Jefferson County hires ambulance director Brian Thomas

FAIRFIELD — The Jefferson County Board of Supervisors has hired Brian Thomas as the ambulance director when the county takes on ambulance responsibilities Oct. 1.

Thomas is a native of Houston, Texas, and has worked as a medic in the U.S. Air Force, in EMS in the Houston area, and a few years ago was director of operations for CARE Ambulance, the current provider for ambulance service for Jefferson County.

Thomas has been living in North Liberty since last June, and just purchased a house in Fairfield. He said he’s excited to hire a team of paramedics and EMTs this summer, and that he expects his full staff to be ready by mid-September. He said he plans to hire a base manager in the next week or so, and then hire a training officer soon after.

The county owns the former First National Bank building at 1900 W. Burlington Ave., which it purchased just last year. It will house the ambulances and EMS staff there, which will require renovating the south side of the building by adding three garage bays, as well as remodeling the interior to add a kitchen, living quarters, male and female showers, and a washer and dryer room. Thomas said that he expects about 95 percent of the remodeling to be done by Oct. 1.

This is Thomas’s second stint of living in Iowa. He became CARE’s director of operations in 2021, but was only able to stay on the job six months because his mother fell ill and he moved back to the Houston area to take care of her. Though it was a short stint, Thomas was proud of what he and the other CARE employees were able to accomplish, and he made a number of friends here.

Sadly, Thomas’s mother passed away. Thomas and his brother were responsible for taking care of their father in Texas, but Thomas was eager to return to a rural lifestyle. He had just obtained a degree in health science from Purdue University, and wanted to move back to Iowa where he could work while attending Yale University online to become a physician assistant.

“I loved Iowa from the beginning because y’all have four seasons,” Thomas said. “The people are wonderful. I thought Texas hospitality was something special, until I moved up here.”

When Thomas moved back to Iowa last summer, he had visions of opening his own medical practice. To pay the bills, he worked as director of safety for Tama Paperboard in Tama, but the business told him he would need to find a new job because they were going to close their doors. When the Jefferson County Board of Supervisors announced their intention to take on ambulance services, friends of Thomas encouraged him to apply to be the county’s ambulance director.

“I decided that I could make a bigger impact being in charge of a county ambulance service than I would being a [physician assistant] seeing a small number of patients,” Thomas said.

EARLY CAREER AS FLIGHT MEDIC

Thomas was born and raised in a Houston suburb called The Woodlands. He attended summer school so he could graduate early, and immediately joined the U.S. Air Force. He remembers the moment he was inspired to join the military.

“My best friend was an Eagle Scout, and I went to one of his banquets,” Thomas said. “He was in his uniform, and all these people were proud of him. I thought, ‘Man, I think I want to join the military.’”

Thomas was in the Air Force for four years, working as a flight medic. He was part of a pararescue group that jumped out of helicopters into troubled parts of the world that were in crisis. Thomas was dispatched to missions in Latin America and the Middle East, including Kuwait, which was reeling from having been invaded by Iraq in 1990, when Thomas was a senior in high school.

“My heart went out to refugees and people who were fleeing conflicts,” Thomas said. “Kuwait was just devastated after Saddam [Hussein] invaded.”

Thomas said that his experiences as a flight medic made him “grow up fast” because it exposed him to some of the worst suffering he had ever seen. After four years in the Air Force, Thomas returned to the Houston area where he worked on an ambulance rig. He said that, during this time, he developed personal relationships with certain people who were frequently the subject of 911 calls, sometimes for health emergencies.

“We’d go to the same house three or four times a week, and we’d try to give them advice to help them,” Thomas said. “We’d see some people so much that we were on a first-name basis, and we’d build up a rapport. We’d learn how they liked to be transported.”

ENLISTING IN ARMY

By the late 1990s, Thomas was ready for another career change, and he chose to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. He specialized in civilian affairs, which involves cooperating with local leaders in a country to ensure a strong partnership between them and the U.S. After three years in the Marines, Thomas joined the Army because it had a bigger budget with a wider variety of fields.

Thomas was entering the Army in early 2002, just a few months after 9/11, and just after the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan. The following year, Thomas deployed to Iraq to work on civilian affairs and intelligence.

“We were trying to mitigate the effects of war on the populace,” Thomas said. “You go into a village and you identify needs, like clean water or a generator for power.”

As if life as a first-responder in the U.S. was not stressful enough, Thomas’s time in Iraq was even more nerve-wracking. The base where he stayed was attacked routinely, about four times per week. The armored Humvee he rode it was hit a couple of times by improvised explosive devices.

“We got mortared, shot at, blown up and ambushed,” Thomas said. “They would use little remote-controlled cars and put bombs on them, and drive them under our vehicles. I had friends killed over there. We’d have coffee and a cigarette together one morning, and by that afternoon they’d be dead. That was surreal, especially when you train with these guys.”

Thomas’s tour of duty in Iraq was supposed to last one year, but the team that came to replace his team was hit by an IED, which killed one of the interpreters. That meant Thomas and his team had to stay an extra six months until the next team was ready.

When Thomas returned from Iraq, his focus was on “decompressing” from the horrors of war he had witnessed. However, he still wanted to serve his country overseas, so he got a job in the U.S. State Department in private contracting, while remaining enlisted as an Army reservist. He worked for defense intelligence agencies, and served in consulates around the world. He worked in places such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Iraq, where he and his team were responsible for guarding Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki.

After having worked in multiple jobs around the world, Thomas said his main takeaway from his career has been this:

“We have one thing in common when it comes to medicine, and that is we all need care of some sort,” he said.

  Buy Photo

  Buy Photo

  Buy Photo