The Seattle PI reported today that three sailors based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island were killed in Iraq.
The three sailors were members of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 11 at Whidbey Island.
The three were killed by enemy forces during combat operations, the Pentagon said. A Navy veterans' Web site said the trio were traveling in a convoy that was attacked. Their detachment was sent to Iraq earlier this year.
It turns out that 12,000 US sailors, called "individual augmentees" by the Pentagon and "sand sailors" by folks in the field, are serving in ground operations for which they are likely completely untrained.
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While the three Whidbey Island NCOs were not designated as augmentees - they were attached to a special unit - the PI report about them revealed almost incidentally that nearly a tenth of our ground force in Iraq is made up of naval personnel.
Nearly 12,000 active and reserve U.S. sailors currently serve on the ground in the Central Command area of operations, most of them known as "individual augmentees," according to Defense Department reports. The Navy has been increasingly called upon to augment ground operations with "sand sailors," since the Army and Marines have been taxed by the prolonged war in Iraq.
Now, as a former sailor, I remember the intense several hours we spent in boot camp on the firing range. (I even hit the target a couple of times.) Not to denigrate the Navy in any way, but most swabbies just aren't schooled in ground combat. I would estimate that upward of a thousand sailors on the ground are serving in their traditional role as Marine corpsmen. Perhaps another 100 or so are UDT/SEALs. But what of the rest?
This is another greatly under-reported indication of how badly our military is being abused by the Bush junta. Sand sailors, for God's sake. Sand sailors.