Navy SAR Rescue Swimmer: Military Service, Sacrifice, and Transition. Rebekah Myers
From Childhood Adversity to Finding Purpose After the Navy
At eight years old, Rebekah Myers was caring for a newborn sister. Years later, she'd be aboard the USS Makin Island, working eighteen-hour days, sleeping two or three hours a night, and preparing to respond when someone went overboard.
Those experiences happened in very different worlds, but both involved responsibility that came with a personal cost.
Rebekah grew up in an isolated religious household, without conventional schooling and with few opportunities to experience life outside her family. She eventually escaped, built a fitness business, became an elite obstacle course racer, and walked away from that success to pursue one of the Navy's demanding rescue specialties.
Her military career included setbacks, difficult assignments, dangerous operations, and the satisfaction of finally earning the qualification she'd pursued. It also brought her to a realization that many military veterans and first responders recognize: achieving the career you wanted doesn't necessarily mean you want to spend the rest of your working life doing it.
What followed wasn't a conventional military-to-civilian career transition. It involved wilderness rescue training, mountains, international travel, entrepreneurship, and a changing understanding of what makes a life worth living.
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Growing Up in Religious Isolation: Finding Independence Through Reading and Fitness
Rebekah Myers grew up in Cortland, Illinois, a small farming community roughly ninety minutes northwest of Chicago. She remembers a town with only a few hundred people, but the small population wasn't what made her childhood unusual. Her parents deliberately limited the family's contact with the outside world.
Bekah was the second oldest of seven children. She had one older brother, two younger brothers, and three younger sisters. She and her older brother never attended conventional school, and the household operated under strict religious beliefs that shaped nearly every aspect of their lives.
Those beliefs also established different expectations for boys and girls. Boys had opportunities that girls didn't. For Bekah, the expected future involved domestic responsibilities and raising children rather than pursuing an education or independent career. Even ordinary childhood activities were restricted.
Her older brother became an important companion. They played military-themed games, built wooden weapons, wore camouflage, and competed against one another. Their mother even incorporated military-style discipline into the household, requiring them to stand at attention and respond to whistles.
Rebekah later learned that relatives had served in the military, including a grandfather who'd been in the Navy. At the time, however, those childhood games were among the few ways she and her brother could create experiences beyond their immediate surroundings.
Learning to Read became the way she discovered a world beyond her home, but Bekah didn’t learn to read until she was approximately ten years old. She remembers standing in the pantry, looking at a peanut butter jar, and suddenly being able to read the words printed on it. It was a small moment with enormous practical consequences.
Reading gave her access to information that wasn't being provided through formal education. She began finding ways to borrow books from the library without her parents knowing.
Books introduced her to places she'd never visited. Mountains, Alaska, the Grand Canyon, and distant landscapes became part of her imagination long before she had the freedom or resources to see them. She spent years escaping into those stories.
But reading didn't change what was happening inside the household. Bekah describes an upbringing shaped by religious control, isolation, and physical abuse. Church attendance could provide rare opportunities for outside contact, but those opportunities could also be taken away.
She recalls deciding at eight years old that she wouldn't cry anymore. By approximately twelve, she'd learned to suppress much of her emotional expression. That response didn't come from an absence of feeling. It was something she'd deliberately taught herself in an environment where showing emotion carried consequences.
She was in essence a surrogate mother raising siblings as a child herself. At approximately eight years old, Rebekah became responsible for caring for a newborn younger sister following a home birth. As she grew older, her responsibilities expanded. Her older brother joined the National Guard at seventeen and deployed to Iraq at eighteen. His departure left Rebekah with even more responsibility for the younger children.
She eventually was able to work as a YMCA lifeguard and swim instructor, while continuing to help raise her siblings. She says her mother took her earnings to help cover household expenses.
For someone who hadn't been allowed the ordinary independence of childhood, lifeguarding offered something different. It required competence, physical ability, and responsibility for people outside her family. But she still faced a difficult question about her own future.
