First published in slightly different form in Military Spouse Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007.

Navy wife Delila Kleinhenz got five days notice -- five days to absorb the news that her Sailor was being ordered to Iraq to serve as a Soldier with the Army. She remembers nearly going ballistic, thinking: He has no background for this! Her husband Mark, a Navy reservist, had never worn camouflage in his life. He knew how to dive a submarine but had never been trained in Soldiering 101.

Delila herself was the weekend charge nurse in a busy intensive care unit. With only five days notice, there just wasn't enough time to solve all the childcare problems that resulted from sudden single parenthood. Her civilian bosses didn't believe that she hadn't seen this coming. Delila lost her job.

To prepare for deployment, the Navy sent Mark to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to bone up on combat skills for thirty days before heading to Iraq. Back home, Delila's preparation consisted of a deployment packet that arrived in her mailbox.

The packet came from the ombudsman, the spouse volunteer who supported the families of the Navy command to which Mark had originally been assigned. The packet contained information about DEERS and Tricare, as well as a flyer and a coloring book on helping children cope with deployment.

That little packet was the first and last time Delila heard from the ombudsman. She received no predeployment briefing. She had no contact with the unit Mark joined in Iraq. Her sons were the only ones in school with a deployed parent. Her only source of information was her husband; her only go-to resource was a phone number in Baghdad. If something happened to Mark, she wouldn't know where to turn. She was utterly alone.

Welcome to the world of the families of individual augmentees.

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Across the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force, a growing number of service members are deploying alone. They're called Individual Augmentees (IA), Individual Mobilized Augmentees (IMA), and members of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). They may be plucked from active duty, or called up from the National Guard or Reserves. They're sent out to temporarily fill a gap in another command, deploying to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and the Horn of Africa.

Sometimes Sailors, Marines, Soldiers, and Airmen volunteer for this duty. Sometimes they're volunteered for it. Sometimes they get the call because their military occupational specialty is needed in the war effort. And sometimes they go simply because they can be spared to fill an empty slot -- in which case, like Delila's husband, they may wind up doing a job for which they've never trained, in a service branch they didn't join.

Most Sailors assigned to the Army, however, are not sent to engage in offensive operations, according to Captain Jeff McKenzie of the Navy's Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center. "The vast majority are assigned to civil affairs and combat support," he explains. "The infantry training they receive is primarily defensive in nature."

At its core, sending in replacements has always been a wartime necessity. Casualties, shifting battlefields, evolving missions -- all can leave holes on the frontlines and along the support lines. This is especially true today, with U.S. forces stretched thin by unpredictable, long-term conflicts around the world. The current augmentee system is a mix of old and new programs that aim to ensure commanders continue to have enough people to get the job done.

Last October, USJFCOMM took over the task of supplying commanders with individual warfighters. Speaking before the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, USJFCOM Commander Air Force General Lance Smith said the primary goal is "to push the notifications time out further and further until we think that we can have the kind of training, the kind of predictability, and those things that are necessary for both the active and Reserve component."

More advance notice will help service members and their families better prepare for individual deployments. In addition, to support their individual augmentees, the service branches provide them with mandatory checklists, briefings, and training.

So far, however, they haven't done as much for the families.

During the year that Katrina White's IRR Soldier was in Iraq, the Army gave her husband some printed information to pass on to her, and made sure someone checked in with her by phone every other month. She was in New Mexico, the caller in Washington, DC.

"It would have been more beneficial if family support at the nearest base had a list of people like me and could reach out," Katrina suggests. "Someone who could adopt me, who's maybe gone through it before."

Late in 2006, the Navy began an effort to do just that. The new Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center is designed to support individual augmentees and their families. With a website and toll-free hotline, the ECRC serves as a one-stop information referral resource. The staff have also begun to proactively reach out to geographically isolated families without waiting for the family to call. They hook them up with the nearest command's support services. The ECRC can only do this, however, if the deploying IA Sailor voluntarily provides family information while filling out predeployment checklists.

The Air Force is in the process of standing up a similar readiness center for its Airmen. But like the Army and Marines, the Air Force relies soley on existing support programs to help the families of the individually deployed.

Even in the Navy, help for these families is hit or miss. Struggling families who call on family readiness volunteers often find the volunteers haven't been trained in IA/IMA/IRR issues. Families who call central hotlines may be referred right back to those very same untrained volunteers.

Family advocates want more. Beth Wilson, a longtime Navy wife, ombudsman, and founder of HomefrontInFocus.com, has taken it upon herself to offer briefings on IA issues to commands and spouses.

"What these families want is a constant stream of information, and to know they're not alone," she says, adding, "The average sending command doesn't appreciate the unique stresses that are placed on the individual augmentee and the family."

