Defense Language Institute Patch

The small gold cap on the red field of this Defense Language Institute patch is the cap of the San Carlos Catalan Volunteers, the Spanish soldiers who marched with Father Junipero Serra and built a presidio at Monterey in 1770. That presidio is the ground DLI students walk today. The school itself began far more quietly. On 1 November 1941 the Army opened a secret Japanese language school at the Presidio of San Francisco with a $2,000 budget. Four instructors taught 60 students, most of them Nisei, in an abandoned airplane hangar at Crissy Field.

After 1942 the school moved to Camp Savage, Minnesota, and in 1944 to Fort Snelling, where it grew to 125 classrooms and more than 160 instructors as the Military Intelligence Service Language School. More than 6,000 of its graduates served in the Pacific and in the occupation of Japan. In 1946 the school came back to the Presidio of Monterey and became the Army Language School. The Defense Language Institute was established in 1963, and its resident training was later consolidated in Monterey as the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. Today it teaches more than two dozen languages to about 3,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and the DLI English Language Center runs at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

The patch measures 2.75 by 3.5 inches with a cut edge that follows its outline and an iron-on backing. The shield is split on the diagonal, red at lower left and blue at upper right, the colors of the institute's wartime and peacetime missions. A gold band crosses it carrying a green olive branch for peace through understanding. In the blue corner sits a fragment of the Rosetta Stone, the 1799 find that cracked Egyptian writing, inscribed with the name of Ptolemy V. A red flame on a gold torch for learning rises above a gold and blue twisted wreath, and a gold scroll below reads DEFENSE LANGUAGE INSTITUTE.

Every DLI graduate remembers the pace: hours in class every weekday, homework at night, and tests that decide where a career goes. Linguists from every branch sat in the same classrooms at Monterey. Their work after graduation was mostly done out of sight, in listening posts, aircraft, ships and interrogation rooms, and much of it was never talked about. The Nisei who started it in a hangar in 1941 set the standard for the thousands who came after. A DLI patch is something a linguist recognizes from across a room.

It fits in a shadow box beside a diploma from Monterey and a unit patch from the first assignment after it. It also makes a good gift for a new graduate, or for a retired linguist whose family never quite knew what he did. It is a small shield that holds a lot of history.