guy holding the banner on the left's birthday
guy on the far left is my buddy Robert
Happy birthday (back then, to him).
Military unit naming convention is curious. There was no 501st in the 101st Airborne that I served in. We had the 327th, 502nd, and 187th infantry regiments. In the 2000s, following the success of the Band of Brothers TV show, the Army brought back the 506th infantry regiment into the 101st. But all of those are just names to honor the past. Really, each is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and then 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT), respectively. More recently the 101st has reorganized again, getting back to three BCTs, like when I was there. But because the 506th is so popular because of the TV show, one battalion within the 3rd BCT (generally speaking, the 187th) has retained the 506th designation (2nd battalion 3rd BCT is 2-506, unlike the first and third battalions, which are 1-187 and 3-187).
I mention all of this because when I saw the 501st on that flag it threw me for a loop (because we didn't have a 501st).
It's also evolving--all those changes involving the 506th happened in the last 20 years. And obviously the 501st went away from the 101st sometime between the Vietnam War and when I was in the 101st in the late 90s. Curiously, the 501st, originally under the 101st, is now in the 25th Infantry (the Alaska BCT), and in the 82nd Airborne.
The whole use of a "regiment" designation is simply pointing back to history, because the U.S. Army doesn't organize in regiments anymore (now it's divisions, brigades, battalions, where regiments would have fit between brigades and battalions).
Regiments went away in the late 1950s. Before then they were largely organized by area (Wisconsin regiments, Tennessee regiments, etc.). But there were also special regiments, like the 442nd that I mentioned earlier: the "
Nisei" regiment during WWII, or the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (black soldiers) during the Civil War, to name two that are more famous
. Of course, all that harkens back to a time when the world was more spread out and segregated (not just in a race-based sense, but in a you're from Wisconsin, he's from Texas, I'm from California sort of a way). That was particularly evident during times of war because traditionally (at least before WWII), the U.S. didn't maintain a large standing army, so the National Guard regiments would get activated to go answer the nation's call.
