Operation Iraqi Freedom OIF Iraq Veteran Patch Stars And Stripes

Coalition forces were in Baghdad on April 9, 2003, about three weeks after the first strikes of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That speed is what the evening news showed. What followed is what most of the people who served there remember. The operation kept its name until September 1, 2010, and in those seven and a half years the war moved from the march north to convoys, patrols, raids and rebuilding. Soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen and Coast Guardsmen rotated through, many of them more than once. Three letters, OIF, came to cover all of it.

The opening campaign began on the night of March 19, 2003, Washington time. On April 9 the statue of Saddam Hussein came down in Firdos Square in Baghdad, and on December 13, 2003, Hussein himself was captured near Tikrit. The years after that were the long middle of the war, the IEDs, the checkpoints, the surge and the slow handover to Iraqi forces. On September 1, 2010, Operation Iraqi Freedom was renamed Operation New Dawn. The last U.S. troops crossed the border into Kuwait on December 18, 2011.

The patch is round, 4 inches across, with a black border and a cut edge. The words OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM arc across the top on a blue band, with four white stars stitched down the left side and red and white stripes sweeping down the right. At the bottom, IRAQ VETERAN runs in white letters across a red band. The center is a blue disc ringed in white, holding a gold map of Iraq with OIF in heavy white block letters laid over it. It reads clearly from across a room, which is the point of a veteran's patch.

Iraq asked a great deal of the people sent there. The 4,000th American death came in March 2008, and every one of those names is still carried by a unit, a family and a set of friends. Many of the men and women who came home did so after more than one tour, with a year or more away each time. Families kept the home front running through all of it. A patch that simply says Iraq Veteran respects that by keeping it plain.

It fits on a vest, a jacket or a range bag, and it sits well in a shadow box next to a unit patch, an Iraq Campaign ribbon patch and deployment photos. It is also a straightforward gift for a son, daughter, spouse or friend who did a tour in Iraq. The backing is iron-on, and it can also be sewn on for a permanent hold. It is a plain way to mark where someone was.