The making of a 'sand' sailor: individual augmentees get "basic training" at Fort Jackson

All Hands, June, 2006 by John Osborne

The crisp staccato of an M-16 rings out, punctuated by the ominous cannonade of several more machine guns and explosions. An Army drill sergeant shouts instructions over the tumult of fighting as armed Sailors dressed in desert camouflage and body armor hit the dirt and prepare to engage the enemy as the serenity of a peaceful spring morning at Fort Jackson. S.C., is transformed into a realistic battlefield.

"A doorway is a fatal funnel! You never, never stop there! Hooah?" instructs Alpha Company Task Force Marshall (TFM) Army Staff Sgt. David Lyle, as the dust and smoke clear and silence descends. "Hooah!" Come the echoes of understanding from most Sailors, with a few "Aye, Ayes" thrown in. The drill sergeant surveys his platoon of trainees who are picking themselves up off the ground and notices someone grimace in mild discomfort.

Lyle has seen a lot in his Army career, but never did he think he would be training a platoon of U.S. Navy Sailors who would, its a matter of days, be transported over to Iraq and Afghanistan to provide his Soldier brothers with some touch-needed assistance in the long war against terrorism.

Get here he and his fellow drill sergeants are, leading Sailors onto the firing range, putting them through the paces of convoy operations, drawing in the sand with sticks to illustrate points and moving sequences inside a mock village created for practicing urban combat operations. The soldiers will also pose as hostiles and friendlies to make the training scenarios more realistic.

Army First Sgt. Kevin Bramlett, senior enlisted soldier in Alpha Company, is in charge of 18 Army drill instructors of TFM who have been tasked with training the Navy's Individual Augmentees (IA). The Sailors will supplement Army troops worldwide as part of a joint-service operation called U.S. Navy Individual Augmentee Combat Training (USNIACT).

"I've benefited from getting to work with another service," Bramlett said. "As I've learned how a different service processes information, I've had to adjust my training style to get them to understand."

Active-duty Sailors and Reservists, ranging in rank from E-3 to O-6, undergo the two-week training at McCrady Training Center on Fort Jackson and then are sent directly to theater in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, the Horn of Africa (Djibouti) and other dangerous regions in the world.

But Sailors abandoning the relative safety of their ships to walk around with weapons among improvised explosive devices (IED), ride in convoys and clear buildings of enemy insurgents

"When I joined the Navy as a Personnel Specialist, I never imagined I would be here preparing to fight on the ground, but I left my options open, knowing that I had to be ready to do whatever was asked of me," said PS3 Mark Hutchinson, who was going through IA training at Fort Jackson in preparation for deployment to Kuwait.

Like many of the Sailors undergoing IA training, Hutchinson was selected by his command, but he has always viewed himself as a volunteer by virtue of taking the enlistment oath and wearing a Navy uniform. "When they said they needed me, I was prepared to go," he said.

Hiking through woods thick with pine needles, crawling through deep sand, sweltering in heat under 66 pounds of clothing and equipment and riding in a convoy that culminates in entering a village made of battered, faded Connex boxes is a drastic change from Hutchinson's previous job at Personnel Support Detachment in Pensacola, Fla., but his attitude personifies what the Chief of Naval Operations (GNO) was looking for from Sailors when he said he wanted the Navy to get into the fight.

"The first four words in the National Security Strategy are 'America is at War,'" said RADM Dave Gove, commander, Naval Personnel Development Command (NPDC) and Navy Personnel Command (NPC), who oversees this IA training program. "We have to be ready to support the combat service support missions that the CNO has pledged to make sure we help cover for the ground forces in country."

There are approximately 10,000 Sailors serving in IA billets, split equally between active duty and Reserve components. The majority of IAs receive orders to Central Command in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We're obligated to make sure our Sailors who are helping support the ground forces of the Marines and the Army have the correct understanding to be able to deal with their environment and be effective in accomplishing their mission," Gove said.

Enter Fort Jackson and its cadre of Army drill instructors. Under the watchful eye of TFM Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Doug Snyder and the commanders of Alpha, Bravo and Charlie Companies, instructors and students alike must in many ways discard what they have been taught since their respective recruit training to effectively train and be trained.

"The biggest obstacle for Sailors is the shock of being a land-combat Soldier," said Alpha Company Commander Army Capt. Jim Hulgan, who will help deliver roughly 3,700 trained IA trained Sailors to battalion commanders this fiscal year. "In some cases they pick it up easily, in others they don't. We use some of the Sailors' own jargon and try to relate the training to something they are more familiar with. In the Army we turn civilians into Soldiers, but that's not what we're doing here.