217. The Trauma of Losing Friends | Army Green Beret Medic to Physicians Assistant (PA)

Joe Stabley

In episode 217 of the Transition Drill Podcast, from the outside, Joe Stabley’s story might look like the path of a warrior turned healer. A retired Army Green Beret medic who went on to become a Physician Assistant. But behind the titles and achievements is a journey shaped by loss, purpose, and the unrelenting pull to serve others. Born in South Korea, raised in Southern California, and hardened by tragedy at a young age, Joe’s life is proof that resilience isn’t built overnight. It’s built through hardship, reflection, and the quiet decision to keep showing up. His story is about more than a military career or medical success. It’s about what happens when trauma and purpose collide, and how one man turned the weight of it all into a mission that continues long after the uniform came off. For veterans and first responders, his journey offers a blueprint for transition, healing, and the courage to move forward.

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Joe Stabley’s story starts long before the Army, long before the uniform or the battlefield medicine that would later define his purpose. He was born in Daegu, South Korea, the son of a Department of Defense civilian and a Filipino immigrant mother. His dad worked as a government manager in the commissary system, one of those behind-the-scenes people who kept the military machine running smoothly. His mom had come to the United States with the same dream so many immigrants carry: to build something better for her family. They moved often, Georgia to Tennessee, chasing opportunity. But when Joe was still a small boy, everything changed. His father got sick.

The illness that took his father’s sight and strength came on early and hard. Diabetes, kidney failure, and the spiral that comes when a man who built his identity on providing can no longer do so. Joe remembers Budweiser cans, the smell of cigarettes, and a man who was angry at the world. It’s not the kind of memory a young son wants to hold onto, but it’s the one that stuck. When his father passed away just after Joe’s fifth birthday, his mother packed up their small family and moved across the country to Southern California, chasing family support and a new start. Rialto became home, and the Inland Empire became the longest place Joe ever lived.

Life wasn’t easy, but it was steady. His mother went back to school, earned her teaching degree, and raised Joe and his sister on a single income. It wasn’t glamorous, but there was food on the table and a roof overhead. Joe learned to respect the kind of resilience that shows up quietly, the strength of a mother who doesn’t complain, just moves forward. Watching her grind through college while juggling two kids gave him his first lesson in perseverance and discipline. He didn’t see it as that at the time, but years later, in war zones and trauma bays, he’d come to realize it was the same mindset that kept him alive.

Still, childhood carried its own chaos. Rialto in the 1980s and 90s wasn’t an easy place to grow up. There were fights, race riots, and the kind of local tension that bleeds into everyday life. He saw how quickly violence could spread and how easily kids could get pulled into it. That exposure to raw conflict left an imprint; it planted the seed of how fragile life really is and how much people need structure and brotherhood to survive it.

There was trauma at home and trauma outside it, but Joe didn’t let that define him. Over the years, through therapy, retreats, and the hard work of reflection, he learned to reframe his story. Instead of letting each bad memory weigh him down, he began to see them as single dark marks on an otherwise bright page. “If all the white on this paper is good and the black marks are the bad,” he once said, “then I’ve had a pretty good life.” That perspective became the foundation of how he lived gratitude over bitterness, lessons over losses.

By the time he reached high school, Joe was restless. He didn’t want to sit still in a classroom. He wanted movement, purpose, and a chance to test himself. The world felt bigger than the Inland Empire, and he wanted to see it. The military wasn’t a dream at first, but it became the path forward. His grandfather, a veteran of three wars, had set the example. His uncles had followed. It seemed like the next logical step for a young man who wanted discipline and direction. His mother, the same woman who’d rebuilt their life after tragedy, signed the papers so he could enlist at 17. Joe didn’t know exactly where the Army would take him, but he knew it was his turn to go earn something on his own.

