75th Infantry Ranger Regiment Patch Rangers Lead The Way

The lightning bolt across this shield is for the strikes Merrill's Marauders made behind enemy lines in Burma, and the white star beside it is the Star of Burma. The four colors, blue, white, red and green, stand for four of the original six combat teams of the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), the Marauders themselves. That is where the 75th Ranger Regiment's line begins: the 5307th was organized in the China-Burma-India Theater on 3 October 1943, consolidated with the 475th Infantry in August 1944 and redesignated the 75th Infantry in 1954. The shield design was approved for the 75th Infantry on 18 March 1969 and carried over to the 75th Ranger Regiment on 3 February 1986. Rangers know it on sight.

The 1986 consolidation brought the World War II Ranger Infantry Battalions, the 1st through the 6th, together with the 75th Infantry in one regiment. Its campaign credits run from Normandy and Central Europe to New Guinea, Leyte, Luzon and Central Burma, then seventeen Vietnam campaigns from Advisory through Cease-Fire, when the Ranger companies of the 75th Infantry carried the Marauder lineage. In October 1983 the 1st and 2nd Ranger Battalions made a low-altitude parachute assault onto Point Salines Airfield in Grenada during Operation Urgent Fury. Panama followed in 1989, and on 3 October 1993 Task Force Ranger, built around the 3rd Ranger Battalion, fought the Battle of Mogadishu alongside Delta Force. The regiment has since added campaign credit for Afghanistan and Iraq in the Global War on Terrorism.

The patch is a cut edge shield, 2.88 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall, outlined in gold with a scalloped top. It is quartered in blue and green, with a silver sun inside a ring of gold-edged rays in the upper blue quarter and the white star, stitched in silver-gray, in the lower one. A red lightning bolt outlined in gold cuts corner to corner across the whole field, through all four quarters. Because the edge follows the shield outline, it sits flat on a jacket or in a frame with no extra border around it. Every element on it points back to Burma.

The regiment's motto is Sua Sponte, of their own accord, and Rangers Lead the Way goes back by Ranger tradition to Omaha Beach in 1944. The regiment is headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia, with the 1st Ranger Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia, the 2nd at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, and the 3rd at Fort Benning. The cost has been real, from the Marauders in the Burma jungle to the 18 Americans killed in Mogadishu. A soldier who wore this shield earned a place in a unit that measures itself against the men in its own lineage.

Frame it in a shadow box with your scroll, jump wings and a photo from Hunter, Lewis or Benning, or put it on the jacket you wear to the regimental reunion. It is also a fitting gift for a son heading to RASP who wants to know where the shield came from. It has iron-on backing and sews on just as well. Sua Sponte.