Tripler Army Medical Center Honolulu Hawaii Patch

Anyone who has landed at Honolulu has seen Tripler, the coral pink hospital on the slope of Moanalua Ridge, and anyone who has been a patient there never forgets it. Tripler Army Medical Center is the Army's tertiary care hospital for the Pacific. It treats active duty troops, retirees and families from every service. Its reach covers patients from nine US jurisdictions and forces in more than 40 countries across the region. For a lot of soldiers and sailors, it was the place they were sent when the injury was too big for anywhere else.

The hospital started in 1907 as a group of wooden buildings at Fort Shafter's Palm Circle. In 1920 it was named Tripler General Hospital for Brevet Brigadier General Charles Stuart Tripler, an Army surgeon of the Civil War era. When World War II came it held 450 beds and was expanded to 1,000, averaging nearly 2,000 patients a day from the Pacific battlegrounds. Plans for a new hospital on Moanalua Ridge were drawn in 1942, and wings A through E were built from 1944 to 1948. The F, G and H wings followed in 1985, and today Tripler is a Level II trauma center.

This patch is a shield 2.75 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall, cut close along a gold border. A white Greek cross in a gold frame sits at the top, the symbol of aid. Two gold palm trees arch up both sides, framing Diamond Head in deep red against a light blue sky. Below it, a red hibiscus, the Hawaii state flower, floats on royal blue water for the Pacific. The design was approved in 1971, and the backing is iron-on and can also be sewn on.

Tripler has cared for the wounded of the Pacific since World War II, when patients came straight from the island battles. Generations of Army medics, nurses and doctors have worked inside those pink walls. Its helipad brings in trauma cases from across Oahu and beyond. The people who worked there, and the patients who left there on their feet, do not forget it.

Sew it to a scrub jacket or a vest, or mount it in a shadow box with a medic's caduceus pin and unit coins from a Schofield or Fort Shafter tour. It makes a thoughtful gift for an Army nurse, a medic or a veteran who was treated there. A small patch from a hospital a lot of people owe something to.