Great Lakes Illinois Naval Recruit Training Command Patch

The three signal flags inside this ring spell out the command's initials: Romeo on the left, Tango on top and Charlie on the right, R-T-C, for Recruit Training Command. Any sailor who learned his flags will read them before he reads the lettering. Naval Station Great Lakes was founded on 1 July 1911 on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, and President William H. Taft dedicated it that October. The command calls itself the Quarterdeck of the Navy. Since 1994 it has been the only place the Navy turns civilians into enlisted sailors.

San Diego's training center closed in 1993 and Orlando's followed in 1994, and from then on every enlisted recruit in the fleet has come through Great Lakes. Recruits start at Camp Moffett in Building 1405, the Golden Thirteen Recruit In-Processing Center, named for the first Black officers commissioned in the U.S. Navy. They live in barracks called ships, named for vessels such as USS Enterprise, USS Triton and USS John F. Kennedy, under the eye of their recruit division commanders, the RDCs. Training runs about ten weeks. It ends with Battle Stations 21, a 12-hour test of 17 shipboard scenarios aboard USS Trayer (BST-21), a 210-foot Arleigh Burke-class destroyer simulator built indoors and completed in June 2007.

The patch is 3.5 inches wide and 5 inches tall, cut edge, built around an old-pattern anchor. At the top sits the anchor ring and a brown wooden stock banded in silver, and the gray chain runs down the right side and wraps around the crown and flukes at the bottom. Centered on the anchor is a round medallion ringed in twisted gold and black line. A blue band carries RECRUIT TRAINING COMMAND across the top and GREAT LAKES ILLINOIS across the bottom in white letters, with a white star on each side. In the white center a rifle and a cutlass cross over an open book, with the R, T and C flags flying around them.

Boot camp at Great Lakes is the one experience every enlisted sailor shares, whether he went on to a carrier, a submarine, a destroyer or a squadron. It means winter wind off the lake, the drill hall, line handling, firefighting, damage control and the first watches stood. Many of the men reading this marched there when the Navy still ran boot camps in San Diego and Orlando too, and many of their sons and grandsons went through the same gates later. It ends at Pass-In-Review in the ceremonial drill hall, when the families come and a recruit walks out a sailor. Every rating in the fleet starts on that same ground.

Put it in a shadow box with a boot camp company photo and the first set of orders, or on a vest for a ship's reunion. It also makes a good gift for a new sailor's parents on graduation weekend, or for a grandfather who went through Great Lakes decades earlier. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on for a permanent hold. Everybody started here.