Join The Coast Guard
Ever ask yourself if you can join the Coast Guard? Read over all your options for joining the U.S. Coast Guard and decide if enlisting is the right career path for you. The Coast Guard offers a unique job opportunity that provides not only training for your career, but benefits for you and your spouse that include signing bonuses, going to school for free, medical/dental and much more.
Steps To Join The Coast Guard
Where do you start? Here are 7 steps to becoming a Guardian.
Where do you start? Here are 7 steps to becoming a Guardian.
ASVAB
You will have to take and pass the ASVAB as part of the recruitment process to join the Coast Guard. The minimum score for acceptance in to the Coast Guard is 45. The ASVAB will also help determine your job or specialty.
The United States Coast Guard, as one of the five services of the United States Armed Forces, offers extensive benefits to its service members. Paid vacation, excellent training, money for education are just some of the benefits. Of course, the most important benefit is serving your country.
The United States Coast Guard is a very selective service. With only 38,000 active duty and 12,000 reserve personnel the US Coast Guard does more with less than any other service. The US Coast Guard performs more missions than all the other services which requires all members to be versatile and hardworking.
Basic training in the Coast Guard is eight weeks at the training center in Cape May, NJ. Basic training is both mentally tough and physically trying. The mission of Coast Guard Basic Training is to transform America’s civilian volunteers into military members of the United Stated Coast Guard.
Special Missions
The US Coast Guard Special Operations are known as Rescue Swimmers. The Coast Guard’s rescue swimmers are the brave young men and women who hoist or free fall from a helicopter into dangerous seas to perform daring rescues. The rescue swimmer training school has one of the highest student attrition rates of any special operations school in the military. Roughly 75 students go through the school each year, and fewer than half complete the training. They are a small group within the U.S. Coast Guard, only about 300 of them service-wide.