Naval Training Center Orlando Florida Embroidered Patch

From 1972 until recruit training ended here in 1994, every woman who joined the Navy went to boot camp in Orlando, because this was the only place that trained them. On 1 April 1974 the Recruit Training Command (Women) and the Recruit Training Command consolidated, and Orlando became the only Navy command where men and women both went through basic. Roughly 462,000 men and 188,000 women graduated boot camp on this ground between 12 December 1968 and 2 December 1994. If you came into the Navy in those years there is a good chance your first haircut and your first formation happened here. That is what this patch is for.

The Navy commissioned Naval Training Center Orlando on 1 January 1968, on ground that had been Orlando Air Force Base until the transfer. It became the third of the Navy's three training centers alongside Great Lakes and San Diego, running recruit training plus apprenticeship and technical schools through Service School Command. Naval Nuclear Power Training Command worked out of Orlando as well, teaching officers and enlisted the reactor plant work the fleet's submarines and carriers ran on. Nuke school graduated its last Orlando class on 17 December 1998 and finished its move to Naval Weapons Station Charleston in June 1999. The 1993 BRAC round set the closure, and the Navy closed NTC Orlando in the fall of 1999. The ground is a neighborhood now, Baldwin Park, though the street names still give it away.

The patch is a circle edged in a gold merrowed border with a deep navy blue field inside it. NAVAL TRAINING CENTER arches across the top in gold block letters and ORLANDO, FLORIDA runs across the bottom, with a single gold star set on each side between them. The center is a white circle carrying a navy diamond, and inside the diamond sits a gold fouled anchor, the anchor tangled in its own chain. Any sailor can name that device on sight, because it is the chief's mark, and at a training command the chief was most of your world. It measures 4 inches across with iron on backing, and it takes a needle cleanly if you would rather sew it down.

Orlando boot camp came with Florida attached. The heat, the humidity that arrived before you did, the afternoon thunderstorms that rolled over the grinder on schedule, and a company commander who was not interested in any of it as an excuse. Recruits came out of here and went to the fleet in every rating the Navy had, and for twenty six years the place turned civilians into sailors at a rate few installations ever matched. For a large share of the women who served in that era, this was the start of all of it, and there is no second base that shares the claim. Six hundred fifty thousand people learned to make a rack here.

It belongs in a shadow box next to the boot camp company photo and the first set of dress blues insignia, which is exactly where most of these end up. It works on a vest or a jacket at a reunion, and it explains itself to anyone who asks. For a base that no longer exists, the patch is most of what is left to hold.