Persian Gulf Yacht Club Patch

Sailors have been founding unofficial yacht clubs in the world's worst cruising waters since Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf Yacht Club is the Gulf generation's charter. The art is the Gulf Navy's defining image: a gray hull in black silhouette, a missile climbing off the rail on a white column, a red sky going down over the water. Membership is simple and self-enrolled, anyone who stood watches in the Gulf, from the tanker war of 1987 and 1988 through Desert Shield and Desert Storm and the Fifth Fleet deployments that never really stopped. WE WERE THERE across the bottom is the entire pitch. No commodore, no dues, no marina.

The club's founding cohort ran Operation Earnest Will in 1987 and 1988, escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the most dangerous sea lanes on earth. That duty had a price: Iraqi Exocets hit USS Stark on 17 May 1987 and took 37 Sailors, and USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine the next April, which the Navy answered with Operation Praying Mantis, its largest surface action since World War II. Desert Storm opened on 17 January 1991 with Tomahawks off ships in the Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean, 122 in the opening salvos and nearly 300 by the end, with USS Missouri firing hers from inside the Gulf. Carrier Sailors claim membership too, and the USS Midway Persian Gulf Yacht Club charter patch from 1990-91 says so in those exact words. The Southwest Asia Service Medal made it official, covering service from 2 August 1990 to the end of November 1995. And the name itself is inherited: the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club was the Seventh Fleet's joke off Vietnam, and the Gulf fleet kept the tradition and changed the water.

The patch is a 4.5 inch round with a gold merrowed border and a navy blue ring carrying the club name over the top and WE WERE THERE along the bottom, a gold star on each side. The center scene stacks a red sky and a dark cloud bank over an orange-lined horizon, the sun sitting low and yellow behind the ship. The warship rides blue stitched waves with the launch plume climbing past her superstructure, and a gold fouled anchor marks the water below. It reads like a cruise memory because that is what it is. The backing is iron on, and it will take a needle if you would rather sew it.

Gulf service had its own texture, and the men who did it recognize all of it: steel too hot to touch by mid morning, Strait of Hormuz transits at general quarters, small boats on the radar that might be fishermen and might not. The deployments ran for decades and produced few movies, which is roughly how the sailors who made them prefer it. A club name is how a Sailor carries that lightly without pretending it was light. This patch does the same job in thread.

It rides well on a vest or jacket next to a ship patch and a Southwest Asia Service Medal ribbon. It also makes a sure gift for the Gulf Sailor in the family, the one who still checks the temperature in Bahrain out of habit. The club never kept a roster. The patch is how members find each other.