This grab bag holds 25 different US Navy patches, pulled at random from our overstock and seconds. No two are the same, and nobody picks them for you. You might get a ship patch, a submarine, an...

Prime BEEF stands for Prime Base Engineer Emergency Force, so the black bull charging through this patch is the Air Force civil engineer's own joke on the name. The Air Force set the program up in...

The black sands of Iwo Jima tested every ounce of strength an American fighting man possessed. For 36 brutal days in 1945, Marines clawed their way through volcanic ash, shattered ridgelines, and...

It was one of the most immortal moments ever captured on film—six Marines atop Mount Suribachi, straining together to raise the American flag above the black sands of Iwo Jima. The photograph by Joe...

Captain James Lawrence gave the order on 1 June 1813, mortally wounded on the deck of USS Chesapeake as HMS Shannon's crew came over the side off Boston. The Chesapeake was taken. The words were not...

Look where the bubbles on this patch come from: they rise off the crown of the skull, which makes it a bubble head in the most literal way thread can manage. Bubblehead is Navy slang for a...

The first GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator ever dropped in combat left a B-2 Spirit over Fordow at about 2:10 in the morning, Iran time, on 22 June 2025. Seven B-2s had flown east out of Whiteman...

"Fair winds and following seas" is not a slogan — it is the Navy's oldest and most permanent farewell, spoken at retirements, read aloud at memorial services, and stenciled onto every kind of...

Army ordnance officers were already wearing the shell and flame in 1832, and the version soldiers know today has been in use since 1936. Ordnance work is older than the branch itself. In July 1775...

The anchor on the left of the chain carries one silver star and the anchor on the right carries two, so the whole climb from Chief to Senior Chief to Master Chief is stitched on this patch before...

The 00° stitched beside King Neptune's head is the latitude of the Equator, the line every Pollywog has to cross before he can call himself a Shellback. The ceremony that turns one into the other is...

There are 50 stars and 13 stripes on this patch, seven red and six white, and the 50-star flag has been the flag of the United States since July 4, 1960. President Eisenhower signed Executive Order...

The yellow and black fan behind the flag on this patch is the radiation trefoil, first sketched at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley in 1946, one year into the Cold War...

The two dates stitched along the bottom of this patch, September 2, 1945 and December 26, 1991, are the same span the Department of Defense uses for the Cold War Recognition Certificate. Congress...

This two-piece SOCOM Airborne set pairs a black Airborne tab with a teardrop SOCOM patch in the classic blue-and-green panel configuration—exactly the combination you'd see on operators who carried...

The crowned, bearded king holding the trident on this patch is Neptunus Rex, and aboard a Navy ship he is traditionally played by the oldest or most senior shellback in the crew. He rules the...

Submarines go to sea painted black, so when a surface sailor says haze gray and underway, he is talking about his own kind of Navy. The phrase means a surface ship at sea and working, not tied to a...

Shellback Hat: Celebrate the incredible journey of crossing the equator with our Shellback hat. Whether you're a seasoned sailor or embarking on your first crossing, this hat commemorates your...

On 1 April 1974 the women's and men's recruit commands at Orlando were merged, and NTC Orlando became the only command in the Navy where men and women both went through boot camp. Women had started...

Anybody who went through boot camp in San Diego remembers the USS Recruit, a destroyer escort built on dry land that never left the base. Sailors called her the USS Neversail. She was built in 1949...