Sailors sweep spouses off feet, meet children for first time as USS Nimitz returns home

Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz greeted spouses and children — some for the first time — after returning home to Bremerton Sunday.

Other Washington-based ships assigned to the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group also returned after a six-month deployment that took them to the Indo-Asia-Pacific region and the Arabian Gulf.

The strike group put 78,000 miles on the odometer during the deployment — a number equivalent to about three times around the world — flew over 1,000 combat sorties into Iraq and Syria, and dropped more than 900 pieces of ordnance, according to the U.S. Navy.

This story was originally published December 10, 2017 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Sailors sweep spouses off feet, meet children for first time as USS Nimitz returns home."