Cold War Veteran Gray Hair Patch

The yellow and black fan behind the flag on this patch is the radiation trefoil, first sketched at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley in 1946, one year into the Cold War. The lab's health chemistry people meant it to show activity radiating from an atom. It started as magenta on blue, and the yellow background came in 1948 at Oak Ridge. For the next four decades that symbol hung on weapons storage areas, reactor spaces, missile sites and alert pads around the world. Anyone who worked near one knows exactly what the colors behind those dates mean.

The dates 1945 and 1991 line up with the Cold War Recognition Certificate, which covers honorable service between September 2, 1945, and December 26, 1991. Section 1084 of the Fiscal Year 1998 National Defense Authorization Act created it, the Army runs it as executive agent, and it is open to military members and federal civilian employees alike. The first date is the Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay, and the second is the day the Soviet Union dissolved. Between them came the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the fall of the Wall in November 1989. The work in those years ran through missile fields, radar sites, submarine patrols, alert bombers and the border that split Germany.

The patch is round, 4 inches across, with a gold merrowed border around a black field. DON'T LET THE GRAY HAIR FOOL YOU arches across the top in gold block letters, and a salty second line runs along the bottom to finish the thought. In the center, COLD WAR and VETERAN stand out in big white letters outlined in black, with 1945 and 1991 on either side of a small American flag. Behind them the trefoil fans out in yellow and orange rays against the black. The radiation symbol, the flag and the dates in the middle, the attitude around the edge.

Cold War service rarely made the evening news, because success meant nothing happened. Readiness was measured in minutes and kept up for years, by alert crews, missileers, sonar operators, radar watch standers, maintainers and analysts. A lot of the men who did that work are the gray-haired guys at the reunion now, and this patch is their joke on anyone who underestimates them. Congress created a certificate for that service, and it still has no campaign medal of its own. This one wears the same dates with a grin.

Put it on the vest you wear to the VFW or a wing reunion, or in a shadow box next to your recognition certificate, dog tags and a photo from Germany, a missile site or a ship. It also makes a good gift for a father or grandfather who did his years on alert and still has the attitude. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on for a permanent hold. The bottom line says the rest.