered AIRBORNE tab. That eagle is Old Abe, the war eagle the 8th Wisconsin carried through the Civil War, and the reason the division answers to Screaming Eagles. It has an iron-on backing and can also be sewn on.

Soldiers of the 101st lived out of their rucksacks for more than a month, and some went 30 days or more before a hot meal. Supplies came in by air and by sling load, and Chinook crews later helped move hundreds of Iraqi prisoners. One retired command sergeant major compared the helicopter ride to the Euphrates with the division's flight from England to the Normandy drop in 1944. The FOB Cobra assault earned the division an arrowhead on its campaign streamer, and the division came home without mass casualties. The last of its soldiers were home that May.

Mount it in a shadow box with your Desert Shield photos and your combat patch, or sew it onto the jacket you wear to a brigade reunion. It also makes a good gift for a son or daughter who has heard about FOB Cobra and wants to see where it was. Old Abe over the sand.