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Isolation, lack of information, and an inadequate support network are potential problems for any homefront family. But the problems are especially acute among IA/IMA/IRR families. A recent report by the American Psychological Association found that "service members without a unit affiliation or those serving in the National Guard or Reserves are more likely to experience higher stress levels."

Active-duty spouses Nicole O'Malley, Christina Bishop, and Jumana Hill all live on or near a major military installation. Yet even they struggled to get through their husbands' individual deployments.

Nicole was a newlywed when her husband left Vandenberg Air Force Base on two days notice to train and deploy with a unit based in another state. After he left, she tried to contact the squadron he deployed with, but no one answered the phone. His home squadron at Vandenberg never contacted her either.

"Being alone," she says, "was the hardest part."

Christina has been married twelve years and has watched her husband leave Pope Air Force Base every year, usually alone. "The squadron was not in any way glued together," Christina recalls. "There were no predeployment briefs." Nothing to help her when the repeated separations and reunions began to tear her marriage apart.

When Jumana's husband left Camp Pendleton on thirty days' notice for his second Iraq tour, this one without his unit, she was alone with five children between the ages of three and seven. Two have special needs -- an autistic son and a daughter who was on medication that gave her migraines. The daughter woke up screaming every ten minutes every night until Jumana was so exhausted she was afraid to drive. She desperately needed help, but none was available, not even through the Exceptional Family Member Program.

"Respite child care is the one thing that is lacking big time," says Jumana. "I know there's the Child Development Center, but there's a waiting list." The only support she received from her husband's unit consisted of announcements about civilian events in town.

In the end, these resilient women found their own solutions. Jumana made a hard choice about her daughter's health -- eight weeks into the deployment, she took her off the medication that was leaving them both sleepless. Nicole found support online, exchanging instant messages with a young Marine wife whose husband was also deployed. Christina found marriage counseling through Tricare. She also turned to the one group that had persistently reached out to her, the Air Force's Hearts Apart program.

"Because of my own frustration all those years, I never went," Christina admits. "Finally I was like, get off your high horse and go." She discovered that the monthly support group meetings helped her get through it. She adds, "But Hearts Apart is just for the spouses of the deployed, so when he comes back, you're cut off."

Yet the challenges of a deployment continue long after the homecoming.

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Before Delila Kleinhenz's husband came home, he spent an hour with the chaplain. As for Delila, she says, "I got nothing." Like many IA/IMA/IRR spouses, she was in the dark about what to expect when her husband returned.

As a result, they both expected everything to be the same as it was before he left. But after nine months in Iraq, Delila's normally laid-back husband was irritable and on edge. His first two months home were rocky. They didn't know where to turn for help any more than they knew who to call when a military bureaucratic slip-up left them without health insurance for a month.

Sailors and Airmen in particular are usually returning to commands and squadrons with no experience in dealing with the aftereffects of urban combat.

"The commands are not up to speed on what to look for in returning Sailors in terms of post-traumatic stress," says Beth Wilson, the Navy IA family advocate. "We're a long way from educating commands on what this is."

Wilson believes homecoming problems begin with the arrival itself. She reports, "These men and women are coming back, onesie-twosie, to nothing."

One wife, who was out of town when her husband came back with little warning, couldn't get a flight home in time to greet him. He arrived in the U.S. by himself and took a taxi to an empty house.

"This is the same thing we did during the Vietnam years," Wilson asserts. "No acknowledgement. It's really detrimental to their emotional recovery."

To prevent that from happening, Naval Base Kitsap partners with veterans groups to host a banquet twice a year. They honor all individual augmentees who've returned in the previous six months, along with their families. According to the spouses who've attended, the event was a turning point.

"One woman hadn't realized how bitter she was," says Wilson. "She found herself crying at the banquet as she and her husband were acknowledged. The next day, the bitterness was gone."

The homecoming doesn't have to be lavish. It just has to be significant -- more than a handshake on the augmentee's first day back.

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Family readiness affects military readiness, which makes it the responsibility of each unit's commander. Ultimately, that's where real, meaningful family support happens.

Michelle Headly was living on base in Okinawa, Japan, when her husband Ted was tapped for an IA assignment. Five days later he was in Iraq. Four weeks after that, Michelle found out she was pregnant with their fourth child. The family was already bursting the seams of their 900-square-foot quarters, but housing officials wouldn't approve a move until the baby was born.

That's when Ted's unit stepped in. The commanding officer went to housing meetings with Michelle and wrote letters on her behalf. Then the sergeant major told her not to go to any more meetings -- from then on, he went in her place. When the approval to move finally came down, nearly two dozen Marines from the unit showed up to pack boxes, including the lieutenant colonel. Neighbors brought meals. Friends took the kids.

Looking back on her IA experience, Michelle says, "We lucked out."