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The 501st and the Defenders Detachment are Star Wars costume clubs and so much more! They volunteer in the community, raise money for others and attend events.
OmahaNebraska.com interviewed three members at their booth at the Offutt Air Show.
The 501st and the Defenders Detachment (Colin Oestreich, John Jaeckel and McKenna Hager)
OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Colin Oestreich, Shore Trooper Squad Leader from the Defenders Detachment
Please tell me about how you got here, either as a volunteer or in your service.
Okay, I’m a retired Master Sergeant from this Air Force Base. I’ve been doing charity work my entire life, so continuing doing charity work in this capacity is just a lot of fun. So that’s why we do it. We never get paid. We only give to charity. We raise about $40 million a year as a whole throughout the entire organization just doing this.
That’s wonderful. I see you guys around, it’s a very supportive community. People get very excited to see you and hope you come to their event.
Oh yeah, all they have to do is ask for us to show up. So that’s the 501st Legion and now the Defenders Detachment, which is a newer group. This is only made up of military, police, civilian first responders, etc. So we represent…all of us are also members of that group too.
Tell me about your costume, please.
The costume itself, we have to make our own costumes. There’s no way to just purchase these. They’re not Halloween costumes. They have to be 100% movie accurate and of movie quality. And typically ours are a little bit better quality than the movie standards because we have to be right in front of you. So what you can do on screen, you can’t get away with in front of people. We have to be very careful.
How do we find you and ask you to come to an event or join you?
Tell me about your character or your character’s name.
Okay. This is a shore trooper. This is a squad leader shore trooper because of the variation of the costume. This was first seen in the movie Rogue One then has shown up again in the show Andor and has also been in The Mandalorian—in a few scenes there were shore troopers—so that’s what this costume primarily is.
OmahaNebraska.com Interview with John Jaeckel, First Order Storm Trooper from the 501st Legion
Please tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got here.
Well, I’m a Nebraska native, lived here most of my life, was in the military. Got out. I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different, so started looking into Star Wars. Joined the 501st Legion in 2000. I’ve been doing this for going on 24 years now.
This weekend ended up being my 501st official event with the club, so it’s been a pretty interesting ride. We’ve been doing charity events all over the country for years. We travel, we have members all over the world. We’ve been on every continent and yeah, we do it just because we love the costuming, we love Star Wars, we love having fun and bringing enjoyment and excitement to people’s lives. The air show—we used to do it regularly, and then as everyone knows, it’s been on hiatus for six years. But they remembered us and invited us back, and we love being here.
Please tell me a little bit about your costume and the adventures making it.
All right, so this is the first order storm trooper armor that I’m wearing today. It’s a kit that you order online. This was actually one of the promotional kits made for the Force Away kits. When they released it, our club got a special access where they only offered a limited number. It’s not a basic kit. There are different skill levels. This is one of the more advanced ones. There’s a lot to it. It has some upgrades and changes and variations that some of the other armors don’t have…that can make it a little more uncomfortable to wear. For example, this one has rubber gaskets on it. So as you can imagine, the rubber gaskets on the knees, the elbows, shoulders, it gets very hot, but it is a fun armor to wear.
It’s wonderful.
Oh, thank you.
Anything people should know before they embark on the adventure of making the costume?
Yes, resources are available. No one should have to start out on their own. One of the nice things about clubs like the 501st Legion is we help people out. We have armor parties where everyone gets together and they bring their projects together. The other thing is it can seem kind of overwhelming at first, but again, you know, reaching out to the organizations, we can take you through the baby steps. It’s an investment in time and money, but the nice thing about it is you can spread that cost over a long time, so it’s not a a big upfront investment. It’s something where you take your time, build your way into, get to know the organization. Everyone joins these clubs for different reasons. Some people like charity work, some people like sporting events, some people like air shows. There’s different reasons that people do it. And so we kind of we all have that melting pot. They may come out and do it. Other people joined, they got the costume, they built it, they just threw it on a mannequin in their basement, and that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone wants to come out and do what we do or do it the way we do it, and that’s perfectly fine.
