Parris Island SC Recruit Training Center Patch

The yellow footprints outside receiving are the first piece of Parris Island a recruit touches, and no Marine ever forgets the night he stood on them. The depot at Port Royal, South Carolina has been making Marines since 1 November 1915, and it trains every recruit who enlists east of the Mississippi. The motto across the top of this patch is the entire mission statement, We Make Marines, and the depot has never needed a second line. Thirteen weeks separate those footprints from the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor pressed into a new Marine's palm. This patch is for everyone who remembers which battalion street that morning happened on.

The names come back fast to anyone who trained there: Elliott's Beach, the rifle range, the sand fleas nobody is permitted to slap in formation. The cadre behind all of it wears the campaign cover and carries the 8511 Drill Instructor MOS, a team of them to every platoon, on duty long before reveille. Recruits belong to the Recruit Training Regiment's numbered battalions, and a Marine's answer to where he went to boot camp usually arrives with his company letter attached. Kilo, India, Lima, and Mike companies fall under the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, which holds its own streets on the depot. Since 1996 the last test has been the Crucible, fifty-four hours of little food and less sleep, its events named for Marines who earned their decorations the hard way. And from 1949 on, Parris Island was where the Corps made its enlisted women Marines, a lineage the 4th Recruit Training Battalion carried for decades.

The patch is a 3.5 inch round with a black merrowed border and a silver outer ring carrying UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS over the top and PARRIS ISLAND, SC along the bottom. Inside, a gold scroll reads We Make Marines above a red bordered shield on a cream field. The shield's upper panel carries the drill instructor's campaign cover over crossed blades, and the lower panel holds a lone rifleman in silhouette, standing the way Iron Mike has stood over the depot since 1924. Fine red stitching rings the shield with micro text, the kind of detail you find with the patch in hand rather than on a screen. The backing is iron on, and it will take a needle if you would rather sew it.

Parris Island's reputation inside the Corps is simple: it is where the transformation happens, and the Marines it makes spend the rest of their lives divided from the ones made at San Diego by a friendly argument neither side will ever concede. The humidity, the causeway, the island a recruit cannot walk off of, all of it becomes a story Parris Island Marines tell with something close to affection decades later. Drill instructors give years of sleep to the job, and most Marines can still name theirs faster than a high school teacher. The depot has adapted for over a century, but the product has not changed, and neither has the claim on the scroll.

It mounts well in a shadow box next to a graduation photo and a platoon number that still means something. It also rides fine on a vest at a reunion, or goes to the new Marine's family the week after graduation, since they stood on that parade deck too. San Diego Marines will tell you about the weather. Parris Island Marines will show you this.