Vietnam War Veteran Patch Don't Let The Gray Hair Fool You

The ribbon at the center of this patch is the Vietnam Service Medal, and every color on it has a job: yellow for Vietnam, three red stripes for the country's three ancient regions, green at the edges for the jungle. Anyone who did his time in the theater wore that ribbon home. Around it, the patch says the rest in plain English: don't let the gray hair fool you. The medal was established in July 1965 and covered service through the 1973 withdrawal, with the Saigon evacuation crews of April 1975 added later. The gray hair took fifty years to arrive. The attitude never left.

The Vietnam Veteran Service Ribbon works as shorthand on a vest: one glance at those stripes and every other vet in the room already knows. The medal itself took thirty consecutive days in the theater to earn, and millions of Americans earned it the hard way. Vietnam vets also built their own greeting, and "Welcome home" is still how one says it to another, a courtesy the community decided to handle itself. The POW MIA flag came out of the same brotherhood, created in the early 1970s for the families of the missing, and it still rides on the same vests as patches like this one. March 29 is now National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the anniversary of the last troops coming home in 1973. Blue water sailors of the era carry their own version of the joke, the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, with the same grin in it as this patch's bottom line.

The patch is a four inch round with a gold merrowed border and a black field that makes the gold lettering read from across a room. DON'T LET THE GRAY HAIR FOOL YOU arcs over the top, WE CAN STILL KICK ASS anchors the bottom, and the patch means both. VIETNAM and VET frame the service ribbon at center, its green, gold, and red stitched in the order the real ribbon wears them. A thin gold ring separates the message from the middle. The backing is iron on, and it will take a needle if you would rather sew it.

The men who wear this are in their seventies and eighties now, and the patch does exactly what it was built to do, getting a laugh first and a handshake second. They came home quietly, went to work, raised families, and watched the country take fifty years to say thank you properly. The vest at the VFW or the Legion hall is where the record gets kept, patch by patch. This one earns its spot by telling the truth twice on one round of embroidery.

It rides best on a vest or jacket where other vets will see it and grin before they say welcome home. It also makes an easy gift for the father or grandfather who insists he does not want anything, because he will wear this one. The hair went gray on schedule. The rest of the claim still stands.