Meet me in Honduras — Army Reservists with Ashland ties have deployments overlap

When her Army Reserve team arrived for its deployment at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, 1st Lt. Gabrielle Boyer ran into someone she never expected to see there — an Ashlandler.

"I was doing a left seat right seat with the team we were replacing, and realized our team was replacing Capt. Hallie Babin, who is also an Ashland native," Boyer wrote in an email from Honduras she sent to the T-G on June 20. "She is back in Ashland now, and I’ll be here till next year.

"We always say it’s a small Army and this was one of those moments," Boyer added.

Soldier ID'd: 77 years later: U.S. military identifies Ashland County soldier who died in World War II

The two teams overlapped for about three weeks planning medical outreach to villages throughout Central America.

Boyer wrote in another email that she will always remember when she first met Babin.

"We were sitting at lunch together after a site survey and I asked her where she was from and she said Ashland and I said, 'No way, ' " Boyer said. "We found out she grew up in the house next to my sister’s best friend, and she knew my sisters."

"We found out we both went to Ashland High School and the layers of how we knew each other," Babin said.

With the differences in their ages — Boyer is 28 and Babin 40 — it's not surprising the two never met in Ashland

How the two found their way to Honduras at the same time, starting with Boyer:

Boyer was born Gabrielle Hitchcock in Ashland on Nov. 19, 1993. After attending St. Edward School and Ashland High School, she went to college in Cincinnati to study health services administration at Xavier University, where she met her husband, Thomas “Ace” Boyer of DuBois, Pennsylvania, and also became interested in the military.

"I played sports throughout elementary and into college, until I had a few TBIs (traumatic brain injuries) and I had to stop playing," Boyer said. "My spring semester freshman year I was truly missing being a part of a team, and one day I walked into the ROTC building and the rest is history.

"Actually on my preview day before I started at Xavier, my parents and I walked by all the booths for clubs you can be a part of and I saw the ROTC booth and chatted with them," she added.

After graduating college in 2017, Boyer was commissioned as a second lieutenant during a ceremony in Ashland at the Holiday Inn so her late grandfather, James Baker, could render her first salute, she said.

She is an Army reservist who was serving for the 307th Medical Brigade as its executive officer in Blacklick until she was selected for the deployment to Central America with the 256th Field Hospital out of Twinsburg.

Boyer also worked as the chief scribe in the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati until COVID-19 hit, then worked as a unit administrator at a military police unit in Cincinnati prior to her deployment.

With a 19-month-old son, Boyer said she looks forward to returning after her yearlong deployment to her home in Pittsburgh, where she has been accepted at the University of Pittsburgh to pursue her Masters of Prosthetics and Orthotics.

"I am looking forward to getting back to my baby boy, husband, three dogs, and family and friends," she wrote.

And she looks forward to visiting her hometown.

"Ashland is very near and dear to my heart still, as the majority of my family still lives there," said Boyer, who added that she enjoys seeing all the recent changes and updates to the city.

Deployment to Honduras was fourth one for Babin

For Babin, a nine-month deployment in Honduras with the 256th Field Hospital out of Twinsburg was nothing new since the 20-year Army Reservist veteran had already been deployed to Egypt, Kuwait and Iraq.

Other than those deployments, Babin, whose maiden name is Whitmore, has lived most of her life in Ashland, where she graduated from AHS in 2000.

While attending Ashland University from 2000 to 2002, Babin enlisted in the Army Reserves in 2001 as a combat medic and was commissioned as an officer in 2011.

Babin started at AU on a cross country and track scholarship, but said that didn't work out for her and she left and eventually received a bachelors degree in history from Ohio State.

For the past two years, the divorced mother of 9-year-old Annabelle has been an operations manager for Amazon in Twinsburg.

While she was in Honduras, Babin said her parents and ex-husband shared the responsibility of taking care of her daughter.

She won't be home long as she got invited to attend a weeklong NATO conference in Athens, Greece the first week of August for a junior medical reserve officer workshop.

"This was the first time I applied for it," Babin said. "I was told not many get accepted to it."

Just as she said she will enjoy networking with other medical reserve officers around the world next month in Greece, Babin said she looks forward to staying in contact with her fellow officer with Ashland ties in Boyer and serving as a mentor for her.

Likewise, Boyer is excited about getting to know Babin better and learning from her as her Army Reserve career progresses.

"We are friends on Facebook now," Boyer said. "I will definitely try to catch up once I get back for sure."

This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Army Reservists with Ashland ties have deployments overlap in Honduras