US Naval Security Group Command Patch

Before there was a Naval Security Group, there was a shed on the roof of the Navy Department Building in Washington, and the radiomen trained up there called themselves the On the Roof Gang. That was OP-20-G, the secret staff under the Director of Naval Communications that began training intercept operators in 1928. Out of that rooftop came the Navy's whole cryptologic tradition. The work was listening, copying and breaking, and almost none of it could be talked about. The Naval Security Group grew from those few men into a worldwide command.

Navy cryptology traces to 1924, when LT Laurence Safford set up the effort inside the Department of Naval Communications. Through World War II the codebreakers at Station Hypo in Honolulu and the intercept stations of the Pacific and Asiatic Fleets worked the Japanese naval traffic. The Naval Security Group became an independent command in 1950 and went straight into the Korean War. For the next half century its stations, detachments and shipboard teams worked the Cold War from shore sites and from the decks of the fleet. The command was disestablished in a ceremony on 30 September 2005, and its people and field activities moved under Naval Network Warfare Command; in 2009 those units went to the reestablished Tenth Fleet as part of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command.

This patch is round, 4 inches across, with a gold merrowed edge. A white ring carries UNITED STATES NAVAL SECURITY GROUP COMMAND in black block letters, with two black stars at the bottom. Inside a thin gold ring, the light blue center holds a bald eagle with spread wings over two crossed gold anchors and a red and white striped shield. Across all of it run a white lightning bolt and a white quill. The back is iron-on.

The Cryptologic Technicians, linguists and officers of NAVSECGRU worked in a world where a good day never made the news. Their record lives in classified files and in the memories of the people who sat the watch with headphones on. Many of them served at isolated sites far from the fleet, or rode ships and aircraft as the quiet extra hands aboard. What they produced reached admirals and presidents without their names attached. The work they did now lives on in Fleet Cyber Command and the Navy's information warfare community.

It belongs in a shadow box with a CT's ribbons and station patches, or on a jacket at a Station HYPO or NSG reunion. It also makes a meaningful gift for a father or grandfather who could never say much about what he did in the Navy. The patch says it for him.