Where can you obtain guidance on the Air National Guard? How about the new ANG Family Guide!

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Benjamin Matwey
  • 166th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
The new Air National Guard Family Guide is a well-written, well-researched and well-organized 124-page document that ANG Command Chief Master Sgt. Chris Muncy and ANG Director Lt. Gen. Harry Wyatt and their wives collaborated on.

The Guide is written using short, digestible paragraphs, and has a good table of contents, a list of acronyms (so civilians can understand 'military talk'), a list of programs and useful websites and a good index.

There are four chapters; Welcome to the ANG; Life in the ANG; Managing Deployment; When Bad Things Happen.

Consider the Guide to be a personal navigation aid to better understand the ANG as a whole, starting with the ANG role in the overall U.S. military structure, to the dozens of concerns and questions that pop up during a career -- health, dental, legal and financial matters, and family relationships to include spouses and children. Human communication, popular social media tools and various coping skills are addressed to better handle matters whether a family is at home together, or separated by 10 time zones. 

There are other well-chosen topics that both traditional part-time Air Guard professionals and full-time members will agree on as hot topics that arise during the career of the modern Citizen-Airman. All-in-all, it is a handy Guide to serving in the ANG as we begin the second decade post-9/11.

A novice single Airman to a senior NCO or officer or their spouse would find this Guide helpful.

Even if you think you know a lot about ANG programs and the military bureaucracy, and you, or you and your family have gone through a deployment or sought needed assistance or direction before, valuable new information has come out in the last couple years making this Guide well worth opening and reviewing.

Find the Guide online (PDF document) on the home page of www.ang.af.mil -- look on the right under 'Spotlights.'

Direct link: http://www.ang.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-111128-048.pdf