Bekah recounts two incidents in which her mother attempted to kill her. She'd already been considering leaving, but the danger forced her to confront what staying might mean. She wanted to protect her younger siblings and leaving them felt like abandoning the responsibility she'd carried for years.
Eventually, she recognized that she couldn't help them if she didn't survive herself. She secretly saved approximately $700, bought a used car, and left for Chicago.
Chicago exposed Bekah to an unfamiliar world. She had limited money, little experience living independently, and an enormous amount to learn. Working in the city, she encountered travelers and business professionals whose lives seemed very different from the one she'd known.
Running became an important part of her life. She discovered that running hard could temporarily quiet the thoughts occupying her mind. What began as a way to manage those thoughts developed into distance running, including completing the Chicago Marathon.
Injuries introduced another interest. Rather than simply accepting that running hurt, she began studying anatomy, mobility, and the ways the body responds to training. Her growing interest in fitness would eventually become a career.
But her younger siblings remained a major concern. Bekah attempted to obtain custody of the five younger children. She worked long hours, trying to meet financial and housing requirements that might allow her to bring them into her care. Her effort was unsuccessful.
It was a difficult turning point because it challenged the belief that working hard enough could solve the problem. She'd spent years trying to protect her siblings, and she couldn't simply replace their circumstances with the life she was building.
She began considering another possibility. Perhaps she could help them by demonstrating that a different future was achievable.
Bekah eventually moved to Orlando, Florida, where her interest in physical training became a profession. She became a personal trainer at and opened Myers Fitness, achieving her goal of owning a gym before her twenty-fifth birthday.
Her competitive interests eventually expanded into Spartan and obstacle course racing. The physical challenges suited her. She'd spent years learning to work through discomfort, and obstacle course racing rewarded strength, endurance, preparation, and the willingness to keep moving when something became difficult.
She progressed into elite competition, earned Team USA recognition, and competed internationally in Italy in 2018.
By her late twenties, she'd accomplished things that would have been difficult to imagine during her childhood. Yet she was beginning to question whether competition, medals, and financial success were enough.
She'd already considered military service when she was younger, attempting to join the Army at nineteen. She'd also developed an interest in rescue swimming after watching Coast Guard rescue swimmers train on Lake Michigan.
She considered physical therapy and volunteered in a hospital, but neither became her next direction. Rescue work offered a combination of physical difficulty, medical responsibility, and the opportunity to help someone in immediate danger.
The Coast Guard was her initial choice, but training delays and concerns about age limits complicated that path. Rebekah was no longer a teenager looking for her first career. She was an established business owner and elite athlete considering giving up a life she'd spent years building.
Navy SAR Rescue Swimmer: Boot Camp, Training Setbacks, and USS Makin Island
Rebekah approached the Navy with a specific goal. She wanted to become an rescue swimmer. She wasn't looking for just any military assignment. She wanted a specialty that combined physical ability, medical knowledge, and the responsibility of helping people in dangerous situations.
When she met with Navy recruiters, they questioned whether she had the physical ability for the program. Rebekah responded by demonstrating pull-ups. She knew what she could do physically, even if the recruiters didn't. But physical readiness was only one part of what awaited her.
Bekah was twenty-eight when she entered military service. She'd closed Myers Fitness and sold its equipment and client list. She was leaving behind an established civilian career, financial independence, and the freedom to organize her own days.
Bekah entered Navy boot camp on a specialized rescue swimmer contract. Alongside the standard demands of recruit training, she completed additional physical training intended to prepare candidates for the specialized pipeline. She wasn't new to difficult workouts or competitive environments. She'd trained for marathons, owned a gym, and competed against elite athletes.
Military training, however, introduced demands that weren't simply physical. She had to operate within an institution where assignments, schedules, standards, and advancement were controlled by other people. The independence she'd developed as a civilian business owner no longer determined how she spent her time. She also encountered resistance to women participating in specialized military programs.
