I pine for Winston Churchill. Every time our fearless leaders talk about the Individual Augmentation program that is sending thousands of sailors into boots-on-the-ground jobs in the Middle East, I find myself longing for some WWII-style oration.
 
I want to hear voices ringing with emotion as they swear something like, “We sailors shall fight upon the sea. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets and anywhere else we find a drop of water. We shall take the ocean to the enemy in a Ziploc bag if we must. We will never, never surrender.”

Tum ta rah. I could buy into a policy sold like that. Really, I’m a sucker that way.

Instead, we Navy families have been getting a much shakier message for months. I’ve heard three different presentations by these poor souls in uniform reciting the same message: We’re not doing the Army or Marine Corps’s job for them. It’s everybody’s fight. No sailor in any rate from E-4 to 0-6 should think they are exempt.

Well, if you say so. But why is this IA message always delivered with enough shifty-eyed glances and twitchy-fingered gestures to make me think Richard Nixon is the one coming back from the dead not my beloved Winston?

I don’t like it. I think I don’t like the program, but I know I don’t like the sell. Can you really blame me? When I picture a sailor I think ships, subs, aircraft, missiles and lots and lots of ocean. When I imagine my own sailor dressed up like the fella on the Cracker Jack box draggin’ an M-16 around a desert, it makes me pretty nervous. It’s making lots of spouses nervous.
 
We duly note the Navy’s message about proper training and how most augmentees are coming from the security, medical, intelligence, communication or engineering fields. We hear the fact that less than 4 percent of sailors will be affected this year. Something about this shifty-eyed presentation makes a gal feel like the military equivalent of the rapture is coming to a house really, really, really near you.

But last week I saw a shift I hadn’t seen before. I interviewed two Navy detailers and two Career Development officers from Millington,Tenn. — where the Navy corrals all those long-term career people. Those guys said all the same things those other folks were trained to say about how it’s everyone’s fight and no one is exempt. But they weren’t just mouthing the words. These guys actually believed the message.

Maybe they’ve been drinking their own Kool-Aid. But they were busy figuring out how folks were going to quantify IA for promotion boards. They already knew that accepting a job as an IA couldn’t be used as a get-well tour, but it was unequivocally career enhancing.  They were already working the change into their reality instead of nervously fussing over the change itself.

I don’t know if I am quite there yet myself. Is anyone? But over the next few months, I do expect the IA message to get less shifty-eyed and more sure. Our support services are going to have to retool in ways that suit a sailor going overseas without his unit and leaving a family behind with no support from the command. I expect all of us to blanche when we see sailors among the faces of fallen soldiers and Marines.

But most of all I expect that we will be forced to think of our sailors as the men and women who fight for us with ships and aircraft and missiles and oceans and rivers and streams. And boots right there on the ground.