Air Force SERE Training Patch Return With Honor Desert Patch

Return With Honor is the motto of the 336th Training Group, the USAF Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base, and it is the same phrase American prisoners of war in North Vietnam lived by. Retired Col. Lee Ellis, a POW in Hanoi, has described the second code the prisoners followed alongside the Code of Conduct: Resist, Survive, Return with Honor. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Air Force aircrew go through it because their jobs can put them on the ground behind enemy lines. The school teaches them how to stay alive, stay hidden, hold up under captivity and get home.

The survival school's lineage starts in December 1949 with the 3904th Training Squadron at Fort Carson, Colorado, set up to give Strategic Air Command aircrews survival and evasion training. It moved to Stead AFB, Nevada, in 1951 and came under Air Training Command in 1954. When Stead closed in 1966, the school moved to Fairchild AFB in eastern Washington, where it has been ever since. It became the 336th Crew Training Group in 1993 and the 336th Training Group in 1994. Today the 22d Training Squadron runs Combat Survival Training, and the 66th Training Squadron trains the SERE instructors over a five-and-a-half-month course.

This is a shield-shaped patch, 3.25 inches wide by 4 inches tall, in desert tan with a cut edge that follows the shape. USAF SERE arches across the top tab in brown. A white bald eagle head with a gold beak and a hard gold eye fills the center, set in front of a red eight-pointed compass star, with two strands of black barbed wire running behind it. RETURN WITH HONOR curves along the bottom in brown thread. It has an iron-on backing and can also be sewn on.

The phrase on the bottom of this patch carries more weight than most mottos. The men held at Hoa Lo and the other camps around Hanoi kept a chain of command and a code among themselves for years, and the ones who came home in 1973 brought that code home with them. SERE instructors keep training in Arctic, desert, jungle and open-ocean survival so they can teach it. For anyone who went through the course, the eagle, the compass and the wire need no explanation.

It fits a flight jacket, a range bag or a shadow box next to aircrew wings and a 22nd Training Squadron patch. It is also a good gift for a SERE instructor, a former student or a family member of a Vietnam POW. Three words that every graduate already knows by heart.