R&R Leave and other IA stuff

A question was posted about R&R leave for these IA deployments so I’m going to answer this based on what is written in the IA Family Handbook.

Rest and Recuperation (R&R) leave is chargeable
leave available to give service members
rest from a combat zone. There are two types
of R&R leave:
1. A four day pass to safe locations near the
theater of operations such as Camp Al
Saliyah, Qatar.
2. A fifteen day pass out of the theater of
operations.
R&R leave is a privilege, not an entitlement.
Service members must be in theater for at
least sixty days before they are allowed R&R
leave. R&R leave within the last sixty days of
deployment is strongly discouraged.
Travel time to and from R&R leave is not
charged as leave. Your Sailor’s command is not
allowed to have more than ten percent of their
personnel away at any time which may impact
when your Sailor can take leave. Air travel is
provided to the commercial airport closest to
the R&R traveler’s leave address. Leave begins
to be charged the day after your Sailor arrives at
the commercial airport closest to his/her leave
address. Only one fifteen day trip will be
authorized in a twelve month period.

So, when I wrote in my last post about Obi-Wan being gone for a year, he has been gone from our home for a year.  I was able to meet up with him in Italy for 2 weeks at the end of November for his R&R so it had been almost 9 months since I had seen him.  Every family is different on how they want to utilize the leave period, such as going overseas to meet their spouse or just having the military member come home. 

As the handbook states, there is only one 15 day leave period, and then a shorter 4 day leave which they can only travel to a close US base broad. 

For more IA information, I definitely suggestion going to this site http://www.ecrc.navy.mil/.  On the left side of the page, they have a whole section on IA deployments, plus handbooks are posted, as well as information for support groups, both physical and virtual.  It should answer most of your questions.  Any Navy spouse at this point should be come familiar with this site b/c of the likelihood that your sailor will be deployed as an Individual Augmentee.  Navy Knowledge Online also has a wealth of resources on the types of assignments and other things but you have to register and get a password.  Once you are in, you can view all sorts of IA information, and there are discussion forums where people post and answer questions about the IA deployments.  I found out a lot just be reading on that site alone, b/c the ECRC site wasn’t operational when Obi-Wan left.  So much has changed in the year he has been gone with regard to family support where IA deployments are concerned.  More systems are in place to help families that weren’t in place when he left. 

Hope that information helps.