My interview with Scott Ruskan was originally set for a Friday at 4 p.m. Thirty minutes before, a text popped up: “Hey, so sorry to cancel last minute. Currently flying a search and rescue case and will not be available for a call.”
For most 26-year-olds, Friday night means wrapping up work and heading into the weekend. For Ruskan, it meant a six-hour rescue mission. When we finally connected, he walked me back through July 4, recounting the shifts in the weather, the decisions made in the air, and what it was like on the ground at Camp Mystic.
“It lives rent-free in my head,” he told me. “It was probably the best rescue of my career, but also someone else’s worst day.”
From accounting to rescue swimming
Ruskan and his crew are based in Corpus Christi. He is one of just nine rescue swimmers at a unit of 200 personnel. The unit has three helicopters and three airplanes that cover a massive area stretching from Austin to the Mexican border.
The path that brought him here was far from straight. “I worked a corporate-y job. It wasn’t for me,” he said. “Pretty big change going from accounting to Coast Guard. Did a career change and went to the rescue swimmer school. Now I’m in Corpus Christi.”
He didn’t grow up as a competitive swimmer, but he was always comfortable in the water. “I’ve always been around the ocean. I grew up boogie boarding and surfing, just being in the water. That was probably the biggest draw,” he shares. Originally from New Jersey, he chose the Coast Guard for one reason - “search and rescue.”
The call
On the morning of July 4, he and his crew — Ian, Blaire and Seth — were the ready team. “We didn’t assemble some kind of magical team or the perfect people for the mission, it was just who we had on that day,” Ruskan said.
The call came around 6:30 a.m. Task Force 1, a state-run search and rescue program out of Texas A&M, needed helicopters to respond to severe flooding near San Antonio. “We got a quick brief that there was a flood and there were probably a couple hundred people trapped. That was the only information we had,” he said. “We didn’t know we were going to a kids' camp.”
They launched from Corpus Christi at 7:15 a.m. with inland rescue gear — ropes, swift-water equipment — even though their training is mostly maritime. But the weather turned bad quickly. Visibility was almost nothing through the Hill Country. “Pilots upfront made some excellent flying decisions,” Ruskan said. “We had to turn around three times, back and forth from airports, just inching closer to Kerrville.”
By 1 p.m., they finally linked up at an airport with the Texas Army National Guard and Task Force 1. “It was kind of dumb luck,” he said. “Everyone realized this was a good spot based off the radar.” That was when they learned their destination: Camp Mystic, a summer camp with hundreds of stranded children..
“We got into the briefing room with the Army and got tasked with it. I asked if we knew the conditions of the survivors on the ground or how many, and was told they didn’t.
The scene at Camp Mystic
By 2:30 p.m., after hours of fighting weather and coordinating routes, they were circling over the campsite. The airspace was chaotic. More than a dozen helicopters — Coast Guard, Army, and National Guard — were hovering, hoisting, landing, taking off, all while dodging weather and mountains.
He described his Coast Guard team leading one of the Army helicopters through the storm. “They thought we had better radar since we are better equipped with bad weather going through the mountain pass. We had me in the backseat looking at the weather on my phone calling out the pilots, we had the flight mechanic literally on Google Maps and Apple Maps trying to find the rivers we were going to follow to pre-plan the route around the weather and mountains because if we came up above the mountains in the clouds unable to see we’d have to go back to the airport.”
He put it in simple terms: “If you are on a commercial airline and they can’t see outside, that’s totally fine because they are on a flight plan. We were not on a flight plan. We were trying to find our way into the flooding zone. We knew we had to stay within the valley, but this was an area we had never flown in before.” At this point, their flight crew had already been flying for about four hours.
The decision was made to drop Ruskan at Camp Mystic once they finally found a safe landing spot. “I was totally OK with it,” he said. “We needed extra space in the cabin. I’m an EMT, we are trained to do triage in the Coast Guard, so I thought I was the best for the job.”
When his helicopter lifted off, leaving him on the ground, he saw a camp counselor and asked if anyone else was there helping. He was told he was the first one. “That’s when things settled in that I was the only person there,” he says.
The mission was clear. “We were tasked with mass transport of people from point A to point B,” he says. “At Point A they’re stuck at a camp and we can’t get a boat in, there’s no roads. The only option is an airlift out and getting them to a proper triage, Point B . Our only mission was to move these kids from point A to point B. Nothing fancy.”
For the next three and a half hours, Ruskan was the face of the rescue at the camp. Helicopters cycled every 20 minutes, each able to take about 15 children at a time. “Basically, my job was to shuffle them to the next helicopter when it lands and pair up a group with one adult. We were wearing helmets and military gear and it’s super loud and scary. I just wanted them to have a little bit of comfort,” he says. “I thought my job was easy. The guys in the air have a much more challenging job avoiding other helicopters.”
Still, he understood his role went beyond triage. He says he knew, “my mannerisms reflected how bad the situation was. If they saw the rescue swimmer super calm, then they would know they were OK. That’s what they teach you in rescue swimmer school, be calm in a world of chaos.”
He knelt down with kids between flights, asked their names, paired them with counselors, and reminded them they were safe. “These people were having a bad day, probably the worst day of their lives, and they are looking for someone who is calm,” he said. By the end of the afternoon, he had written down every group in his notes app: 165 children moved from danger to safety.
A team effort
Despite the attention Ruskan has received — from viral TikToks, media interviews, to a tweet from the Secretary of Homeland Security — he wanted to make sure others got credit. “We put all those kids on Army helicopters, they deserve the credit too,” he says.. “The other civilians who took time off work and brought us breakfast tacos or Black Rifle coffee, those little things made such a big difference.
“Our air crew was responsible for 15 saves and they were in a more isolated trickier spot all by themselves,” he said. “The saves are the most important because those essentially mean if the crew hadn’t gotten there, they would not have made it. It was a total team effort.”
He also pointed to other crews in the air that day, including the Texas National Guard crew with the call name “Shiner” based out of Austin and a medevac crew out of San Antonio known as “The Alamo.” “They’re sick, love those guys,” he says..
Life after the mission
Since Camp Mystic, Ruskan and his crew — the “random crew on the random day,” as he calls them — have flown more missions together. They still grab beers and stay in touch on group chat.
But life off duty has changed too. He suddenly found himself all over social media, with strangers posting about the rescue and his role in it. “I got pretty popular overnight, never really wanted that,” he said. “I’m still just a rescue swimmer, pretty new on the job, still standing on duty and still trying to pull my weight.” His Instagram bio reads simply, “just a guy.”
He visits his girlfriend in Austin often and is a big fan of P. Terry’s. He remembers with gratitude about the companies who dropped by the hangar with donations. “YETI dropped off some things and Black Rifle dropped off coffee. Everyone’s morale was super boosted.”
Ruskan has been in the Coast Guard for four years, most of that time in training. Rescue swimmer school has an 85 percent fail rate, he shared, and the program to become a pilot is even more selective. “Good crew communication was the biggest lesson. Trust your training.”
For inspiration, he points to his uncle Dave, a retired New York City firefighter. “He was a first responder, I would visit him at the firehouse in the city, on duty 24 hours. I thought if I could be like him, that would be sick.”
At only 26, with one of the most harrowing rescues of his career already behind him as his first mission, Scott Ruskan remains humble. “I know it’s kinda cool I’ve gotten all this attention recently, but I’m still on mission, on duty.”