NAS Cubi Point Bataan Philippines US Navy Naval Air Station Patch

The runway in the middle of this patch sits on a mountain the Seabees cut in half and pushed into Subic Bay. Civilian contractors had looked at the jungle and the high ground above the water and told the Navy it could not be done. Admiral Arthur W. Radford wanted a jet-capable air station on the western Pacific rim anyway, and in October 1951 the job went to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3, with MCB-5, MCB-2 and others following. Five years and roughly 20 million man-hours later, Naval Air Station Cubi Point was commissioned on 25 July 1956. The Navy counts it as the largest earth-moving project it has ever undertaken.

From 1964 the station was the primary maintenance, repair and supply center for the 400 carrier-based aircraft of the Seventh Fleet, and the jet engine shop turned out two engines a day to hold that pace. A-4 Skyhawks worked out of Cubi Point in B, C, E and F variants, with the VC-5 detachment based there for years. Lockheed P-3 Orions flew Market Time patrols out of the Philippines, and squadrons including VP-40, VP-4 and VP-1 rotated detachments through the field. A pier alongside the runway could take the Navy's largest carriers, which put the shops and the flight deck within sight of each other. In December 1972 the airfield was dedicated as Admiral A. W. Radford Field, though everyone kept calling the station Cubi.

The patch is round, finished with a navy merrowed border, and what sits inside it is Cubi Point itself rather than a crest. A ridge of green mountain fills the upper half, the same terrain the battalions worked through. Below it the runway runs out onto ground that used to be water, edged with dark rock revetment and bracketed by the bay on both sides. The control tower and a row of low hangars sit at the tree line in white and tan thread. Gold Naval Aviator wings with a fouled anchor and striped shield cross the bottom of the scene, under lettering that reads NAVAL AIR STATION CUBI POINT above and BATAAN, PHILIPPINES below.

Anyone who came through the Western Pacific knew the Cubi Point Officers' Club. In 1969 the maintenance department took a banged-up aerial refueling tank, shaped it into something close to an A-7 Corsair II, named it Red Horse One and mounted it on rails. It ran out the double doors toward a pool of water with the arresting wire set fourteen feet off the nose, and it divided naval aviation into men who caught it and men who got wet. Squadrons commissioned plaques from local artists before heading home, and more than 3,000 of them went up on those walls between the Vietnam years and 1992. Mount Pinatubo erupted twenty miles away in June 1991 and left the station under about a foot of wet ash, and the last American sailors and Marines departed on 24 November 1992. Before they went, officers crated up the bar and shipped it home, and it reopened in 1996 as the Cubi Bar Cafe at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.

Most of these end up in a shadow box with cruise patches and a set of wings, or on the vest that comes out once a year for the squadron reunion. It also works as a gift for a son or grandson who has heard about Olongapo and the catapult and never had anything to put with the story. The patch is 4 inches across with iron-on backing, and it will take a needle just as well if you would rather sew it on. Cubi Point is a commercial airport now, and the mountain is still missing.