Every August 4th, the United States Coast Guard marks the anniversary of its founding in 1790, when Alexander Hamilton established the Revenue Marine to enforce customs laws along the young nation's coastline. Two hundred and thirty-five years later, the service that grew from those first ten cutters is still underway — on the Great Lakes and the Gulf Coast and the Bering Sea and a thousand other waterways that most Americans never think about, doing a job that only makes the news when something goes wrong. Coast Guard Day is for the people who know the work from the inside: the men and women who have stood watches in places where the sea and the shore meet, where the margin for error is measured in feet.
The Service Between the Shore and the Sea
The Coast Guard's mission is broader than most civilians realize and broader, probably, than many Navy veterans give it credit for. Search and rescue is what most people know: the helicopter in the storm, the motor lifeboat through the surf, the swimmer in the water. But the Coast Guard also enforces maritime law, maintains aids to navigation, conducts drug interdiction in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, manages port security, and — in wartime — deploys alongside the Navy as a full branch of the armed forces. Coast Guard cutters and crews have served in every American conflict from the War of 1812 to Iraq and Afghanistan, often without the recognition their contributions earned.
The Navy and Coast Guard Connection
For Navy veterans, the Coast Guard is a familiar presence. The two services share waterways, sometimes share facilities, and in wartime share operational areas. Coast Guard port security units operated in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm and OIF, working alongside Navy forces in some of the most complex maritime environments in the world. Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETs) have routinely deployed aboard Navy vessels for counter-narcotics patrols, their boarding authority complementing the Navy's platform and firepower. The relationship is one of mutual respect between services that understand, in a way landlocked communities never quite do, what it means to work in an environment that has no margin for error.
The men and women who choose the Coast Guard make a choice that is in many ways more demanding than it appears from the outside. They are a small service — fewer than 43,000 active duty members — covering a mission set that would require a much larger force if the people doing the work were less experienced or less committed. The rescue swimmer who jumps from a helicopter into a storm-driven sea off Cape Hatteras, the cutterman who stands watch at midnight on a 210-foot vessel a hundred miles offshore, the small boat crew that crosses a surf zone that no civilian boat could survive — these are not people doing easy work for comfortable pay. They are doing a job that the country depends on and largely doesn't think about.
Coast Guard Day at Sea
For active duty Coast Guard members, August 4 is an occasion that varies by unit — some commands mark it with ceremonies, some with the slightly more practical recognition that comes from a commanding officer who remembers what day it is. On a cutter at sea, the occasion might be marked over the 1MC and then quietly set aside in favor of whatever the current mission requires, which is the same way the Navy marks its own birthday and every other occasion when there is operational work to be done. The celebration of service happens in the doing of it.
If you served in the Coast Guard or in the Navy alongside the Coast Guard, The Ship's Store honors the ships and sailors who kept watch on the water — in every service, on every sea.
A Service Worth Knowing
Coast Guard Day is an invitation to learn something about a service that most Americans underestimate. Read the accounts of the Pendleton rescue of 1952, when Coast Guard motor lifeboats crossed seas that should have been uncrossable to save the crew of a tanker that had broken in half. Read about the Coast Guard's role in the Normandy invasion, in the Pacific island-hopping campaign, in Vietnam riverine operations. Read about what a rescue swimmer does when the helicopter can't land and the survivor can't swim and there is no other option. The Coast Guard has been doing this work for two hundred and thirty-five years. They don't need the recognition to keep doing it. But they've earned it anyway.