Jim Thomas

A proud veteran wearing many hats

If a person in North Big Horn County happens to attend a program on the American Flag, the Constitution or military history -- or a Memorial Day or Veterans program, chances are, he or she would find Jim Thomas front and center with his wealth of knowledge.

Though carrying the title of chaplain for Robert Boyd Stewart American Legion Post 11, Thomas also acts as the post historian or educator, and he enjoys providing information on patriotism, the flag and other topics.

A veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, Thomas enjoyed a long career in the medical field and through participation in the American Legion and the Boy Scouts of America, he developed a love of teaching.

Though a 1971 graduate of Burlington High School, Thomas could call numerous places home since his father was a school administrator and the family moved from time to time with his father Ivan’s career.

“I was in a different school every year from the time I was in the fifth grade,” he said, noting that his mother, Arthea, worked in special education.

An all-state basketball player for the Huskies, Thomas received a scholarship to play basketball at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, but as he started practice for his freshman year late in the fall of ’71, he received word that he had an extremely low draft number.

“I got my wonderful notice that said, ‘Dear Jim, your draft number is 13,’” he recalled. “Of course, we were in Vietnam big time at that time, and matter of fact, the Tet Offensive had already started, and that’s where my military history kind of took off on its own.”

Not wanting to be drafted, Thomas instead enlisted in the Coast Guard, which he thought would be rewarding and, indeed, turned out to be.

“I checked around and at all the recruiting offices,” he said. “I took their entry exams and actually qualified quite well. So I kind of had my choice from the Navy or the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard sounded more fun than anything, so I went into the Coast Guard (in January of 1972).”

During basic training at Alameda, California, Thomas received the Best Shipmate Award, which meant a lot to him because it was voted on by the members of his company. Most of his company shipped off to Vietnam, but three members of the company qualified for advanced schooling, and Thomas was one of them. He went to aircraft structural mechanic school in Millington, Tennessee.

Asked how aircraft factor into Coast Guard training, he said the Coast Guard ran search and rescue operations using the Lockheed C-130 for long-range missions and the Grumman Albatross for shorter missions. Thomas’ MOS (military occupational specialty) was sheet metal and hydraulics repair on the aircraft, but after he was stationed in Port Angeles, Washington, he moved into helicopters and went for more schooling in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

During this time, about the time he moved to Port Angeles near the end of 1972, he also married Marie Neves of Burlington, who he had met in high school.

While in Port Angeles, his career took on a new dimension when he got into medicine and teaching.

“I had never had any desire to look at anything in medicine, but especially with being a crewman on the helicopter, I was placed in a position where we had to do first aid. And while I was stationed at Port Angeles, I did not only that but got my paramedic training.

“At that time, the base doctor there at Port Angeles was really interested in pushing medicine going out to the patients instead of just picking them up and bringing them back. He wanted something done between the time we picked them up and the time we delivered them to the hospital.

“And so that kind of opened up the realm, and I ended up getting to the point where we actually taught an EMT class in the northern part of the 13th Coast Guard District. We taught the EMT class to all airborne enlisted, the guys that were flying it and that were sailing in the motor lifeboats. And so, besides doing my work out at the base, periodically I’d be teaching a class for EMTs.”

So successful was Thomas during his career out of Port Angeles, he received the Pritchard Award as the highest achieving enlisted man in the 13th Coast Guard District, which included Washington, Oregon and “a big chunk” of California, he said. He also received several other accommodations for rescue work, including the Sikorsky Award for his helicopter work.

One time he was part of a mission to check on a crew from the famous French oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, whose boat had broken down in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Coast Guard crew was OK and essentially told the responders “We’re fine. Go away (with a French expletive).”

He also noted that pilots who transported patients to Seattle like to make a pass or two around the Space Needle, no doubt to the delight of tourists inside.

After one mission he spent three days in quarantine because he had to perform CPR (and mouth to mouth) on an unconscious member of a commercial vessel crew who was thought to have the bubonic plague. Fortunately for Thomas, he didn’t.

Thomas stayed in the Coast Guard until 1978 when a potential new duty station would have taken him away from his young family, now with two young children at home. He expressed interest in serving on icebreakers, and if he had been assigned to a duty station in the Great Lakes Region, he would have been home most nights, but if he was offered a post on the South Wind, which sailed far south to nearly Antarctica, he could be gone for 18 months at a time. He had achieved second class petty officer status as an E5 and decided to call it a career.

“Marie was not excited about living alone, so I said, ‘Yes, Dear,’” he joked.

Medical career

Thomas and his family returned to Wyoming, and he attempted to enroll in the University of Wyoming nursing program but was not accepted, he said, noting that the director of the program didn’t believe in training male nurses. But as he put it, he had been bitten by the medical bug and stayed at the university, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in medical technology in 1980, which led to lab work.