When Joe left Rialto at seventeen, he wasn’t just leaving home. He was leaving behind the uncertainty that had shaped so much of his early life. He’d grown up fast, carrying lessons from hardship that most kids his age couldn’t understand. Two weeks after high school graduation in 1998, while his classmates were still planning beach trips and college dorms, Joe was on a bus to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, beginning Army basic training. He didn’t want to sit around another summer waiting for life to happen. He wanted it to start.

Basic hit him like a wall. For a kid who’d craved movement and structure, the first few days were a shock. He expected chaos and yelling, but the waiting, the stillness, was the hardest part. They sat around in reception, reading the same small handbook for hours, waiting to be told what came next. That downtime forced him to think about home, his girlfriend, his mom, and all the reasons he’d joined. He learned early that stagnation was dangerous for him. When life stopped moving, his mind started spinning. That lesson stuck with him far beyond those first few days in uniform.

Once the real training began, it gave him what he’d been looking for: purpose through motion. Every run, every ruck, every push-up was a test of endurance and will. The Army’s discipline wasn’t something to fear; it was something that made sense. After graduation, Joe headed to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for medic training. The Army had promised him a job that combined his interest in medicine with his desire to help people. He’d originally wanted to be a firefighter, but the medic route felt right. It was action and service rolled into one.

Medic school was demanding, mentally and physically. The classroom grind was relentless, and for the first time, Joe found himself leaning on caffeine to stay focused. But when the lessons moved from books to hands-on training, everything clicked. Giving shots, working trauma scenarios, practicing lifesaving interventions, this was where he felt alive. He earned his EMT certification, one of the few in his class to test out early, and he started to realize he might have found something that wasn’t just a job. It was a calling.

His first assignment took him to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He didn’t know what to expect, but the moment he stepped into an infantry battalion, the identity of “Doc” became his own. Those soldiers weren’t just patients; they were brothers. He found in them the male mentorship he’d craved his whole life. They teased him, pushed him, and respected him. When they called him “Doc,” it meant trust. It meant he had a role that mattered. The long days in the field, the nights sleeping in the cold, the endless training, none of it felt like punishment. It felt like belonging.

That sense of brotherhood carried him overseas for the first time. Assigned to a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Peninsula, Joe got his first taste of the world outside the small corners he’d known. He spent weeks on remote outposts near the Gulf of Aqaba, surrounded by desert mountains that carried the weight of biblical history. It was beautiful and isolating at the same time. The rhythm of work was simple — patrols, training, maintenance, and downtime filled with laughter and alcohol. The camaraderie was everything. But that trip would also mark the moment when the innocence of service ended for him.

He’d been trained to save lives, but in Egypt, he faced the brutal truth of what that really meant. When a fellow soldier, Specialist Jason Curry, took his own life, Joe was the first medic on scene. The memory of that drive across the desert, racing toward a brother in crisis, would never leave him. It was his first encounter with trauma on a level that reached far beyond medicine. It was the moment that redefined what “Doc” truly meant, and it would shape the course of his entire career.

The Sinai was supposed to be an easy deployment. It was a peacekeeping mission, not a combat zone. For a nineteen-year-old medic, it felt like an adventure. Joe was living by the water on the Gulf of Aqaba, surrounded by rugged desert mountains, ancient history, and a tight group of young soldiers who had quickly become family. They trained, stood guard, and when duty was done, they partied. It was the late 1990s, before social media, before smartphones. The world still felt big and disconnected, and in that isolation, the brotherhood became everything.

In that small slice of the Middle East, Joe found a sense of belonging he had never felt before. The men around him were more than coworkers. They were brothers. They trusted him with their lives, and he took that seriously. When someone called “Doc,” he ran. It wasn’t just a job; it was identity. But what he didn’t realize was that his role would soon force him to confront a kind of trauma that no training could prepare him for.

