Maintainer returns from long deployment

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Jason Schaap
  • 931st Air Refueling Group Public Affairs
MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. --  Kobe Reimer didn't say goodbye. He didn't know how.

He was just shy of his second birthday when his father, Senior Airman Travis Reimer, deployed to Southwest Asia in September. "(Kobe) wasn't really talking yet," Airman Reimer remembered.

But children develop rapidly at that age. And Airman Reimer, like many servicemembers before him, missed some of his child's growing up while serving his country overseas.

Kobe had a little-boy vocabulary when his father returned in early February. Now, Airman Reimer said with a proud smile, Kobe can say "daddy."

Airman Reimer is an aircraft hydraulics mechanic assigned to the maintenance squadron of the 931st Aircraft Refueling Group. His four months in Southwest Asia was one of the longest deployments for a 931st Airman in the last year.

"It was a lot of hard work," the Newton, Kan., native said, "but it did seem to go by quickly."

While deployed, Airman Reimer was part of an expeditionary maintenance unit at a base with the largest KC-135 Stratotanker operation in the world. He credited 13-hour workdays, six days a week, for helping time move fast.

Staying busy especially helped during holidays, of which, he missed all the big ones for a family man: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and two birthdays to boot (Kobe turned two and Airman Reimer's wife, Ashley, also celebrated her special day while her husband was more than 6,000 miles away).

"That was a little difficult," he said. "We pretty much worked right through (holidays). They keep you so busy there."

Airman Reimer called home two or three times a week. He and Ashley would coordinate instant messaging when he had wireless internet access during his one day off.

Family separation was easily the "hardest part" of the deployment, he said, but he and Ashley knew that before he asked to go. Unlike many of the active-duty Airmen overseas, the Air Force didn't tell Airman Reimer, a Reservist, that he had to deploy. He volunteered.

It was something he hadn't done since he joined the Air Force three years prior. So when active-duty maintainers he worked with at McConnell AFB received orders for an Air Expeditionary Force rotation, he threw his hat into the ring too.

"I heard some of them of them talk about it," he said. "If I'm going to do the same thing they are doing, I think I should get the same experience."

By same thing, Airman Reimer meant work on KC-135 hydraulics full-time. He wants to be an Air Reserve Technician for his maintenance squadron, working as a civilian full-time between drill weekends and annual tour. The extra hiring points he'll receive for deploying was added motivation for volunteering.

"I learned a lot," he said of his time in the sand, "a lot of stuff" he wouldn't have learned back at McConnell. And not just hyrdraulics "stuff."

He learned that monotony is like a desert mirage, that an Air Force base that doesn't sleep can be "boring" too. That military chow "gets old very quick" and that a steak as soon as you get back home tastes really good.

He learned that kids grow up quick. And that "daddy's" can be rewarded for their sacrifice through the words of a two-year-old.


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Click here to see Airman Reimer in the Spirit Spotlight.