Gonzo Station Camel Corps

Task Force 70 / Indian Ocean Battle Group — unofficial "Camel Corps" cruise patch, Gonzo Station · USN · 1979-1980

"Gonzo Station" — the Gulf of Oman Naval Zone of Operations — was the carrier operating box in the north Arabian Sea where the U.S. Navy massed after the Tehran embassy seizure of November 1979, the name reportedly coined aboard USS Midway by a VF-151 intelligence officer who enlivened his briefings with Muppet puppets. Crews sweating out record line periods there nicknamed the patrol area "Camel Station," and by February 1980 as many as 27 warships and three carriers — Nimitz, Midway, and Coral Sea — were on station launching roughly 90 sorties a day apiece. USS Nimitz set the mark in May 1980 with 144 consecutive days at sea, and this dromedary badge is the sailors' answer to it: a self-deprecating "Camel Corps" membership card in the same gallows-humor tradition as the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club. Over some 22 months more than 126,000 sailors and Marines in 181 ships rotated through those waters, waiting on a hostage crisis that would not end until January 1981.