The Triumph and Tragedy of Coast Guard Search and Rescue
Features
By Nolan Peterson | June 13, 2021
You can’t save them all.
Coast Guard rescue swimmer Ryan Pierce learned that lesson the day the call came to evacuate a man who’d suffered a heart attack aboard a cruise ship off Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Pierce and the other three members of his Miami-based aircrew loaded onto their bright orange MH-65 Dolphin helicopter and took off, headed east over the ocean. While en route to the awaiting cruise ship, and purely by chance, the helicopter passed near a small fishing boat in distress. Flares arced into the sky just before the vessel slipped under the surface. The two men who’d been aboard were now in the water.
“We hovered around them and literally watched the boat sink. I had a weird, creepy feeling,” Pierce later recalled.
Inside the helicopter, the two pilots, the flight engineer, and Pierce agonized over what to do. Without an immediate rescue, the two boaters would probably die. But the heart attack victim’s life was in jeopardy, too — there were medical personnel aboard the cruise ship, but he needed to get to a hospital fast.
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