CG Helicopter Rescue Swimmer Patch

The Coast Guard had no rescue swimmers in February 1983, when the bulk carrier Marine Electric capsized in a storm about 30 miles off Chincoteague, Virginia, and 31 people died in the water. Coast Guard helicopters lowered a basket that night, and the men in the water had to reach it on their own. Only three of the 34 men aboard survived, and the one rescue swimmer on scene that night came from a Navy helicopter. Congress funded a Coast Guard rescue swimmer program in the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 1984. Every Coast Guard swimmer who has dropped from a helicopter since comes out of that night.

The first Coast Guard rescue swimmers went to work in 1985 at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and by 1991 the program was running at 23 air stations. The swimmers are enlisted Aviation Survival Technicians, the AST rating, and they come out of a 24-week A school at Elizabeth City. Kelly Mogk Larson, who joined the Coast Guard in 1984, became the service's first female rescue swimmer and in 1986 the first woman to finish Navy Rescue Swimmer School. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Coast Guard crews saved or evacuated more than 33,500 people. Many of those started with a swimmer on the end of a cable.

This is a 4 inch round patch with a blue merrowed edge and a white outer ring. U.S. COAST GUARD runs across the top and HELICOPTER RESCUE SWIMMER around the bottom, with a blue star on each side. The center is a red-orange disc carrying a blue six-pointed EMS star with a staff and serpent, a nod to the medical training a swimmer carries into the water. Gold aviation wings spread across the star, marking a member of a helicopter aircrew. A gold scroll at the bottom reads SEMPER PARATUS, Always Ready, the Coast Guard motto. The back is iron-on.

A rescue swimmer goes out the door when the weather is too bad for anything else to work. The job is the hoist, the cold water and a survivor who may be hurt, panicked or both. The A school at Elizabeth City is known as one of the hardest in any service, and plenty of candidates do not finish it. The ones who do wear the AST rate for the rest of their careers and get called out on the worst nights of the year. Families on fishing boats and sailboats, and the crews of ships in trouble, owe their lives to swimmers who wore this patch.

It fits a shadow box with an air station photo and a set of aircrew wings, or the shoulder of a flight jacket or swim parka. It is also a good gift for a young swimmer just out of A school, or a retired AST who still listens for the pager. Always Ready, stitched on a 4 inch circle.