Monday, July 28, 2008
Has your spouse been an IA?
I want to hear from you, the readers! Has your spouse been an Individual Augmentee? Where were they deployed to? How did the IA deployment differ from a typical ship deployment? What was the hardest part? Is there anything the Navy could do to make IA deployments easier on the families? Please share your experience!
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Hey Ally, Its your favorite person.....PAM!!!
ReplyDeleteI think its pretty cool what you are doing. Having gone through 3 IA deployments, I can tell you the hardest part is having life at home go on while your sailor is gone. With him being the only one deployed with that group, it was hard to find support back home from the parent command. I sometimes felt like out of sight out of mind with them. I were never contacted by the ombudsman or even told who that was, I never was given the FRG for the Marine group he was with or any type of information for help. I had to find all of my resource on my own. Luckily for me, I had the Great Lakes group during the last deployment to Iraq and enough experience with the military to know where to look for other means of support.
Hello, My husband just returned from an 8 month IA deployment. He was deployed to Qatar, as a special forces armorer.
ReplyDeleteI think that the IA deployment difference from the ship was that I actually could keep communications up with him - the e-mail rarley went down and he did get to call once a week, which was nice. The hardest part was just not having him here - not being able to tell him something when I need him. I had 2 close relatives [grandmother and aunt] pass away untimely while he was gone and I couldn't get ahold of him for hours to tell him, and speak to him about it.
It was hard, but it honestly wasn't horrible. A lot of good came out of that, we paid off debts, and my love for him grew even more that I ever thought it could. =]
Well that's pretty much my story!
Thank you for your comments girls. Brittany, communication was better for us also. We were able to chat online just about every day.
ReplyDeleteThis one was harder for me to deal with because of the fact that he was in a much more dangerous situation there in Iraq than he is when he's deployed on a ship.
It was also our first deployment with a child, which made it more difficult, however, I don't know how I would have survived it without my son putting a smile on my face each day. :)
It was also more diffucult because I was one of a very small amount of spouses here in Great Lakes whose spouse was deployed. Everyone was always busy with their families on the weekends while I sat at home missing my husband.