One day, word spread fast across their remote site. Specialist Jason Currie, one of Joe’s closest friends, had shot himself. At first, it didn’t register. Currie was one of the top gunners in the platoon, the kind of soldier who lifted others up. Everyone thought it had to be a mistake, a weapon accident. But when the radio traffic came again, the message was clear. It wasn’t an accident. Joe’s instincts took over. He grabbed his aid bag, climbed into the medic van with another soldier, and they tore across the desert, driving faster than he thought possible. It was supposed to take forty-five minutes, but they made it in thirty.

By the time he arrived, the squad had already done what they could. Currie was still breathing, but barely. Joe saw his brothers covered in blood, desperately performing mouth-to-mouth, using their hands to clear his airway. The scene was chaos. Training kicked in. Joe pushed aside fear and emotion and went straight to work. He suctioned blood from Curry’s mouth, began rescue breathing, and focused on every detail he could control. In those moments, he wasn’t thinking about life or death. He was just fighting the clock, doing what he’d been trained to do.

When the medevac helicopter finally arrived, Joe’s supervising PA took over. He watched as the officer tried to intubate through a bloody airway, then performed a field cricothyrotomy, something Joe hadn’t yet learned to do. The helicopter lifted off toward Israel. Currie never made it.

That day split Joe’s life into two parts: before and after. Before, being a medic was exciting. After, it was a burden he carried with purpose. The guilt hit hard. He questioned everything. Could he have done more? Should he have gotten there sooner? It didn’t matter that his leaders told him he’d done everything right. He couldn’t stop replaying the scene. It was his first brush with the deep emotional weight that trauma medicine carries.

He started to see that serving as a medic wasn’t just about saving lives, it was about carrying the cost when you couldn’t. The experience planted a seed that would grow over the next two decades. It made him obsessed with being better, learning more, and never again feeling unprepared. It also became the start of a pattern that many veterans and first responders would recognize later in life, pushing through pain by focusing on performance.

When the deployment ended and they returned home, Joe carried the memory of Currie with him. He didn’t talk about it much. Back then, conversations about mental health weren’t part of the culture. You sucked it up, kept moving, and buried the feelings deep. For Joe, that silence became fuel. It turned into a promise that if he ever had the chance to train others, he’d make sure no medic felt helpless the way he once did. That tragedy became the foundation of his lifelong mission: to serve, to heal, and to teach others how to do the same.

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After returning from the Sinai, Joe knew he wasn’t the same. The loss of Specialist Curry had left a mark, but it also created purpose. He wanted to be better, stronger, and more capable of handling anything that came his way. That drive guided every decision from that point forward. When his time with the 101st Airborne Division ended, he chased the next challenge, looking for the next level of mastery in trauma medicine and soldiering.

His next assignment took him to Fort Irwin, California, where he served as a flight medic supporting training operations. It was different from the infantry life he had known, but it gave him perspective. Working from the air meant seeing the broader picture, understanding how logistics, communication, and teamwork all came together to save lives. Still, he missed the tight-knit bond of small-unit life. Flying over training ranges wasn’t enough. He wanted to be closer to the fight, to use everything he’d learned on real missions, not just exercises.

The turning point came during a deployment to Kosovo around Christmas. Joe found himself working alongside soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group, and something about them stood out immediately. Their professionalism, calm under pressure, and quiet competence were different from anything he had seen. These weren’t ordinary soldiers. They were experts, thinkers, and operators who blended precision with purpose. Watching them in action sparked something inside him. He wanted to be one of them.

By the early 2000s, Special Forces had become a magnet for soldiers seeking the hardest, most meaningful work. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ramping up, and Special Forces medics were at the forefront of modern battlefield medicine. For Joe, joining that community meant more than prestige. It was redemption. It was his way to make sure no soldier he served with ever faced the same outcome he’d witnessed in Egypt.

He put in for Special Forces Assessment and Selection, knowing full well that the physical challenge was only half the battle. Selection wasn’t just about strength; it was about mental endurance, teamwork, and humility. The process broke a lot of people. It was designed to. Joe leaned on what had carried him through every hardship before: the ability to keep moving forward. He’d learned from his mom’s resilience and his own experiences that quitting wasn’t an option. When the pressure mounted, he reminded himself why he was there. It wasn’t about glory; it was about service.