OmahaNebraska.com Interview with McKenna Hager, Scout Trooper from the 501st Legion
Please tell me about how you got here.
I actually have been an unofficial member of the 501st Legion for probably about 15 years now. I’ve just been a friend of the Garrison and going on official trips with them for probably that long, and I officially, finally fulfilled my dream of joining them this June 2024. So it’s been a long time coming, but I finally got to fulfill that dream.
Please tell me more. Tell me about your character.
So I am a Return of the Jedi Scout Trooper, and it’s one of my favorite characters. I’ve always loved the character. I’m not sure why; it’s always been one of my favorites, and so it was the first character that I decided to go for.
And tell me a little bit about your costume.
So the Scout Trooper, it consists of a flight suit that has knee-high boots, knee plates, forearm braces, bicep braces, shoulder pads, a chest plate with a back plate that has a backpack on it, a cummerbund in the middle with a belt, waist pouches, and then a cloth codpiece so I can have considerable more flexibility than most of the other troopers.
And it’s nice you can raise the helmet.
Yes. And I have a visor helmet, so I can actually raise the helmet versus most of these guys have to take the whole helmet off in order to breathe.
OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Aviation Students, Joseph Hibbert and Trevor Denker
UNO aviation students: Joseph Hibbert and Trevor Denker
Tell me why you were interested in the program. Why Omaha? Why aviation?
Trevor Denker: I’ve always known from a young age that I wanted to be a pilot. I think I’ve modeled off of my grandpa. He was an airline pilot for a while, so I looked up to him. Being from Nebraska, really close to Omaha, it just seemed like it was a good fit financially, being close to home. Everything just kind of seemed to line up and worked for me. I’m going into my second year in the program. I’m really liking that. I’m having a lot of fun, meeting a lot of friends. I’m just getting closer every day to my end goal of being an airline pilot and stuff.
Joseph Hibbert: So my dad was…he started getting some flight training and took me on a flight and that really sparked my interest in aviation. I started looking at careers that I could do and decided to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force … so joined UNO to do the aviation major there. Saw that there was flight team that I could do, it sounded very fun, joined it. I’ll be going into my freshman year, so meeting a bunch of new people, great people. Having a lot of fun. Really excited.
Thank you. Anything you want to say or add about the program?
Trevor Denker: It’s a lot of fun. I recommend getting involved whenever you can, whether it’s flight team or just going out to like an athletic game or something. Be involved. Having fun, enjoy. Enjoy the journey along the way of becoming whatever you want to do, with whatever you want to be as a pilot.
Do either of you have your PPL [Private Pilots License]?
Trevor Denker: I do. I have my instrument rated private pilot.
Thank you. Thank you both.
Trevor Denker and Joseph Hibbert: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Major Tommy Reynolds
Major Tommy Reynolds
OmahaNebraska.com here with..
… Tommy Reynolds. I’m a major in the US Air Force and right now I’m an instructor pilot at Euro NATO joint jet pilot training and Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, and I am an instructor specifically in the program called “Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals,” which is kind of a graduate-level pilot training program where we take freshly minted winged aviators that just completed the undergraduate pilot training program and we shift their mindsets from basic airmanship to using their airplane as a weapon. That’s the long and short of what we do.
How did you come to join?
Joining the Air Force… I won’t say it was preordained, but I come from a heritage of military aviators through my father and his father. My dad joked a long time ago that we were descended from flying dinosaurs. It turns out that we think dinosaurs now have feathers, so you know that kind of makes sense. But I was taken to air shows like this one when I was young, and…enthralled by the speed and the agility and the power of the aircraft. And, you know, when you see something extraordinary like that at a young age, it imprints pretty hard. So I knew for me early on that that was a calling… that I wanted to fly that type of airplane. To fly that type of airplane, the commitment was to serve, because nobody else really has airplanes like this to do what they’re doing here at these air shows and demonstrations. So it was a natural selection for me to go and try and commission into the Air Force to fly these airplanes.
