US Navy Nuke Submarine Pride Runs Deep Patch

"We have a saying in the submarine community: Pride Runs Deep," Cmdr. James Marshall, the first commanding officer of USS San Francisco (SSN-711), said during the boat's 1981 Fleet Week visit to her namesake city. Submariners use the phrase among themselves, and this patch stitches it under a black boat running beneath a red sky. It belongs to the nuclear Navy, which began when USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was commissioned on 30 September 1954. On 17 January 1955 Nautilus signaled "Underway on nuclear power," and long submerged patrols became the way the force worked.

San Francisco was a Los Angeles-class fast attack, commissioned at Newport News, Virginia, on 24 April 1981, with anti-submarine warfare as her mission and "Gold in Peace, Iron in War" as her motto. Over 35 years she steamed more than 1.2 million nautical miles and made more than 1,000 dives and surfaces, with 16 commanding officers and over 1,800 sailors in her crews. She held her farewell at Naval Base Point Loma in November 2016, then went to Norfolk for conversion to a moored training ship for the Nuclear Power Training Unit in Charleston, South Carolina. Enlisted submariners qualify for silver dolphins and officers for gold. That pin is earned by qualifying on the boat.

The patch is a 4 inch circle with a black merrowed edge. A red sky fills the upper half, banded darker at the horizon and broken by ragged gold clouds. A black submarine silhouette runs across a gold perspective grid, sail forward and rudder aft, with gold cloud shapes spread across the grid like light on the water. Black block letters follow the bottom curve: PRIDE RUNS DEEP. There is no hull number or class on it, so it belongs to any boat and any crew.

The submarine force is a small community with its own customs, and this saying is one of them. Qualification takes a sailor through the whole boat, and the crew that comes out of it knows each other's jobs. Boats are decommissioned and crews scatter, but the phrase stays with the people who rode them. The Navy put it in the headline when San Francisco said farewell in 2016. A submariner reads this patch at a glance.

Iron it onto a jacket, or sew it to a vest for a submarine veterans meeting, or frame it in a shadow box beside a set of dolphins. It makes a good gift for a shipmate from the old boat or for a son or daughter headed to the submarine force. The iron-on backing holds on its own, and a few stitches around the merrowed edge make it permanent. It is a patch for anyone who earned dolphins or loves someone who did.