US Naval Hospital Okinawa Japan Patch

When U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa moved to Camp Foster in March 2013, it brought the only military emergency room on the island with it. Marines, sailors, airmen, soldiers and their families from every base on Okinawa end up there sooner or later, for a broken ankle on a Saturday or a birth in the middle of the night. The hospital is a Navy command on Marine Corps ground, staffed by Navy doctors, nurses and hospital corpsmen. Its neonatal intensive care unit is run by the Air Force, one of four Air Force NICUs worldwide, and it takes the smallest patients from across the Western Pacific. Few commands on the island see every branch walk through the same door.

For decades the hospital stood on Camp Lester, a Cold War building that was about 55 years old by the time it closed. Camp Lester land is slated to go back to Okinawa under a U.S.-Japan agreement, and the replacement went up on neighboring Camp Foster at 443,000 square feet, twice the size of the old one. The move finished in March 2013 and the Camp Lester hospital was decommissioned. Reporting at the time put the load at about 1,100 patients a day from across the region. The NICU cares for 22 to 26 infants a month and escorts about 30 a year to stateside hospitals when they need more than the island can give. The new building added a fully secure ward, isolation rooms for vulnerable infants and a tube system that runs prescriptions and samples between departments.

The patch is a 4 by 4 inch circle with a white merrowed edge and a navy blue outer ring. U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL arches across the top and OKINAWA, JAPAN runs along the bottom in white, with a small white winged caduceus on each side. In the white center stands a gray anchor with a red line wound around its shank and a gold caduceus set inside the ring at the top. A green outline of Okinawa runs down the length of the anchor, so the island and the anchor read as one shape. Four gold oak leaves surround it, and the upper left one carries a silver acorn, the Navy Medical Corps device. The back is iron-on.

Duty on Okinawa means caring for a military community an ocean away from the nearest stateside hospital. A deployment physical, a training injury and a premature birth all come through the same doors. For the staff that means emergency, inpatient and newborn care for every branch on the island, on one roster. Plenty of military children took their first breath on those wards. Corpsmen, nurses and doctors who served there remember the pace, the humidity and the patients they sent home healthy.

Put it in a shadow box with a corpsman's ribbons and a photo of the old Camp Lester building, or sew it on the jacket you wear to a Navy medicine reunion. It also makes a good gift for someone who served on the staff, or for a son or daughter born at the hospital while a parent was stationed on Okinawa. Either way it keeps the island and the hospital in one place.