Thomas started his career in the lab at North Big Horn Hospital, then moved to Johnson County Hospital in Buffalo. Though he enjoyed lab work, his true love was patient care, so he left Buffalo and enrolled in the Northwest College nursing program, earning a degree as a registered nurse in the mid-1980s.

He worked at the long-term care facility in Powell, then at South Big Horn County Hospital in emergency room care, then becoming director of nursing. He then shifted gears and went to work for the State of Wyoming as a healthcare surveyor, visiting hospitals and nursing homes to make sure they were in compliance with the Centers for Disease Control to receive Medicare benefits. He also investigated complaints when necessary. He retired in 2023, he said.

Having moved to Lovell in 1980, Thomas has served his community in many capacities. He was the ambulance director at North Big Horn Hospital for a time and served as an intermediate EMT, an EMT with advanced skills.

Thomas also started volunteer work with the North Big Horn Search and Rescue squad, having also worked search and rescue in Laramie and Buffalo. He is currently the training officer for the North Big Horn SAR unit.

Perhaps his most memorable mission of his career took place when trying to rescue an injured snowmobiler during a major snowstorm on the Big Horns. He was taking a rescue sled to the victim in Hannan’s Coulee who he said was “busted up pretty good.”

“It was the worst snowstorm I have seen in a long time,” he said. “And so we started in in the middle of the night, during a raging blizzard, no visibility whatsoever. And so I was dragging the rescue sled, and when we got down into the timber, the trail became not really navigable with a rig that long.”

He turned a corner and was met by a tree limb, which struck his arm, damaging a nerve.

“I kept trying to go, but it didn’t work out,” he said. “Wes (Mangus) and I talked it over on the radio, and he said, ‘Well, we need your sled. How do you feel about just staying there?,’ which was fine. I’ve had quite a bit of wilderness survival stuff. So I got myself in out of the weather and was actually fairly comfortable and stayed there while the rest of the rescue was going on. They finally found the guy, so one of the other guys came back with his machine and picked me up and took me down.”

In great pain, Thomas was given morphine and spent the night with the rest of the crew on the mountain, gathering around a fire. And when the weather cleared the next morning, a helicopter picked up both the injured snowmobiler and Thomas, dropping Thomas off at the base camp.

American Legion

A longtime member of the American Legion, Thomas was pleased when Rich Fink reorganized and rejuvenated Post 11 several years ago. The post has been holding regular meetings ever since, along with programs like the June 14 (Flag Day) American flag retirement ceremony, the recent program on the Constitution and the traditional Veterans Day and Memorial Day services, plus military honors for fallen veterans.

As chaplain, Thomas plays a major role in programs and ceremonies, but he’s also, in essence, a historian and educator.

“I love the teaching part,” he said.

Though active, the Post 11 membership is aging, and Thomas would love to see younger veterans step up to become members, from those deployed to the Middle East to members of the Wyoming National Guard. He believes the general lack of participation goes back to the days when Vietnam veterans were oftentimes scorned when they returned from the war.

Proud patriot

Thomas said his sense of pride in America and his patriotism actually predate his enlistment in the Coast Guard as he bristled at the way returning veterans were being treated and college students – even at Westminster – were demeaning to their country.

“Today I still have that cringing emotion when people start talking about the Constitution, that it has to be changed,” he said. “It’s outdated. It’s worthless. Well, really it’s not. I find frustration with politics that play games. I mean, we’re in the middle of it right now with the government shutdown.”

Thomas said he hated history in high school but now loves reading about and studying American history from the Constitutional Convention to various wars. I look back and see the Constitutional Convention, what those guys actually went through and what they did to come up with a compromise that worked for everybody. OK, maybe it wasn’t perfect, and no, people didn’t get what they wanted in entirety, but they worked together so that everybody benefited from it, and then we go through the history of the Civil War, World War One, World War Two. You see how it was important enough for those men and women to go into active combat.”

And then there was Vietnam.

“Vietnam was a totally different war,” Thomas said. “It was a sad war where, with the technology, they brought the war right into people’s living room, and so they could see it, and it was terrible, and yet they don’t recognize that it was terrible before. I’ve spent some time with a couple three veterans that were at the Battle of the Bulge. They won’t talk about it. That’s how bad it was. And yet they did it. They gave what was necessary so that the United States could continue to be the United States.

“Vietnam was a little bit different. We were trying to provide freedom for a different group of people. It wasn’t the U.S. that was being attacked until we stepped in to try to protect the others, but the news just brought it in.”

Thomas also served as a leader with the Boy Scouts for many years, providing training for adults and youths alike, and has been an active spelunker.

Jim and Marie Thomas have raised nine children: Jason, William, Scott, Timothy, the late Jennifer and her children Kirk, Paige and Jacob, raised by Jim and Marie after her murder in Texas 16 years ago, which also claimed the life of her unborn baby, Gwen. They also have 28 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.