Joe made it through selection and began the long grind of the Q-Course. The Special Forces Medical Sergeant pipeline was one of the most demanding in the military. It covered everything from trauma surgery and pharmacology to prolonged field care and clinical medicine. It wasn’t enough to stop bleeding or start an IV. Green Beret medics learned to perform amputations, deliver babies, treat infections, and even run a small clinic in the middle of nowhere. It was medicine stripped down to its essential knowledge, skill, and adaptability.

Joe’s language assignment was Arabic, a skill that would later serve him well in deployments to the Middle East. Once qualified, he joined the 10th Special Forces Group and eventually earned a slot on a military free-fall team. Jumping from planes at high altitude was both a rush and a test of trust. Every jump demanded precision, calm, and awareness. It wasn’t just about the fall; it was about knowing that the men around you depended on your composure when things went wrong.

On the team, Joe found the brotherhood he had been searching for his entire career. These were men who didn’t have to talk about loyalty or trust because they lived it every day. The stakes were higher, the missions riskier, and the responsibility heavier. He wasn’t just “Doc” anymore; he was an operator and a medic, expected to fight and save lives in the same breath. The line between warrior and healer blurred, and he learned to carry both identities at once.

Still, the emotional cost of the job never went away. The trauma of what he’d seen as a young medic lived just below the surface, resurfacing during quiet moments after missions. But instead of letting it consume him, Joe used it as fuel. Every patient he treated, every soldier he helped train, every life he touched became part of a personal promise that he would always be the medic ready when it mattered most.

After years in the Special Forces community, Joe had built a career that most soldiers could only imagine. He had trained in some of the toughest schools, jumped from planes at night, and worked medicine in environments where mistakes cost lives. But even with the pride that came from wearing the Green Beret, he knew there was more ahead. The body can only take so much, and the tempo of combat rotations eventually forces everyone to think about what comes next. For Joe, that next mission wasn’t about stepping away from medicine; it was about taking it to a higher level.

He decided to apply for the Interservice Physician Assistant Program, or IPAP, a joint military and university partnership that trained service members to become certified Physician Assistants. It was one of the most competitive programs in the military, but Joe’s years of experience as a medic and his drive to keep learning gave him an edge. When he got the acceptance notification, he knew his life was about to change again. This time, the battlefield would be replaced by the classroom.

PA school was no break. The twenty-nine-month program pushed him harder than anything before. The academic side was intense, lectures, anatomy labs, pharmacology, and rotations that demanded long hours and mental stamina. The partnership with the University of Nebraska Medical Center gave the program a civilian accreditation, which meant the standards were high. Joe wasn’t just learning how to be a better medic. He was learning to think like a clinician. The shift from trauma care to long-term patient management challenged him in new ways. He wasn’t patching up gunshot wounds or stabilizing hemorrhages anymore. He was diagnosing chronic illness, learning to balance empathy with science, and adjusting to the civilian side of medicine, where the pace was slower but the responsibility was just as heavy.

After graduation and national certification, Joe transitioned into civilian healthcare. His first major job was in an emergency room in Orange County, where he quickly realized that the high-stress environment felt strangely familiar. The ER had its own kind of chaos. It didn’t smell like the desert or sound like the battlefield, but it carried the same urgency. People looked to him for answers, and he thrived under that pressure. Over time, he moved between ER and primary care roles, gaining a wider perspective on medicine and on people.

Still, even as a PA, the weight of trauma medicine lingered. Years of exposure to death, suffering, and human pain had left invisible scars. He began to notice the emotional fatigue that many in his profession face, what the medical community now calls compassion fatigue. The work was meaningful, but it could also be draining. The burden of responsibility, the paperwork, the constant stream of patients, and the lack of closure wore him down. The same traits that made him a great medic, focus, control, and relentless drive, also made it hard to slow down.