Bekah had experienced gender-based restrictions during childhood and had spent much of her adult life demonstrating what she could accomplish physically. Yet she was again encountering people who questioned whether she belonged. That didn't prevent her from continuing through boot camp and into rescue swimmer training in Pensacola. She completed aircrew training and progressed toward aviation rescue swimmer school.
During her first aviation rescue swimmer school attempt, Rebekah was dropped from the program following a disputed push-up evaluation. She believes the evaluation had been unfair. Now she faced the possibility of serving in the Navy without doing the job she'd enlisted to perform.
She continued training during that period and competed in triathlons. She was still physically capable of performing at a high level, even though the military evaluation had ended her immediate opportunity. Eventually, the Navy assigned her to USS Makin Island as an undesignated E-3.
For Rebekah, the assignment meant moving from a specialized training pipeline into general shipboard duties. Now she was a junior sailor aboard an amphibious assault ship, learning a new organization and doing work that wasn't the original reason she'd enlisted. She could have treated the assignment as the end of her rescue swimmer ambitions, instead, she began looking for another way forward.
Rebekah started researching what qualifications she could earn aboard the ship and what she'd need to do to become eligible for another aviation rescue swimmer school opportunity. A female sailor helped her identify an opportunity to attend surface rescue swimmer school.
Surface rescue swimmers and aviation rescue swimmers have related rescue responsibilities, but they aren't the same qualification. Surface rescue swimmers operate in support of shipboard rescue missions, while aviation rescue swimmers train for rescue operations involving aircraft.
For Bekah, surface rescue swimmer school offered a chance to remain involved in the work that had originally attracted her to military service. She attended training in San Diego during the COVID period, when restrictions affected military training and operations. She graduated as team captain.
Back aboard USS Makin Island, her combined scores placed her ahead of two more senior rescue swimmers. She became the ship's primary surface rescue swimmer despite her junior enlisted status. But it didn't change the other responsibilities that came with being assigned to a ship. Learning Aviation Fuels and Flight Deck Operations
The work required learning procedures and responsibilities that were very different from personal training or competitive athletics. A ship's flight deck is a coordinated operating environment. Fueling, aircraft movement, and flight operations involve people performing separate tasks that depend on one another. Bekah had to learn those duties while continuing to maintain her surface rescue swimmer qualification.
Her military experience was becoming broader than the single specialty she'd originally pursued. She was learning to operate within a shipboard team, qualify in unfamiliar duties, and accept responsibilities that weren't necessarily the ones she'd chosen for herself.
As a civilian, she'd been able to decide what to study, what competitions to enter, and how to run her business. In the Navy, she could pursue qualifications and demonstrate competence, but she couldn't independently determine where she'd be assigned or what operational demands would come next.
In September 2020, Bekah entered the predeployment period aboard USS Makin Island. COVID restrictions made an already demanding process more complicated. She describes being sequestered in a hotel under armed guard, undergoing medical testing, and dealing with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic.
For sailors preparing to deploy, restrictions didn't eliminate the ordinary requirements of shipboard operations. The ship still needed personnel who could perform their duties, maintain equipment, stand watches, and respond to emergencies.
The deployment ahead would demand more than physical fitness. It would also change the way she thought about endurance, exhaustion, and the price of continuing to push through difficult circumstances.
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Military Deployment, Rescue Operations, and the Decision to Leave Military Service
The deployment aboard USS Makin Island brought Rebekah Myers into a different kind of military experience. She'd spent years pursuing physical challenges that she could prepare for, compete in, and eventually finish. Shipboard deployment didn't operate according to those rules.
COVID restrictions affected nearly every aspect of life aboard the ship. Port calls were canceled, the deployment was extended, and staffing shortages increased the workload for the sailors who remained available.She describes working eighteen-hour days and sleeping only two or three hours a night.
