17th Field Artillery Regiment Coat of Arms Patch

The castle on this shield is Ehrenbreitstein, the fortress above the Rhine at Koblenz, and the 17th Field Artillery put it on its arms to remember its occupation duty there after World War I. A silver band in the American colors crosses the castle and carries seventeen blue stars. The red field is the artillery color. In the corner, red and ermine stripes are the device of the 8th Field Artillery, the parent organization. The regiment's motto is In Time of Peace Prepare for War.

The 17th Field Artillery was constituted in the Regular Army on July 1, 1916 and organized at Camp Robinson, Wisconsin on June 6, 1917. Assigned to the 2d Division that September, it fired through the Aisne, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne campaigns and came home with the French Croix de Guerre. In 1944 the regiment was broken up, its 1st Battalion becoming the 17th Field Artillery Battalion and its 2d Battalion the 630th Field Artillery Battalion, and its guns went from Tunisia and Sicily through Southern France, the Ardennes-Alsace and Central Europe. The regiment carries ten Korean War campaigns, from the UN Defensive to Korea, Summer 1953. Today the 1st Battalion serves with the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force in U.S. Army Pacific, and the 2nd Battalion with the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 7th Infantry Division.

The patch is a shield 3 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall with a silver-gray merrowed edge around a red field. The silver band runs corner to corner with a blue stripe and a red stripe along it and the row of blue stars down the middle. The castle stands in gray and white on a green mount, cut in two by the band, just as the blazon has it. The striped canton sits in the upper corner, a nod to the 8th Field Artillery lineage. It has a sew-on backing with a plastic stiffener and needs to be stitched in place.

The regiment's battalions kept answering calls for fire long after the Rhine. In Vietnam it took campaign credit from the Defense phase through Counteroffensive, Phase VII, and it carries a Presidential Unit Citation for Pleiku Province. In the Gulf War it served in the Defense of Saudi Arabia and the Liberation and Defense of Kuwait, and in Iraq it earned a Valorous Unit Award and a Meritorious Unit Citation for 2006. Redlegs from every one of those eras wore this castle on their unit crest. Two battalions carry it in the active Army today.

Put it in a shadow box with your unit crest and your battery guidon photo, or on the jacket you wear to a 17th Field Artillery reunion. It also makes a good gift for a son or grandson who wants to know where his father pulled lanyards. A castle, seventeen stars and a hundred years of fire missions.