Paratrooper ‘to his core’: Army vet who helped get injured reporter out of Ukraine dies at 50

A retired Army paratrooper who served in two wars and in civilian life assisted in evacuating a gravely wounded reporter in Ukraine has died after a battle with cancer.

The phrase “send me” defined Sean Michael Lee’s military career and his life afterward, according to an obituary for the 50-year-old native of New Canaan, Conn., who died Sunday after a reported battle with esophageal cancer linked to burn pit exposure.

Lee spent more than 20 years in the Army and deployed several times to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, his obituary says. He also served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy.

“He was, to his core, a paratrooper,” it says. “Long after he took off the uniform, the values forged there remained the organizing principles of his daily life: duty, loyalty, competence under pressure, and an unwavering commitment to the person behind him.”

After taking part in the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 and spending the first year of the war in Iraq, he returned to the country two years later to provide security for its first democratic elections, local online news outlet Patch reported in August 2012, as Lee was slated to return home from an Afghanistan deployment.

Sean Michael Lee, then an Army paratrooper, in Baghdad in an undated photo. Lee, a 20-year Army veteran and member of the 82nd Airborne Division, died Sunday after a battle with esophageal cancer. (U.S. Department of Defense)

In the years after his military service ended, Lee continued to go where others needed help, including as part of the nonprofit Independence Fund, which helps provide wounded veterans with services and support.

“His entire life was in service to others,” Steven Rozina, chief operating officer of Independence Fund, said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “Up until the very end, Sean was always thinking of others.”

Amid the chaos of the Taliban’s recapture of Kabul in 2021 as the Afghan government collapsed ahead of the U.S. withdrawal, Lee joined the nonprofit Save Our Allies in helping coordinate the evacuation of Afghan partners and others desperate to escape the country.

In early 2022, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Lee went to Poland and helped set up field hospitals.

After a Russian attack killed two Fox News journalists and wounded reporter Benjamin Hall near Kyiv in March of that year, Lee helped coordinate efforts to evacuate Hall to the Polish border and on to Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany.

“He saved my life, and so many others, and is everything that a hero should be,” Hall wrote on X in response to the news of Lee’s death. “Thank you for getting me home to my family and my daughters. We will never forget.”

Lee answered the call again in 2024. After Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina, he rushed to the disaster zone and slept in his car while helping deliver aid and needed supplies to help struggling communities rebuild.

“Again and again, when circumstances were dangerous, chaotic, uncomfortable, or seemingly impossible, Sean went,” the obituary says. “That was the pattern of his life.”

While others came and went, Lee “never stopped” and just kept helping, sleeping in a tent so he could continue supporting communities ravaged by the storm, the nonprofit HunterSeven Foundation wrote in an Instagram post this week.

The foundation, which is focused on combating cancer, learned about Lee’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis earlier this year, after Save Our Allies founder and Independence Fund chief executive Sarah Verardo asked for a review of Lee’s medical reports.

The obituary lists Verardo, the widow of a critically war-wounded veteran, and her children as among Lee’s survivors. She is one of two “sisters the Army gave him” along with veterans mental health advocate Danica Thomas, also a widow of a combat soldier.

Other survivors include his brother, James Lee, who also served in the Army and was injured in the blast of an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, as well as James’ wife and son.

Before his death, Lee had been working at the Veterans Affairs Department as a political appointee under Secretary Doug Collins.

And even up to the end, he was still anticipating the next mission, making sure there were plans for hurricane response and earthquake contingencies and asking how can we help more people, Rozina told Fox News.

Though Lee was proud of his missions and the lives he saved, the obituary says, “the titles and headlines were never what mattered most to him.”

“He was proudest to be a paratrooper, a brother, and an uncle,” it says.

“Sean leaves this life surrounded by the family the Army gave him and joins the brothers who were waiting for him on the other side,” including the husbands of Verardo and Thomas.

A funeral with full honors is scheduled for Tuesday at Weddington Methodist Church in Weddington, N.C., and he will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.