Those weren't occasional difficult days followed by recovery. She remembers the schedule continuing over an extended period. And for someone who'd built much of her adult identity around physical performance, the effects were significant. She eventually stopped caring about fitness.
It wasn't that she'd forgotten how to train or lost the knowledge she'd spent years developing. Her attention had shifted toward getting through the immediate demands of each day. The ship's operational schedule left little room for personal recovery.
Rebekah describes the accumulated effects of long workdays, disrupted sleep, limited communication, and deteriorating morale. Military members understand that difficult conditions come with service. Training and operational readiness are built around the expectation that people will continue performing when they're uncomfortable, tired, or under pressure. But there are limits to what sustained demands can take from a person.
Bekah had entered the Navy with an unusually strong athletic background. She knew how to endure difficult training and had spent years voluntarily pursuing challenges that tested her physical capacity. The deployment exposed a different kind of strain.
There wasn't a finish line she could see approaching. There wasn't a race result or personal record waiting at the end of another exhausting day. The work simply continued.
The ship encountered severe weather, including seas she describes as approximately thirty feet high. During operations near the Strait of Hormuz, she participated in armed small-boat activities involving Iranian vessels. She describes being assigned to a boat equipped with a .50-caliber weapon.
As the ship's primary surface rescue swimmer, Rebekah had to be prepared for personnel-overboard emergencies. She had five overboard rescue responses during the deployment, including a nighttime incident in the Persian Gulf.
A rescue swimmer's work carries a particular responsibility. The person entering the water is attempting to help someone who's already in danger, often under conditions that aren't controlled by the rescue team. Water conditions, darkness, fatigue, and the urgency of the situation all affect what happens next.
Bekah had learned about that responsibility years earlier while working as a lifeguard. One of her instructors had warned that a drowning person could pull a rescuer underwater. The rescuer had to protect their own safety to remain capable of helping someone else.
During deployment, however, the immediate concern was carrying out the mission. Rebekah describes reaching a point where she'd accepted the possibility of dying. She'd been exposed to prolonged exhaustion and operational danger, and her understanding of risk had changed. When the deployment ended, the effects didn't disappear simply because the ship had returned. She remembers being physically and emotionally depleted.
Despite everything she'd experienced, Bekah still hadn't completed the original objective that had brought her into the Navy. She'd qualified as a surface rescue swimmer and performed operational duties, but she hadn't earned the aviation rescue swimmer qualification. She began pursuing another opportunity.
This time, she had a record of shipboard service, additional qualifications, and operational experience supporting her request. Her chain of command eventually supported her return to aviation rescue swimmer school.
When she returned, she encountered renewed opposition. Rebekah recalls a school master chief telling her that she didn't belong in the program. It was another moment in which her place in a demanding specialty was questioned.
She'd already experienced the consequences of failing a physical evaluation. She knew that her background as an athlete and her service aboard the ship wouldn't automatically carry her through the remaining requirements.
This time, she passed the final evaluations and graduated as an aviation rescue swimmer.
The qualification represented the completion of a long and difficult process. She'd entered the Navy specifically to pursue that role, been removed from the initial training pipeline, served aboard a ship, and worked her way back. She'd finally earned what she'd set out to achieve. But completing the qualification didn't produce the lasting satisfaction she might once have expected.
After graduation, Bekah received an assignment in Coronado, California, and continued serving for approximately two more years. She was finally working in the specialty she'd pursued. Yet the questions that emerged during deployment hadn't gone away.
She'd experienced the physical and emotional costs of military service. She was also dealing with accumulated injuries and concerns involving pain management and medical treatment. The work she'd wanted required more than completing training and maintaining physical readiness. It also meant continuing to accept the demands of military life.
Rebekah had spent much of her childhood without control over her circumstances. She'd worked hard to establish independence as an adult, then voluntarily surrendered much of that independence when she enlisted. Now she was questioning whether that exchange still made sense for her.
The issue wasn't whether she'd been capable of becoming an aviation rescue swimmer. It was whether she wanted to continue giving her time and autonomy to military service.
