The folks at Danger Room are having a contest for the most awesomely bad military patches of all time. Here are some of the candidates.
Catapultam Habeo . . .
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Those can’t be real, are they?
There are some bad real ones, too. Even some that aren’t bad are bad sometimes, for instance, a female officer I knew wished the patch on her uniform didn’t say “any time, any place.”
Oh, they’re all real.
Most of them seem to be Air Force, which must have a different Patch Policy from the other services. (I mean, look at what the -pilots- wear, fer heaven’s sake.)
At any rate, a lot of them seem to be a homemade design, run off in bulk by producers Stateside.
The funny part, about some patches, is that they reveal classified knowledge that would get the wearer sent to prison–except that anyone who knows that the symbol signifies is in on the secret. I have a coffee cup which displays a diagonal line next to a shaded circle, and nobody but me and maybe fifty other people will ever know what it means…
Hmmm. Diagonal line and shaded circle . . .
I shall send this information to my Foreign Masters at once!
They look like typical military humor to me.
As Dave Drake once remarked, when all you’ve got is gallows humor, you need to laugh more than in more fortunate times.
The example he mentioned was when his battalion in Vietnam had had a very quiet week. No enemy casualties to report.
However, a Vietnamese farmer who’d been following a truck too closely on his bicycle got squished to death when a flexible fuel bag (several thousand gallons) bounced off and landed on his head.
So they reported it as an enemy casualty. As Dave said, the guy was almost certainly a VC sympathizer anyway.
HQ asked if the casualty was ‘stepped on’ (slang of the period for ‘confirmed’).
They replied: “Man, the dink was as stepped on as you can get.”
This was considered hilarious.
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