Good to know. Yea I should go pick up a cheap little one for this kind of thing. Thanks for your advice!

Every ocean-going US Navy surface vessel WAS issued a minimum of 3 sextants, sometimes 4 or more.    I had billets twice as Ship's Navigator.  Typically, two people would shoot "official" star bearings - either myself and my QMC or QM1.  If I had the watch, then my QMC and a QM1/QM2 would shoot the bearings.  A third person, a junior QM would serve as recorder.  Frequently, we had a 3rd person shoot bearings as a trainee.  Usually a QM2 or QM3.  If we had Midshipmen aboard for their summer cruise, we would rotate them through as well.  The 4th sextant was the "emergency backup".   I had 4 waterproof seabags containing sets of nautical almanacs, maps of the area of operation, sight reduction tables and worksheets in water resistant bags along with pencils, dividers, clipboards, stopwatches, etc.    The game plan was that in the event of a mandatory abandon ship event, a sextant box and a chronometer box would be thrown in each seabag and 1 each would be delivered to the Captain's gig, the motor whaleboat and 1 of the ship's boats.  The 4th bag  would have to rely on the boat officer's wrist watch as ship's only have 3 chronometers.   The boat officers for assigned to each boat would them have navigation tools for, well, navigating.  3 of the boat officers would be the CO, the XO, and Navigator, with the 4th being the Operations Officer.  Since the XO is the ship's "Navigator", and all COs had to be XOs at one time and many Ops bosses had been Navigation Officers in prior assignments, every boat would theoretically have a "competent" navigation officer.   The Navy dropped celestial navigation in 2006 and sold off all the sextants as surplus because "Hey we got GPS.  We don't need no stinking celestial navigation."   Then a decade later, in 2016, the higher-ups had an epiphany and started worrying about cyber warfare and brought celestial navigation back.  And had to buy all new sextants. SMH.

Not 100% sure but this has got to be a riverine sailor with the 521st River Patrol Section as they wore a similar colored triangular patch with the wording of TUAN GIANG at the bottom (see photos).    

I found these late this afternoon after my very good friend sent me after them.   At 3pm they were sitting for sale for approximately $25 each.   Any help pricing them please    I know the M19B has a steel casing and saw an online price of $275.   Is that even accurate?   Educated guesses are welcome    Thank you for your help.

AND ...  underway -  short sleeve shirts, long sleeve shirts, both with or without jackets.    Deck apes in short sleeves, snipes wearing jackets in 90ºF weather on the flight deck beause it 25ºF - 40ºF colder than the engine rooms and they were freezing their patooties off.

One of my friends from the Legion and a retired teacher was a tanker with a Sherman talked about the battle at Bitche…. He referred to himself as a Bitche from Bitche ✔️💯I know there is a SSI referring to the statement.   Kurt

A blacklight will aid you in determining whether the patches are period correct. If correct, the thread will not glow under blacklight. Typically, you want to look at the edges of the patch and lighter color threads for reference. You can get a nice handheld one on amazon fairly cheap. I like the looks of the 101st, 17th, and 3rd army. The 82nd, I would want to see under a blacklight

As a matter of curiosity, did you sew 2 patches on the right sleeve of the flight suit, or did you purchase it that way?

Thank you! Yes, I’m fond of them - and ‘desk displays’. Adds a splash of of colour to things.

Nice, I like footlocker displays.  Well done.