Near the end of her enlistment, Rebekah participated in a difficult winter mountain climb with a former Navy SEAL who was also an ultrarunner. The experience introduced her to another demanding physical environment.
Mountaineering involved preparation, discomfort, exposure, and risk. Those elements weren't entirely unfamiliar to someone who'd spent years racing and training for rescue operations. What was different was the choice.
She could decide whether to pursue the challenge. She could choose where to go, how to prepare, and what experiences she wanted from it. The mountain experience helped her recognize possibilities outside the military.
As reenlistment approached, she faced a decision that wasn't easy simply because she'd identified another interest. She'd spent years trying to become a rescue swimmer. Leaving meant stepping away from a qualification she'd sacrificed heavily to earn. It also meant giving up the structure of a military career without having a fully developed civilian plan waiting. Approximately four days before her expected reenlistment commitment, she decided not to continue.
Military Transition, Wilderness Rescue, Travel, and Finding Personal Freedom
Rebekah left the Navy without a clear civilian career plan. She'd spent years preparing for and performing demanding rescue work, but transitioning out of military service didn't mean those qualifications automatically opened civilian career opportunities. She discovered that her Navy rescue swimmer training didn't directly translate into all the civilian certifications she needed.
For veterans and first responders, that's a familiar challenge. Skills developed through years of training and operational experience don't always fit neatly into another profession's credentialing requirements. Bekah started building additional qualifications.
Within approximately three months of separation, she'd pursued emergency medical training, wilderness medicine, high-angle rescue, swift water rescue, and canyoneering rescue. The work remained connected to her military experience, but she was no longer operating within the Navy's career structure.
Bekah also became interested in ultrarunning. She'd read David Goggins' Never Finished and began exploring the possibility of running extraordinary distances. She'd completed a marathon years earlier and had substantial experience in competitive endurance sports, but ultrarunning presented another level of physical challenge. She began spending time in Colorado, skiing in Aspen and traveling to Moab to run.
Her living arrangements were unconventional. At times, she slept in her vehicle, including during an Aspen winter when temperatures reportedly reached sixteen degrees below zero.
She wasn't pursuing a traditional civilian routine centered on immediately finding a permanent job, commuting to work, and rebuilding the same schedule she'd left behind. She was experimenting with what she wanted her life to look like. That included accepting discomfort when it came with an experience she'd chosen.
There was a difference between enduring difficult conditions because an organization required it and voluntarily sleeping in a vehicle so she could spend more time skiing, running, or exploring.
During her civilian rescue training, Bekah met two outdoor educators from India. They encouraged her to visit, and she eventually bought a one-way ticket. She spent approximately four months traveling in India before continuing to Nepal. There, she undertook a winter Himalayan trek involving three mountain passes, avalanche hazards, and difficult high-altitude conditions. She reached Everest Base Camp and Kala Patthar.
Those places had a connection to interests she'd developed long before her military career. As a child, she'd read about mountains and remote landscapes while living in an environment where even ordinary travel was restricted. Now she was experiencing those environments herself.
Her interest in difficult terrain wasn't simply about reaching a destination. The travel also allowed her to learn from people, navigate unfamiliar circumstances, and spend extended periods outside the routines she'd known.
After her travels in Asia, Bekah pursued an opportunity to work in Alaska. She secured a position involving wilderness guiding and medical responsibilities. The job took her into a remote environment where she lived in a tent for approximately four months. Her work included guiding activities associated with grizzly bears and wilderness river operations.
The living conditions were basic, communications were limited, and the surrounding environment demanded attention. She describes encounters with grizzly bears near camp.
It was another physically demanding experience, but the responsibilities were different. She was using her rescue and medical interests in a civilian setting while spending time in the kind of remote landscape she'd wanted to experience since childhood.
