On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 13:07:40 GMT, Mike Williamson
wrote:

George wrote:
Mary Shafer wrote in message . ..

How about Holloman, not Davis-Monthan? There are F-117s at Holloman.

Mary


There's Air Force Spec Ops at Davis Monthan.

Well, there are the rescue squadrons here, but I don't recall ever
seeing that patch here. On another note, Air Force unit patches
are typically (almost universally, as far as I have seen) round,
rather than triangular. The AZ National Guard units have a non-round
patch, but that is in the shape of the State of Arizona.

I think that's because round patches are cheaper. I used to be on the
Dryden Exchange Committee, which ran our gift shop, and that was
something we suggested to patch designers to keep costs down.

I have a translation from rec.org.sca now. The "de multe nocte noli
rogare" is, approximately, "Don't ask what we do late at night" and
"classis caece" is "invisible or secret military group or fleet",
which may be "stealth squadron".

So I'm going with the 49th at Holloman AFB.

Mary

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 00:04:46 -0400, "Brian M. Scott"
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Apr 2004 17:05:14 -0400 Leigh
wrote in news:aSjcc.17163$of.7246@lakeread03 in
rec.org.sca:

Mary Shafer wrote:

There's a military patch that has many people in another newsgroup I
frequent quite curious. The standard of Latin scholarship is quite
low there, so I thought I ask here. You can see the patch at
http://www.darkstar.ukonline.co.uk/patch2.jpg.

Embroidered on the border of the black triangular patch is
CLASSIS CAECE (top point) DE MULTE NOCTE (bottom left)
NOLI ROGARE (bottom right), all readable in the usual orientation.
The phrases are separated by three ghosts or spooks, on the order of
the bullies in Casper, The center of the patch has a globe showing
the Americas with a star at about Holloman AFB (or any of a number of
other bases).

The combination of ghosts or spooks, the reference to "late at night"
(multe nocte), and the star have led me to believe that this patch is
that of some component of the 49th Air Wing, which flies the F-117 at
night from Holloman. I add this information purely as a guess, but
thought it might be helpful.

The spooks and CLASSIS CAECE 'invisible fleet' pretty
clearly mark it as the badge of some intelligence-oriented
unit, I should think.

I should mention that this may not be the best Latin in the world.

well, I'm not a latin scholar or anything (and the one online translation
website that did Latin English seems to have changed it's policy, *Sigh*),
but...

Looking at the patch I think you have to take DE MULTE NOCTE + NOLI ROGARE
as one unit which would be roughly:
'do not ask (what we do) in the course of/during many nights'

I think rather 'Do not ask (what we do) late at night'.

Best I could get out of CLASSIS CAECE was 'a hidden group of the military'
('Classis' being in one sense either 'group' or 'the armed forces' generally)

Mind you most of the words ending in 'e' should probably be ending in 'ae'
(at least when looking at the roots of the words that was the closest, at
least according to the interactive online latin dictionary I was looking
through).

Yes: where Classical Latin has ae, medieval Latin often
has just e, especially in inflexional endings.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer