John Sharbel is a name to remember, respect and treasure. Plain and simple, he’s a hero. Yep, he’s an Our Town Hero for sure and an Our World Hero, too. From Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains to the lands of Afghanistan and beyond, this man has helped save countless lives in a variety of ways.

John Sharbel

Sharbel is 42, a full-time paramedic and firefighter today, working out of the Knoxville Fire Dept.’s (KFD) Station 20 at West Hills. That’s one job. There are others. Father to three young sons. Husband to his wife, Farragut veterinarian Dr. Laura Sharbel, at the Village Veterinary Center.

But when he’s off his KFD shifts, he could be anywhere – literally.

Let’s get into those other jobs of today and yesteryear:

  • In 2010 he joined the Tennessee Army National Guard (TANG) as a flight paramedic and has been there for almost 15 years. He is an E-7 platoon sergeant for the UH-60 Medevac Blackhawk helicopter unit at Joint Base McGhee-Tyson Airport. The 20-chopper unit responds to natural disasters, wildfires, humanitarian relief efforts and combat/conflict zones, wherever they are needed. In 2012 his unit spent 10 months in the Helmand province of Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. His unit flew 750 missions and he was on many of them, rescuing injured U.S. Marines, U.S. Army personnel, members of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and Afghan civilians. He’s also been deployed to Kosovo and Serbia.
  • For 8½ years he’s been what he calls “a ground pounder” for the elite Search and Rescue Team that assists the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. He also spent five years working full-time as a backcountry paramedic for the park service.
  • In 2016 he joined Team BUSAR as a search and rescue technician with its founder, Andrew Herrington. He’s an assistant team leader now. BUSAR is an acronym for Backcountry Search & Rescue team and its 20 members. It also assists with rescues in the Smokies and elsewhere.
  • Beginning in 2008 he worked as a paramedic for eight years for Rural Metro Ambulance.
  • He worked for six months as a paramedic in the University of Tennessee Medical Center’s Level 1 trauma emergency room.
  • He and his wife moved to California for three years in 2003, first to Tehachapi near Bakersfield and then south San Diego. They worked for a year on three ranches covering a combined 75,000 acres. John was a cowboy, busy branding cattle, repairing broken fences and water lines and making sure the cows were fed. Laura also was a ranch hand and pulled some vet duty, too.

He is a native Knoxvillian, reared in the Cedar Bluff area of west Knoxville. Sharbel is a 2000 graduate of Catholic High School where he played football and basketball and, no surprise here, was in the school’s Climbing Club. Laura also is a Catholic grad where they met. Today, they and their boys Atticus, 10; Wyatt, 9; and Logan, 6; live in Maryville near where he loves to hike in the Great Smokies.

During his cowboy days he worked alongside a retired firefighter who put the bug in his ear. “He got me to thinking about firefighting and I never forgot that. He was an old-school type dude and I listened to his great stories. That was the start.”

Eventually he and Laura returned home. In 2008 he took the ambulance job and after eight years, he left AMR Rural Metro to begin working for the National Park Service.

“It was great in the park. I basically hiked for a living as a back country paramedic, but I always worked weekends and got no summers off due to the crowds visiting the park and my hours were usually 3 p.m. to after midnight,” he recalled. “Then the kids started arriving and I was missing too much of being with them.” That led him to KFD and he joined its team in 2021.

He refers to his KPD work “as normal everyday stuff. We mostly save people who are overdosing. Occasionally I bring a person in cardiac arrest back from the dead. The bad car wrecks happen all the time and we stabilize them on the side of the road and get them in an ambulance and send them on their merry way.”

Sharbel says his most difficult rescue in the Smokies involved a 14-year-old girl who fell backwards off Fern Branch Falls in the park’s Greenbrier area in 2019. “She landed on a rock ledge halfway down the falls and she was pretty badly injured,” he remembers. “It quickly turned into a very technical rescue to get to her and rig the ropes and everything we needed to lift her out. She was with her parents and a brother and lost her balance and fell.”

It took Sharbel and 14 others to complete the rescue. “Once we had her stabilized and got her off the falls, we had to hike out carrying her two miles to the UT Lifestar helicopter LZ (landing zone). But she survived and the last I heard she was a college soccer player. You never forget a rescue like that one.”

He’s lost count of the number of extractions he’s been involved in the TANG in the Smokies. Sharbel recently spent a number of days responding to the Hurricane Helene devastation in the Unicoi and Elizabethton areas. “I was not with the Blackhawks on the first day when they were snatching people off hospitals and buildings, but came in later to begin delivering supplies to those affected by the storm.”

In 2018 his Medevac Blackhawk unit was in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence and extracted a number of people off the roofs of their houses due to flooding. “And at one point I had 27 dogs in the back of the helicopter that we helped rescue from the rising flood waters,” he said. “What an experience!”

He was part of a KFD flood response team sent to South Carolina this past August after Hurricane Debby. “I have also deployed around the state and region for firefighting water-bucket drop operations with the Blackhawks, including during the wildfires of 2016 that devastated Sevier County and surrounding areas.”

The “why” of his life is reason enough to treasure him: “It’s fun. I’m fortunate to be doing some cool stuff and that’s a big component of it. I can’t sit still. No offices or computers for me. I’m drawn to these jobs. I’ll never get wealthy doing this and I’ve really never given much of a damn about money. Just enough to have a roof over my family’s heads and food in the fridge.”

Here’s how he earns our respect: “I feel obligated to be there and help others. And I’ve always been good at this. I keep a very cool head in stressful situations. I do put my life in somewhat dangerous places but in situations I can control.”

Tom King has been the editor of newspapers in Texas and California and also worked in Tennessee and Georgia. If you have someone you think we should consider featuring as an Our Town Hero, please email him at the link with his name or text him at 865-659-3562.