8th Special Forces Group Flash Patch

In 1967 a mobile training team from the 8th Special Forces Group trained the Bolivian Ranger Battalion that captured Che Guevara that fall. That single mission says a lot about the group behind this flash. The 8th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was the Army's Green Beret group for Latin America, and its full title carried the words Special Action Force. It was the only full Special Action Force the Army fielded. Its weapons were language, patience and instruction, and its teams worked inside partner armies across the hemisphere.

The group was activated on April 12, 1963 at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, formed from Special Action Force elements of the 7th Special Forces Group under Lt. Col. Arthur D. Simons. Its mission was counterinsurgency training for the armies of Latin America, and some of that teaching ran through the School of the Americas, also at Fort Gulick. Mobile training teams worked with units in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, helped Venezuela build its jump school, and trained a Dominican mountain battalion in counter-guerrilla tactics. Detachment A-13 ran the first HALO school held outside Fort Bragg. The group's exhibition jumpers were known around the region as the Jumping Ambassadors.

This is the flash a Special Forces soldier wore on his green beret, a small shield split on the diagonal. Gold-yellow fills the upper left and light blue fills the lower right, each edged in its own color. There is no lettering, and nothing else is needed. Anyone who wore the beret in Panama knows the colors at a glance. It measures 1.87 inches wide by 2.25 inches tall, the size of a beret flash.

The group was inactivated on June 30, 1972, and its people and mission carried on as the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group. Its companies became the detachments that ran the airborne, HALO and SCUBA schools. The 8th lasted nine years, and in that time its teams trained armies across Latin America.

The iron-on backing works on a jacket or a range bag, and it can also be sewn on. Set it in a shadow box beside a green beret, jump wings and a Panama photo, or pair it with an 8th Special Forces Group flash with crest. It also makes a fine gift for a Panama-era team member or his family. A small patch with a long reach.