School of Medicine alumnus on front line of war on terror

Second-generation UM Grad

Joined Navy at 34
   

tudents with their eyes on a medical education sometimes see the U.S. armed forces as a way to exchange a couple of years of time for expensive tuition. Navy Commander Thomas R. Flipse, M.D., class of ’85, saw things the other way around.

“It’s sort of a sense of obligation and a patriotic duty,” says Flipse.

“I tell everybody he bleeds red, white, and blue,” says his mother, Ann R. Flipse, M.D., director of the School of Medicine’s Office of Teaching and Learning.

“It’s something people sort of smile at but it’s true,” says Thomas Flipse, who was home from service in the Persian Gulf region on a brief leave in November. “And whenever something goes wrong in the world, the Navy’s the first to respond.”

Flipse, the son of Thomas E. Flipse, class of ’57, was eight years beyond medical school and 34 years old when he joined. But he still had to explain it to his mom.

“This envelope arrived from the U.S. Department of the Navy,” she recalls. “I called him up and asked if there was something he forgot to tell me. There was this long, bad pause.”

“I was trying to figure out what scandal it was,” he remembers. “Had I forgotten Mother’s Day or something?”

Says Ann Flipse, “I actually thought that if I lived long enough I would simply become good friends with my children.I’m now on my 161st year, cumulative, of worrying.”

Thomas Flipse joined the U.S. Navy as a reservist in 1993, but being a reservist doesn’t mean what it did a year ago. He couldn’t share all the details about his deployment, but he is a flight surgeon for a combat helicopter squadron. He has three certifications in the Navy: aviation medicine, cardiovascular disease, and internal medicine. He’s responsible for the general health and readiness of the whole squadron. While he wouldn’t share an exact count, most squadrons number around 200people—but they vary.

He has met several physicians in Kuwait and Iraq who went through the military training program at Ryder Trauma Center. In civilian life, which was put on hold in April, Thomas Flipse is a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.

Despite the occasional heartache, Ann Flipse is proud. “I pinned on his wings and it was an honor to do that. I understand why he did it and I’m proud of him. That doesn’t mean that I don’t worry about him.”

Until this past year, Thomas Flipse only missed Christmas at home twice—the first time as a medical resident, the second when he was on-call at Mayo. He left for Iraq just before Christmas, the same day Saddam Hussein was captured. “There are several hundred thousand people over there so it seems unfair for me to get any extra attention,” Flipse says with characteristic humility. “I’m just another guy there.”