The Inheritance

Nobody ordered this mark to survive. Twice, someone asked for it.

In January of 1943, at Norfolk, Virginia, a new fighter squadron was working up on a new airplane called the Corsair. Its commander wanted an identity that could bind a roomful of strangers into a unit headed for war, and the airplane offered one: a corsair is a pirate ship. So the squadron took the oldest pirate mark there is, the skull and crossbones, and called itself the Jolly Rogers. Then it earned the flag. Flying from island strips in the Solomons, the squadron was credited with more than 150 enemy aircraft in 76 days of combat, and came home in early 1944 the Navy's top-scoring fighter squadron to date.

Navy rules are plain about what happens when a squadron is disestablished: its history and lineage end with it. In the spring of 1959 that happened to the squadron then carrying the mark. Its last commanding officer took command of a different squadron two days later, and asked permission to bring the mark with him. In 1995 it happened again. The squadron wearing it was struck from the rolls on the first of October, and ten days later a third squadron asked to trade away the name it had flown under for forty-three years and take the skull instead. The Navy's own lineage manual says, carefully, that these are three separate squadrons with no official connection to one another. That is the point. Nothing in any regulation kept this mark alive. Each time it went down, living men asked to pick it up.

There is a glass case in the squadron's spaces today. Inside it are a skull and two leg bones. The squadron tells the story of a young pilot named Jack Ernie, shot down at Okinawa in 1945, who called out in his last seconds to be remembered with the Jolly Rogers, and whose family later gave the squadron his remains so the request would be kept. The archives cannot confirm the details. It does not seem to matter. His name holds a permanent line on the squadron roster. The newest pilot is charged with keeping him, and takes him home at night. And at every change of command, the bones pass from the old skipper's hands directly into the new one's.

The mark flies today on Super Hornets out of Virginia: a white skull on an all-black tail, gold bands at the tip. Eight decades, three squadrons, two funerals, and not one order requiring any of it. The dates on this shirt are the year the mark was born and the two years it was orphaned. The line beneath them is what happened instead.

What it stands for:

• A mark kept alive for more than eighty years by choice, not by orders
• The men who asked to carry what the paperwork said had ended
• A promise the squadron keeps whether or not the archives can prove it was made

Traditions don't survive on their own. Someone carries them.

Designed in America. Made to last.