Interior Communications Electrician IC Rating Patch

Look under the globe and you will find the rating spelled out a second time, in flags: India, yellow with a black ball, and Charlie, blue, white and red stripes. Any signalman or quartermaster on the bridge would read those two flags as IC without thinking about it. The red globe with the telephone handset across the top says the same thing in pictures. Interior Communications Electricians keep a ship talking to itself. If the word cannot get from the bridge to the engine room, or from damage control central to a repair locker, nothing else aboard works for long.

The IC rating was established in 1948, drawn from the Electrician's Mate rating. IC-men, as the rest of the crew calls them, own the sound-powered phones, the interior telephones and switchboards, and the public address systems. They test and maintain the gyrocompass, the engine order telegraphs between the bridge and main control, and the rudder angle indicators. Alarm, warning and indicating systems are theirs, along with tactical plotters and dead reckoning equipment for navigation, shipboard television and closed-circuit systems, and the alarms on weapons magazines. Ashore and afloat, on surface ships and submarines, the work runs from synchro and servo systems to fiber optic lines, and every IC needs a secret clearance to do it.

The patch is 4.5 inches wide and 3.25 inches tall, with a navy blue merrowed edge around the classic rating patch shape, curved across the top and bottom. UNITED STATES NAVY runs across the top in navy lettering on a gold band. In the center, a red globe with a telephone handset over it sits between a large white I and a white C. The India and Charlie flags are stitched below the globe, and INTERIOR COMMUNICATIONS ELECTRICIAN runs along the bottom gold band. The back is iron-on.

Most of the crew only notices an IC when something goes quiet, and that is the way the rating likes it. General quarters, man overboard, a casualty in main control: every one of those calls goes out over gear an IC wired, tested and fixed. They are the ones crawling through cable runs with a schematic, chasing a ground in a phone circuit at 0200, or zeroing out a gyro before the ship gets underway. The rating has stayed in the fleet for more than 75 years because ships keep adding systems and someone has to make them talk. Anyone who wore the IC rate knows how much of the ship ran through his hands.

It fits a sea bag, a work jacket or a reunion vest, and it sits well in a shadow box with his crow, ribbons and ship's patches. It is a good gift for an IC who has retired, or for a son who just picked the rate at MEPS. Two letters, a globe and two flags, and every IC knows what they mean.