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Coast Guard toasts birthday, 1M lives saved

The Coast Guard was to mark its 217th birthday Saturday with a riff on the Marine Corps mantra “Every Marine a Rifleman.”

Having documented that it — with its ancestral services — has saved 1,109,310 lives since 1790, the Coast Guard declared at a birthday bash in Grand Haven, Mich., “Every Coast Guardsman a Lifesaver.”

“What began as America’s only lifesaving service charged with the dangerous duty of saving sailors from shipwrecks along our coasts has evolved into a modern-day, multimission Coast Guard that demonstrates the same commitment to saving lives that it did more than 200 years ago,” Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said in a servicewide birthday message.

The Coast Guard calls itself the nation’s oldest maritime service, tracing its roots to the Revenue Cutter Service, which was established under the Treasury Department in 1790 to combat smugglers and collect tariffs.

Today’s Coast Guard is an aggregate of historic services and agencies, including the cutter service; the Lighthouse Service, established in 1789; the Lifesaving Service, established in 1871; and the U.S. portion of the International Ice Patrol, established shortly after the Titanic sank in 1912.

The modern day Coast Guard was formed in 1915, when the Revenue Cutter Service and Lifesaving Service merged.

For this year’s birthday, the Coast Guard Historian’s Office mounted an ambitious campaign to document the number of lives saved since the service’s inception.

The 1,109,310 number is supported by documentation and is likely even higher, officials say.

“The number is verifiable, and we know there are more, but we didn’t count those in which we assisted or weren’t formally recorded,” said Capt. James McPherson, chief of public affairs on July 30.

The Coast Guard, with an active duty force of roughly 41,000, is often described as “multimission” and has a range of duties, including homeland security, search and rescue, maritime safety, maritime mobility, national defense, environmental protection and maritime law enforcement.

Given its mission scope and the fact that the Coast Guard is the only armed service outside the Defense Department, Coast Guardsmen often find themselves explaining their duties or defending their membership in the U.S. military.

An adage like “Every Coast Guardsman a Lifesaver” could just make these tasks more difficult, but Coasties don’t see it that way.

“From my perspective, this is perfectly clear,” says Capt. Scott LaRochelle, chief of search and rescue at Coast Guard Headquarters. “We’re a military, multimission maritime service, and at the same time we are lifesavers and guardians of the seas.”

So, for example, the more than 150 Coast Guardsmen currently serving and supporting six 110-foot patrol boats in the Arabian Gulf are both military security forces and search and rescue personnel if necessary, officials said.

“We do consider ourselves military. We may be driven by the humanitarian. But really, our psyche is, we don’t care what the mission is, just give us the job and we’ll do it,” said Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Timothy Ellis, executive petty officer of the coastal buoy tender Abbie Burgess.

Coast Guardsmen are known to most Americans as the lifesavers of Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the service removed 24,135 people from imminent danger and evacuated another 9,409 to safety.

Yet even that historic moment wasn’t the service’s biggest rescue in its history.

During the Mississippi Flood of 1937, the service saved a total of 43,853 persons in immediate danger and 11,313 head of livestock, according the Historian’s Office.

“Given the multimission nature of the Coast Guard, at one point or another in our careers, we all cross the paths of being guardians,” LaRochelle said.

The Coast Guard’s primary missions have changed since Sept. 11, 2001, with homeland security tying search and rescue for the number one spot, LaRochelle said.

Yet the service, which has come under fire in the past three years for poor handling of a massive modernization contract and oversight of regulatory practices, is prepared for that dual challenge, LaRochelle says.

“It’s the same cutters, same boats, same people, same aircraft. It’s all part of being Semper Paratus. 24/7, we’re ready,” he said.

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