Military Service is a Family Affair

FOREST LAKE, MN (May 1, 2003) - When Colleen Dettmer found out her husband was being deployed by the U.S. Army in November 2001, she suffered a heart attack.

Bob Dettmer, chief ward officer (CW3) for the U.S. Army, is a systems analyst working with satellite operations for the Army's Department of Military Intelligence. A teacher for 30 years at Forest Lake High School, he was sent to Kuwait at the end of December 2002 and serves at Camp Doha, about 30 miles from Kuwait City. He joined the Army reserves in 1986.

While she worries about her husband, Colleen Dettmer's heart hasn't caused any major problems in recent months. In a telephone interview, she said she keenly feels God's presence and remains in good spirits despite being separated from Bob for more than 500 days.

A parishioner at Linwood Covenant Church in Wyoming, Minnesota, Colleen has been a busy lady, helping lead two youth Bible studies, caring for a foreign exchange student from Germany and assisting her daughter, Krystle, as she finishes her senior year at Forest Lake High School. Thankfully, there are things to keep her mind occupied because Bob isn't the only one she thinks about in light of the recent war in Iraq.

One son, Travis, is an Army officer stationed in Kuwait - he arrived there in January. Another son, Robb, is stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, and may be deployed in the Middle East at some point. And Travis' wife, Martisse, is a first lieutenant stationed at Fort Lee, Virginia, although she won't be deployed elsewhere because she is pregnant with the couple's first child.

"I've had so many say 'How can you do this?' and I have told them it's by the grace of God," Colleen said as she reflected on the past 18 months. "God has gotten us through all of this. He has provided before and he will provide again. But I know that life can change in a day - in a few minutes, actually."

Life changed for the Dettmer family during a few minutes of a telephone conversation one November day in 2001. The call came from the U.S. Army telling Bob he had three days to drive to Atlanta for his first assignment. Two months earlier, terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Colleen and Bob had watched some of the events on television. Although life had continued for Bob as a teacher and wrestling coach at Forest Lake High, the threat of terrorism was on the family's mind and the call to military service wasn't a total surprise.

"It was unusual for him to be home, but he was sick on 9/11," Colleen recalled. "I remember him saying at that time that I shouldn't be surprised if he was called to active duty. He's an intelligence officer and intelligence officers, especially those who work with satellite imagery, were going to be the first to go. And he got called to active duty two and a half months later.

"He had three days to get ready - he hadn't gotten called in 16 years in service - and when he told his wrestling team that he was going, they were in shock," Colleen continued. "Then he had to call our daughter (Krystle) out of class. We had to get a Power of Attorney signed and get insurance changed."

Stresses mounted from the many details that had to be finished and the night before Bob left for Georgia, Colleen said she felt some heart pain, although she went to bed without telling her husband. Shortly after her husband drove off, however, the pains became sharp enough that Colleen's son, Robb - who had returned to Minnesota from Fort Hood to see his father off - knew something was wrong. Within a day Bob was driving back to Minnesota as his wife was hospitalized following a heart attack.

"After he (Bob) left, we went to the hospital and they ended up having to get Bob back because they were going to transport me to another cardiology hospital," Colleen said. "He got home in time to follow our ambulance in Minneapolis. I had a hole in one of my heart arteries and they put a couple of stents in (to repair the damage). Bob came home for a week and then he had to leave again. Our son, Travis, was in Korea at the time and they had to find him. But when all was said and done, Robb took the ball (in caring for Colleen and Krystle). When he was ready to leave he said, 'I thought I was coming home for Dad, but I could see that God brought me home for you.'"

Colleen was physically limited in her movements during the first weeks after her husband left home, but a more difficult task was finding a way to lessen the emotional angst she was experiencing. "The doctors told me that I had to cut down my stress level," she said. "They'd tell me to try to stay calm. When Bob was first called, it was a nightmare for three or four days and I had constant headaches. But when he left the second time (after Colleen's heart surgery), I had a total peace and I think it was the Lord's doing."

Although schedule differences can make communication sporadic at times, Colleen tries to keep in regular contact with her husband and Travis in the Middle East. Given the security issues associated with military information, she is not allowed to discuss Bob's job in detail. However, she said that Bob was working 20 hours per day during the heat of the war with Iraq and his work was important to units on the frontlines, especially in one particular instance. His satellite images helped soldiers rescue Jessica Lynch, a soldier who was taken hostage early in the campaign in Baghdad, Iraq.

"Bob has been working seven days per week and he (normally) works 12 to 15 hours per day," she said. "He sleeps in a warehouse with 300 or 400 guys and has a corner bunk, so he doesn't have a quiet place for himself. He lives by faith each day and he knows so many people are praying for him. They keep their gas masks on their hips and they have to have those masks on in nine seconds (when warned by military intelligence). The first day of the war there were five missiles that came and they saw a couple of them being intercepted. My son, Travis, said it was the biggest noise he had ever heard, but Bob got used to it because he was only 30 miles from the border. I couldn't sleep for the first two days of the war."

Colleen isn't the only one in town that misses her husband. Bob Dettmer has been a well-known coach for 30 years in Forest Lake, a bedroom community of 25,000 near the Twin Cities. Bob's teams have won more than 300 matches and won a state title since he became head wrestling coach in 1975. The same attention to detail that helps him in military intelligence has aided him as he has built a stellar wrestling program. And that quality has been especially important for keeping in the loop with his daughter's final semester of high school.

"Bob has been an incredible dad," Colleen says. "All of the kids have had him as a teacher and both boys wrestled under him. I remember many Sunday afternoons when they wrestled together - Bob taking on both of the boys. The hardest thing has been that my daughter didn't experience the last two years of high school with her dad. Those rewards of watching her graduate, or seeing her during prom, he's missed that. I'm not sure he'll be home for Krystle's graduation, but we would like to have him experience being with her as she starts school at Bethel College in St. Paul.

"He's done the best he can to be there," Colleen continued. "The week before prom, he called the boy that Krystle was going to prom with, called him out of class, because he just had to talk to him. On her 18th birthday, he made sure to send Krystle roses. I know he's been working 20-hour days, so I don't know how he's been able to think of those things."

During the next month, Colleen will continue to juggle her roles as wife, mother, Bible study leader and prayer warrior, attending Krystle's music and academic ceremonies and helping her ready for college. Thankfully, she says, she knows that God and fellow parishioners remind her that she's not alone in her journey. For now, that is enough to sustain she and her husband.

"We have seven people in our church who are deployed and directly affected by this and there have been a lot of care packages being sent," she said. "Knowing that so many have been holding him in prayer has probably kept Bob going. But our faith definitely has been tested and matured in the past year and a half."

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