Please tell me a little bit about the track.
There’s art and science to all of it. The science is in the engineering and the capabilities of the platform. You know, the speed and the G forces and the thrust and the drag, all those forces combined. The art is really understanding how you as a pilot interface into the machine and how far you can take your body, how far you can take the airplane so it maximizes performance. The craft that I have right now is building upon a career of flying combat aircraft and bringing that knowledge and more importantly the experience—the wisdom, if you will—back to young pilots who have no idea what’s in front of them. They might have the knowledge, they might have the capabilities, but they don’t yet have the wisdom because they haven’t gone through the experience. So it’s my job and my fellow instructors’ job to take our experience from the combat air forces and bring that as early as possible into the minds of these young pilots. The sooner you can introduce that mindset and the methodologies and the experience into those young pilots, the better off they will be when it’s time for them to face the same challenges.
That’s wonderful. Sounds like good advice for everybody, too.
I think so.
Any advice for somebody wanting to join?
If you want to join as a military aviator, there are some hard, set requirements. One of those, which is arguably the most challenging, is you have to have a bachelor’s degree to be a military officer. And only officers in the Air Force fly. They’re only pilots, right? They will only be pilots. So you have to have a four-year… you have to have a bachelor’s degree. So that’s really the hard and fast rule. You can speak to a recruiter. They’re all over the country. They have a great option—a pathway, if you will—to aviation through the University of Nebraska at Omaha right now. And in fact, their tent is that red one over there, if you haven’t visited them yet, but they have an aviation institute and it will take a civilian who has graduated high school and wants to be a professional aviator, and it will earn them a four-year bachelor’s degree at the end of the program, but they will also earn all of the credentials and licensing that they need to either go commercial, private, or be in a position to commission into the military through something like an officer training school, which bypasses a service academy, or a reserve officer training for ROTC path. So there are lots of different ways to get to being eligible for pilot training. So I would speak with a recruiter, seek out an aviation institute like the Aviation Institute at UNO. There are others around the country that follow a similar model, but there are many pathways to it. But I would say just reach out to a recruiter—find a recruiting office, tell them what you want to do, and they can start steering you towards the right agencies to get you what you need.
Please tell me a little bit about how you came to be here today and why you chose to be Flight Surgeon for the Thunderbirds.
Major Jacob Hall in Thunderbird Flight suit with blue sky, planes and air show guests in background
Sure. So I started my Air Force career 20 years ago as a young airman, actually assigned right here at Offutt Air Force Base for my first duty station working in Intelligence. I did that for a few years, used the tuition assistance in the GI Bill to go to college, and my dream was to go to medical school, and so I applied through an Air Force program to go to medical school. I was fortunate enough to get accepted into that. I attended medical school for four years and then served as a flight surgeon in San Antonio, TX, for about 3 years, did my residency training in dermatology and then had the opportunity to apply for this position with the Thunderbirds to be their flight surgeon. And so I jumped on that opportunity, and I was so lucky to get selected. I’ve been with the team now for about a year and I’m just having a wonderful time taking care of all these folks.
I understand you had more or still do have more flight time than everyone else.
Yes, that’s true. I do have more combat flying hours than anybody else on the team, and that’s all from right here at Offutt. The years I was flying here with the RC135s doing deployments during Operation Enduring Freedom.
Thank you very much for your service. Any advice to people wanting to start down your path?
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there’s so many opportunities in the Air Force that you just have to find what you want to do and pursue that. And that’s always my recommendation to young people who are considering the Air Force as a career is to go talk to a recruiter, look at all the different jobs that are available. There’s so many different things you can do, but then just, you know, once you get on the path you want to be on is make a plan for where you want to be and always have that plan for the next year, five years, ten years, but then always be moving towards your goals.
