United States Navy Veteran Embroidered Patch

Aboard ship it is line, not rope, and every sailor got corrected on that inside his first week. The gold ring around this patch is rope, and nobody is going to correct you on that one. Inside it the blue band carries UNITED STATES NAVY across the top and VETERAN across the bottom, in the same arc where a ship or a squadron name would normally sit. That substitution is the point of the whole patch. The unit changes from sailor to sailor, the service does not.

The Navy was born on 13 October 1775, when the Continental Congress voted to fit out two armed vessels to intercept British supply ships bound for the army in America. The date sat unmarked for most of two centuries until Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, as Chief of Naval Operations, set 13 October as the official birthday in 1972. Everything in the center of this patch comes from what the fleet became after that. The eagle stands for the country, the F/A-18 banking hard over the water is the air side of it, and the white water breaking below is the surface and the boats underneath it. Air, surface, subsurface, the three ways the Navy reaches the fight, worked into one circle four inches across.

The patch is a full circle, edged in a navy blue merrowed border with the gold rope ring set just inside it. The center field is worked in pale grey and white so the aircraft and the eagle read clearly against it, with rust red picked out in the eagle's wings. UNITED STATES NAVY is stitched in white block letters on the blue band above and VETERAN below, both arced to the curve. The eagle sits low and forward with wings fully spread, head turned, so the bird is the anchor of the design and the aircraft flies out over the top of it. It measures 4 inches across with iron on backing, and it takes a needle without any argument if you would rather sew it.

Every sailor who wears this stood watches nobody outside the lifelines will ever hear about. The mid watch, the sea and anchor detail, the long stretches where the job is attention rather than action, and the understanding that the ship runs because somebody is awake at three in the morning doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing. Ratings differ, hulls differ, and a boatswain's mate and a nuke and an AT have almost nothing in common on paper. What they share is the water and the watch bill. The word VETERAN on the bottom arc covers all of it without needing to say which one you were.

It sits well in a shadow box with a set of ribbons, a ship's patch and a crossing the line certificate, and it holds up on the vest or the jacket that comes out for reunions and Veterans Day. It is also the easy answer when a son or a grandson wants something of yours to keep. Four inches is big enough to read across a room.