Thibaut Delloue

Thibaut Delloue is a former naval officer, writer, and advocate for sailors and veterans. His articles and narrative nonfiction have been featured in the publications Task and Purpose, War on the Rocks, the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, and The War Horse. His first book, The Wardroom: An Officer’s Tour at Sea and the Crisis of the US Navy, was released in July of 2022. 

Hailing from the great state of New Hampshire, Thibaut worked as an English teacher abroad and in Boston before his military service. In 2014, he stumbled into a Navy recruiting office and applied for the Navy’s Officer Candidate School; some months later he began training at Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island. After receiving his commission as an officer in the US Navy, Thibaut was assigned to his first ship, the destroyer USS Carney. 

Aboard one of only a handful of US warships deployed in Spain, Thibaut spent most of his two-year tour at sea, sailing across Europe from the English Channel to the eastern Mediterranean. As a surface warfare officer, he led the ship’s communication division and stood watch on the bridge, where he oversaw the ship’s navigation. Among other exploits, Carney’s crew confronted Russian battlecruisers off the coast of Syria and fought ISIS in the Battle of Sirte in Libya. After completing his first tour, Thibaut was assigned as the navigator of the littoral combat ship USS Coronado in San Diego. He completed his active-duty service with the rank of lieutenant in 2020. 

Thibaut began writing The Wardroom to record the many anecdotes of his deployments at sea. As he grappled with the tragic collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain in 2017, in which seventeen sailors lost their lives, he realized a bigger story needed to be told about the culture of the Surface Navy and his own community of surface warfare officers. 

After a brief stint in the Navy Reserve, Thibaut continued his studies at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and currently works as an assistant principal at a charter middle school in Nashville. When not writing, he can usually be found exploring the outdoors of Middle Tennessee or reading on his porch.

Pulling the Crazy Cord- The Warhorse

3 years after the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, the Navy’s surface warfare community shows few signs of change

Lessons for the Navy’s new frigate from the littoral combat ship

Standardize SWO Qual Boards