Vietnam Veteran All Gave Some Some Gave All Embroidered Patch

The line across the bottom of this patch is usually credited to Howard William Osterkamp of Dent, Ohio, a Purple Heart veteran of C Company, 5th Regimental Combat Team in Korea. It was a Korean War man's sentence first. The Vietnam generation took it and made it theirs. All gave some, some gave all. Everyone who went paid something, and some paid everything, and nobody who served in-country needs that explained.

Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade came ashore at Da Nang in March 1965, and the last U.S. combat troops left in March 1973, the reason 29 March is now Vietnam War Veterans Day. In between, men flew UH-1 Iroquois Hueys into landing zones, F-4 Phantom IIs and A-1 Skyraiders over the North, and B-52 Stratofortresses on Arc Light strikes and through the eleven days of Linebacker II in December 1972. On the rivers it was PBRs and Swift Boats, and on the ground it was the M16 and a ruck in the Central Highlands, the Delta and along the DMZ. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall was dedicated on 13 November 1982. Its black granite carries more than 58,000 names.

The patch is a 4 inch circle with a gold merrowed edge around a black field. VIETNAM VETERAN arches across the top in gold, and a full American flag fills the upper half, white stars on blue and red and white stripes. Below it a red dragon with a gold belly coils across the field between two stands of green bamboo, the same imagery men had stitched onto tour jackets in-country. ALL GAVE SOME - SOME GAVE ALL is set in gold across the bottom in three lines. It measures 4 inches wide by 4 inches tall, with a merrowed edge and iron-on backing.

Vietnam veterans built a lot of their own homecoming, and they did it together. The reunions, the chapter rides, the posts and the half-scale Moving Wall that still tours small towns came out of men looking after each other. This phrase shows up in all of those places, on vests, on memorial bricks and on the back windows of pickup trucks. It says the whole thing in six words without dressing any of it up. That is the way that generation tends to talk about the war, when it talks about it at all.

It sits well on a riding vest with unit patches and theater ribbons, or in a shadow box beside a photo from in-country. It also makes a considered gift for a son or daughter honoring a father who never said much about his tour. One patch, plain and direct, that says what needs saying.