M1 Abrams Battle Tank US Army Armored Vehicle Patch

The M1 carries the name of General Creighton Abrams, the tank battalion commander who led the 4th Armored Division's push into Bastogne in December 1944 and later served as Army Chief of Staff. The tank that bears his name entered service in 1980. Chrysler Defense designed it, and General Dynamics Land Systems took over the line when it bought Chrysler Defense in February 1982. Hulls have rolled out of the Lima Army Tank Plant in Ohio ever since. Four men ride it, commander, gunner, loader and driver, behind a turbine engine that sounds like nothing else on a tank trail.

That engine is the AGT1500, a multi-fuel gas turbine rated at 1,500 shaft horsepower. The first M1s carried the 105mm M68A1 rifled gun with 55 rounds aboard. The M1A1 moved up to the 120mm M256 smoothbore, and about 5,000 of them were built between 1986 and 1992. The Abrams saw its first combat in the 1991 Gulf War, when the Army deployed 1,956 M1A1s to Saudi Arabia and the Marine Corps brought its own M1A1s for the liberation of Kuwait. The M1A2 followed with a commander's independent thermal viewer and a digital data bus, and Abrams crews took the tank into Iraq again in 2003.

The patch is a 4 by 4 inch circle with a black merrowed edge around a white field. M1 ABRAMS arches across the top in navy blue letters. Behind the turret rises a half-round American flag, stars on the left and red and white stripes on the right. The tank sits in desert tan, gun forward to the left, antennas up, seven road wheels showing along the track and dust kicking up under it. The back is iron-on.

Tankers live with the Abrams the way sailors live with a ship. Crews spend long days breaking track, pulling packs and boresighting before a single round goes downrange at gunnery. A four-man crew learns each other's habits in a turret that does not leave much room. Every armor soldier remembers his first qualifying run and the tank commander who got him through it. Four decades on, the Abrams is still the tank the Army sends.

Frame it in a shadow box with your crew photo and the combat patch from your armor unit, or wear it on a range bag or jacket. It also makes a good gift for a son or daughter headed to armor training, or for a dad who crewed one in the Gulf. One tank, one flag and a name every tanker knows.