Credit Where It's Due: The History Of The VF-634 Patch
Original VFA-634 Patch Proof of Concept from 2019
Did you know I had very little to do with the early branding of the VFA-634? I knew a few things. I wanted to focus on the F-14, but leave it open to other jets. It was kinda supposed to be a VFA in name only type deal. Basically, I could fly my 14, but if someone wanted to fly the 15 or 18, that would work too. I think I may have also come up with the name Guardians. It had something to do with the squadron existing to protect. I just thought that it would be easier to cheer on a squadron that’s not based around mindlessly blowing stuff up and killing people. I wanted the idea of if we were fighting it was to protect something or someone. Plus Guardians still sounds like a pretty badass name. So I started from there.
Fun Fact: I absolutely suck as an artist, so I started asking a sailor in the barracks named Conrad for help. Conrad was an artist, and a damn good one too. When I started asking for mascot ideas, they came up with this concept of an Owl. I thought that made no sense. Why an Owl? They then proceeded to explain that the Owl was symbolic of Athena, and I thought that was actually a pretty good idea. I mean, Athena being the goddess of wisdom and warfare. To me that added a level of intellect to the patch. I also didn’t really want an Owl for the mascot though. So that idea got worked with a little bit, and then we settled on kind of a nondescript female warrior, who could be both Athena or not Athena depending on the purposes we needed it for. Given the fact that I was really indecisive during this whole process this was all fine by me.
If you ever come across the original diagrams for the patch, you’ll see that they say VFC-6301 or VFA-6301. This is again because I was deciding on the actual number until the last second. The barracks that Conrad and I were in was BEQ 6301 and I was just going to copy that. Then I got moved to the Missouri barracks (which I loved and Scout hated) and Missouri was 634. I liked that a lot better so I swapped over to 634. So now we had a cool concept, but no actual patches. We worked with a company called AviatorGear which actually did a fantastic job taking the concept and turning it to a actual final design. AviatorGear also manufactured the original patches which we bought WAY too many of, so you can still buy those here.
None of this is really news. I’ve talked about it before, but I wanted to make sure there would be somewhere that Conrad really could get the recognition they deserved. They worked really hard on this design that would manage to last longer than both of our Naval careers combined, and that deserved some recognition. VFA-634’s patch still exists today, albeit under the name of VF-634. The patch’s design was pretty much pulled straight from the patch and used on the Jets, shirts, decals, All sorts of stuff. The design hasn’t changed much and it looks like it won’t for a long time. It exists now as it did years ago: with a goddess watching as the Guardians charged to battle.