Her travels continued beyond Alaska, including time in the Caribbean and South America. She was building a collection of experiences that didn't follow a conventional career ladder. Learning That Every New Challenge Doesn't Require Starting Over
Rebekah escaped home, established independence, opened a business, competed as an elite athlete, entered the Navy, and fought to earn a rescue swimmer qualification. After leaving military service, she'd pursued more certifications, long-distance running, mountaineering, and international travel.
But she began questioning something about that pattern. Why did moving forward so often involve dismantling what she'd already built? She recognized that she'd repeatedly reached a point where she wanted to change everything and begin again. She also began examining her tendency to organize her life around helping other people.
As a child, she'd been responsible for younger siblings. As an adult, she'd attempted to obtain custody of them. She'd built careers involving physical improvement and rescue. Those experiences were meaningful, but they hadn't always left much room for her own needs. She began considering what it would mean to build a life she genuinely wanted to maintain.
That didn't mean abandoning difficult goals.
Bekah continued training regularly and preparing for the Cocodona 250-mile ultramarathon. The difference was that she was choosing those demands within a lifestyle she'd created for herself.
Bekah also returned to an idea she'd developed many years earlier. At approximately nineteen, she'd created a mixture she continued using through different stages of her life. She used it during athletic training, military service, and wilderness experiences. Her younger sister's difficulties with illness associated with flying helped bring renewed attention to the mixture. Encouragement from others, including an entrepreneur in San Diego, contributed to her decision to commercialize it.
The result was PreFlight, a travel-protection product.
Starting the business gave her another opportunity to apply the independence and initiative she'd developed through earlier careers. It also connected several parts of her experience: physical performance, travel, personal experimentation, and entrepreneurship.
At the same time, she began pursuing formal higher education. Using GI Bill benefits, she enrolled in college to study psychology. For someone who hadn't attended conventional school during childhood and had taught herself to read, attending college represented a different kind of milestone. It was an opportunity to pursue education on her own terms.
Bekah's current living arrangements reflect her changing priorities. She's converted a small shed on her property into a living space of approximately 140 square feet. She rents out two other residences on the property, creating income while keeping her own living expenses and physical footprint relatively small.
She's experienced more conventional living arrangements and relationships, but she doesn't measure success primarily through the size of a house or the amount of property someone owns. She values the ability to make decisions without substantial financial commitments restricting her options.
Her family remains important. Rebekah talks about continuing to occupy something of a maternal role in her siblings' lives. She's also close to nieces and nephews.
Her current understanding of freedom isn't limited to traveling wherever she wants. It also involves deciding which responsibilities to accept, which relationships to maintain, and how much of her time she's willing to exchange for material security or professional status.
She's begun writing about her life experiences, and she acknowledges that her priorities may change as she gets older. For now, she describes having built a life she doesn't feel compelled to abandon for another reinvention.
Rebekah's confidence doesn't depend entirely on professional titles, athletic achievements, or outside approval. She describes it as trust developed through the experiences she's already completed and the decisions she's made. Those experiences remain part of her story.
When she considers the child she once was, she believes that younger version of herself would be proud of the life she's created. Her advice centers on making use of opportunities while they're available, rather than postponing experiences indefinitely.
As she puts it, “You can always make more money. You cannot make up lost time.”
Closing:
Rebekah Myers spent much of her life demonstrating that she could accomplish difficult things. She learned to read without conventional schooling, built a business, became an elite athlete, and earned a Navy rescue swimmer qualification.
But one of the more important changes in her life came when she stopped treating every challenge as something she needed to overcome to prove her worth.
Military service gave her experiences and responsibilities that few civilian careers could reproduce. It also demanded time, autonomy, and physical sacrifices she eventually decided she didn't want to keep making.
Her civilian life hasn't been free of difficulty. She's simply become more deliberate about which difficulties she chooses.
That's a meaningful distinction for anyone approaching military separation, retirement from law enforcement, or a transition out of the fire service.
A career can be important without becoming the only measure of a person's identity.
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