Happy Birthday to U.S. Coast Guard!

This is a belated note of happy birthday to U.S. Coast Guard, yesterday, August 4th, was their 217th birthday. In this era where the country seems to have overran by death culture, it is good to be reminded that this great agency, which we may be simply taken for granted, is still dedicated for saving lives. In a birthday ceremony yesterday, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that 1,109,310 lives have been saved since its establishment by the first Congress in 1790.

In this blog I reported quite a number of freaque wave encounter cases, some tragic and some have happy enddings. What I may not have specifically mentioned in those postings is that they all deeply involved the all-taken-for-granted efforts of the unsung heros of the U.S. Coast Guard and similar Coast Guard agencies around the free world.

A fellow blogger, Robin Storm, told an amazingly successful and very difficult rescue story of the crew of s/v Sean Seamour II by the U.S. Coast Guard.

While the mission of search and rescue is mostly peace time endeavors, as one of America's five armed forces the U.S. Coast Guard is certaonly have their shares of war efforts also. In an article in the National Review Online, James S. Robbins wrote a fascinating story of a Coast Guard veteran, Marvin Perrett, who happened to have participated in the June 1944 Normandy Invasion, and also the landing at Iwo Jima in February 1945. The article is a great read by itself. Heart warming too. Let me quote Robbins' last paragraph to conclude this brief blog:

Marvin Perrett's full story other accounts of Coast Guardsmen and women in war and peace can be found at the web site of the U. S. Coast Guard Histrorian's Office. Happy birthday to all the Coasties who have served, and are serving, securing our ports, conducting maritime-interception operations and coastal-security patrols, taking down smugglers and drug runners, and saving lives on a daily basis.