HMM-364 Purple Foxes — Hawaii

Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 364 (HMM-364), "Purple Foxes" · USMC · 1984-1999

Reactivated on 28 September 1984 with Marine Aircraft Group 24 at MCAS Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, HMM-364 resurrected a mascot and a motto born two decades earlier: a purple fox named for a Tijuana bar the squadron's pilots adopted in 1963, and the unprintable pledge that Sergeant Ronald Knight first stenciled onto CH-46 tail rotors aboard USS Princeton in April 1966. The islands version of the patch, worn over the squadron's CH-46 Sea Knights, marks fifteen years of Pacific work — Okinawa deployments in 1990, 1991, and 1993, Mount Pinatubo relief, and Hurricane Iniki recovery on Kauai in 1992 — before the Foxes moved to MAG-39 at Camp Pendleton in June 1999. The vulgar scroll was never an official motto, and commanders periodically ordered it scrubbed; it always came back, because for a medevac squadron it was a promise about who would come when Marines called.