EAST BERNE — Lieutenant Commander Nathan Stempel of East Berne has been recalled to active duty from his Naval Reserve unit. He will be serving a nine-month deployment to Djibouti, Africa.

Stempel graduated from Berne-Knox-Westerlo in 2001 and has served in either the active or reserve component ever since. His last tours on active duty were aboard USS Louisville (SSN-724), a nuclear-powered submarine, and as a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a reservist, Stempel has been a part of exercises in South Korea, Virginia, and Italy, while balancing jobs as a management consultant and now co-founder of a tech startup. 

“For this upcoming deployment, we wish him fair winds and following seas (even though he will be in the desert) until his return,” said his mother, Kathy Stempel.