US NAVAL Service School Command Great Lakes Illinois

Boot camp at Great Lakes turned recruits into sailors, and Service School Command was where many of them went next to learn a rate. The A-school side of the base traces back to 9 December 1940, when the first class of the Class A Service School began at Great Lakes. Generations of sailors sat in its classrooms between recruit training and their first ship. This patch carries the command's motto, STRENGTH THROUGH TRAINING AND DISCIPLINE, around a ship's wheel. At the center is a scroll reading SURFACE WARFARE EXCELLENCE, which tells you where those sailors were headed.

Great Lakes opened on 1 July 1911 on the Illinois shore of Lake Michigan, a site a Navy board chose in 1902, and for its first six years it trained about 2,000 recruits a year. In World War I more than 125,000 sailors trained there, and by November 1918 there were 45,000 in training at once. About one million of the more than four million Americans who served in the Navy in World War II trained at Great Lakes. During the Korean War the station graduated 98 recruit companies in a single week in 1951. Naval Service Training Command was established at Great Lakes on 31 October 2003, and in 2021 the boatswain's mate A school and Surface Common Core moved to Surface Warfare Engineering School Command Great Lakes in the USS Whitehat schoolhouse.

The patch is a 4.5 by 4.5 inch circle with a gold merrowed edge on a white field. SERVICE SCHOOL COMMAND arches across the top in blue, and STRENGTH THROUGH TRAINING AND DISCIPLINE runs around the bottom, with a small gold star at each side. A gold ship's wheel fills the middle, and inside it hangs a white scroll with GREAT LAKES across the top roll. The scroll holds the surface warfare device in silver, a ship's bow over crossed swords and a curl of sea, then SURFACE WARFARE in black, a small blue twin-tower device and EXCELLENCE. The back is iron-on.

Sailors remember the schoolhouse as much as boot camp: the classroom hours, the barracks inspections, the marching to class in formation, and the first time a rating badge felt within reach. A school was where a seaman recruit stopped being general labor and started being a boatswain's mate, an engineman or a gunner's mate. Many of the instructors were fleet sailors themselves, sent back to Great Lakes to train the next ones. Surface ships across the fleet have carried sailors who learned their trade there. The motto on this patch was the deal they were offered.

Put it in a shadow box with your A-school graduation certificate and your first rating badge, or sew it on the vest you wear to a ship's reunion. It also makes a good gift for a son or daughter just shipping out to Great Lakes, from a parent who went through the same gate. Iron it on, or stitch it down for good. Great Lakes was where a lot of Navy careers got their start.