Through those years, Joe began to understand that healing others was tied to learning how to heal himself. He engaged in therapy, trauma retreats, and veteran support programs, where he started to unpack the cumulative toll of two decades of service and medicine. The conversations he once avoided about loss, mental health, and guilt became part of his story. He didn’t want pity or praise. What he wanted was clarity. He realized that the same skills that made him a good clinician, awareness, adaptability, and composure under stress, were the same tools he could use to rebuild his own sense of peace.

Becoming a PA wasn’t just a career move; it was a continuation of his mission. He was still serving, just in a different uniform. Every time he treated a patient, whether in a trauma bay or a clinic, he saw a reflection of the same human fragility he’d witnessed on the battlefield. He carried the lessons of every soldier, every patient, and every loss with him. The oath to care didn’t end with the Army; it simply evolved.

After twenty-three years of service, countless missions, and a lifetime of medicine, Joe Stabley reached a point where the uniform came off, but the mission didn’t end. Retirement wasn’t the finish line. It was another beginning, and like every phase before it, it demanded preparation, humility, and purpose. The difference this time was that the challenge wasn’t physical. It was internal. Leaving the structure, brotherhood, and adrenaline of service is something every veteran and first responder eventually faces. Joe had seen too many people stumble in that space. He didn’t want to be one of them.

What helped him most was the same concept that had carried him through every phase of his career — the buddy team. In the Army, the buddy system isn’t just a rule. It’s a way of life. It means you don’t move alone, you don’t suffer alone, and you don’t let anyone fall behind. Joe believes that transition works the same way. It can’t be a solo effort. Too many people treat leaving the military like shutting a door and walking away from everything they’ve built. In reality, it should be a continuation of the same teamwork that made them successful in uniform.

Joe often talks about how transition should start small and personal. It begins with conversations between two people who trust each other enough to be honest. Maybe that’s a friend, a spouse, or a mentor. The point is to build from the bottom up, not the top down. “If we wait for programs or agencies to fix everything for us, we’ll be waiting forever,” he says. “It has to start between teammates, at the lowest level.” That mindset echoes through his work today, both in healthcare and in his mentorship of other veterans and first responders.

He encourages people to build what he calls a “transition team.” It’s a mix of trusted friends, family members, and mentors who can hold you accountable, spot warning signs, and help you navigate the emotional shifts that come with leaving service. They’re the people who can look at you and say, “Hey, something’s off,” or “You’re not yourself lately.” Joe’s honest enough to admit that he’s needed those check-ins too. The long years in trauma medicine, the weight of seeing lives lost, and the constant demand to stay composed all took their toll. Recognizing that didn’t make him weak. It made him human.

Joe’s conversations with veterans and first responders now focus less on war stories and more on balance. He talks about how trauma doesn’t define you, but ignoring it can. He talks about gratitude, not as a buzzword, but as a daily practice that keeps your perspective grounded. He shares how focusing on one task at a time, rather than the overwhelming big picture, can make the transition process manageable. “It’s just a puzzle,” he says. “You don’t put it together all at once. You handle one piece at a time.”

Through his work as a Physician Assistant and his ongoing involvement with veteran outreach, Joe continues to serve the same way he always has, by taking care of people. He’s learned that the best medicine isn’t always a prescription or a procedure. Sometimes it’s a conversation, a moment of connection, or the courage to admit you’re struggling. His own life stands as proof that resilience isn’t about avoiding pain. It’s about building forward through it.

Closing

Today, when Joe reflects on his career from the chaos of Egypt to the precision of the operating room, he sees a full circle. The scared nineteen-year-old kid who raced across the desert to save a brother became the seasoned professional who now helps others find their footing after service. The trauma didn’t break him; it became the foundation for his empathy and strength. For veterans and first responders standing on the edge of their own transition, Joe’s message is clear: don’t go it alone. Build your team, lean into your purpose, and keep moving forward. The mission isn’t over, it’s just different.

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