Veteran team member
Tim Snell
U.S. Army veteran
“No matter how bad things get, you just keep moving forward.”
Tim Snell didn’t plan on joining the Army. He was struggling in college when his dad laid down the law: live under my roof, play by my rules. Tim chose the Army. A year of college qualified him to enter as a Private First Class rather than a buck private. After five and a half years and two enlistments, he left as a Sergeant.
Most of Tim’s service was in Würzburg, Germany. He re-upped so he could stay there and would have finished his service in Europe if the Gulf War hadn’t intervened. His unit followed a strict daily rhythm: PT formation five days a week, a three- to five-mile run, breakfast, work formation, then a full day of work. Rooms were inspected down to the dust on top of the door frame. About six months of each year were spent in the field, working close to 22 hours a day and sleeping through Sundays. “It's like Groundhog Day,” he said.
Tim was an NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) specialist who kept switching specialties because he liked a challenge. He started in decontamination, which he describes as “a fancy car wash” for people and vehicles hit by chemical weapons. Next came a smoke battalion, laying down smoke screens from M113 vehicles to hide advancing or retreating forces. Finally, he joined an elite reconnaissance unit doing both conventional and chemical recon.
When the Gulf War began, the U.S. needed better chemical-detection equipment, and the Germans had it. Because Tim’s unit was already in Germany, it became the first unit trained on German armored vehicles carrying a mass spectrometer — lab equipment mounted in a combat vehicle. It could “sniff” the air or a surface, identify every chemical present, from cigarette smoke to VX nerve agent, and print the result on the spot. Tim’s unit was the first one deployed to do that work. It rode at the spearhead of the northern advance, where commanders expected any chemical attack to hit first.
After the Army, Tim earned a bachelor’s in history with a German minor in two and a half years. He then spent a year in Hungary, earning a certificate from the Technical University of Budapest, and completed a master’s in history at Michigan State. Facing a narrow job market in history, he asked himself what else he was good at. The answer was computers; he’d been tinkering with them since the days when you soldered your own modem in. He landed an IT internship with the Michigan Department of Corrections and was hired full-time three months later. “The rest is history,” he says.
The Army’s biggest lesson for Tim was persistence. When things look like they’ll never work, his answer is simple: “We're just going to keep going forward until we make it work.”
Tim joined Soarin Group as a Systems Administrator in January 2024, bringing that same keep-moving-forward attitude to every problem he takes on.