Patrick Thibeault

Patrick Thibeault sat down with me for Heroes Live. Tibo. Combat medic. Paratrooper.

Military brat. Father was a command sergeant major. Maine. Bragg as a kid. High school in Seoul, class of eighty-nine. Commissary. Bakery. The Olympics. The DMZ. He already knew what the uniform cost.

He watched men jump and said that looks like fun. Then he dreamed he was a medic with no medical background at all. El Paso. Thirty-four foot tower. Balance gone. He studied and passed anyway.

82nd. Combat medic. A mission they declassified years later. Afghanistan, 2004 and 2005. He came home to civilian RN work and the screaming in the rooms was too much like the screaming in the bird.

160th. Night Stalkers. One of the few medics with jump wings. Panama. A soldier went down in a swamp. He swam. He called the bird. He kept a man on a ventilator across a country. That one lived.

He worked amputations in the back of a helicopter. Morphine. Shock. Then VA end-of-life. He said he saw more dying as a nurse than he did as a medic.

Northwest Indiana now. Wife. A four-year-old. Gardening. A fifty-cal. He wrote a book about being a combat medic so he could close it. Christ-centered. Dignity. His spiritual calling is taking care of other veterans.

The parachute is a means of delivery to battle. That is all it is. Thank you, Patrick. That is why we hit record. Get the story on tape before we are too old or too sick to tell it.