Dixon National Guard recruiter Wittenauer is the first among first sergeants

DIXON - Josh Wittenauer joined the Illinois National Guard more than a quarter century ago in part because he wanted to help people.

The Dixon resident performed that duty so effectively that he is now receiving national recognition for it.

Wittenauer, with Aurora-based Delta Company, is the National Guard’s First Sergeant of the Year for the 2020 fiscal year. The final stage of his competition was held April 26 in Key West, Fla., when he was interviewed by and later chosen by a panel of 12 board members.

“I was surprised – like, did I actually just hear my name?” Wittenauer said. “The confidence level going into both boards, I knew that I was going to win. I don’t know any way to explain it besides that.

“Being prepared and knowing that all I had to do was tell the story of how hard the company worked, they put me in this position and there’s only one way to come back, and that’s as a winner.”

Wittenauer, a 1995 Amboy High School graduate, joined the Illinois National Guard in July 1995. He was based in Dixon, then transferred to Galva in 2000. He was attending Western Illinois University at the time, and Galva was only about a 45-minute commute. It was there that he had the chance to train new recruits as a noncommissioned officer.

In 2005, Wittenauer came back to Dixon as a National Guard recruiter. His territory was all of Lee County, plus Rochelle, and he signed up about 100 new recruits over a 5-year period.

In 2010, Wittenauer was promoted to team leader in Dixon, a position he held for 5 years before accepting a similar position in Aurora in 2015. There, he oversees a team of 10 recruiters who cover a good portion of northern Illinois.

His background as a recruiter in Galva and Dixon gives him a unique perspective when working with his recruiters.

“It’s more on the empathy side,” Wittenauer said. “I know that job well. Everybody’s different, and everybody’s got a different recruiting style, but at least I’ve walked in their shoes before and I can understand what they’re going through. You get told no more times than you do yes.”

Fiscal year 2020 began Oct. 1, 2019 and ended Sept. 30, 2020. Under Wittenauer’s leadership, Delta Company more than exceeded its goal of recruiting new guardsmen, and training them well.

“Basically, we have a mission each and every month, which goes throughout the year,” Wittenauer said. “Last year, for this period of time, we finished 110% of our mission. We enlisted 171 new soldiers for the Illinois Guard, and our mission was 153. We over-produced, which was one piece of it.

“There’s another side of it where there are quality marks of the soldier and the training that we put into it. That’s on the Recruit Sustainment Program side. They measure you based on training pipeline success, meaning when you enlist somebody, do they actually make it through the entire process.

“We were actually highest in the nation that when we shipped somebody, they graduated. Out of 157 soldiers that we shipped to training, 155 of them graduated.”

That level of effectiveness allowed Wittenauer to be chosen as the state’s top First Sergeant, among the 11 companies in Illinois. It was one of many honors Delta Company received at the state level.

The next competition was the Strength Maintenance Advisory Group, which was held just after the state awards, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. There are seven SMAG regions in the United States, and SMAG 4 includes Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. Wittenauer was competing against all of those state First Sergeant winners to be an Expert 7 – one of seven to be chosen to compete at the national level.

“You had to walk into a room, with a panel, and they evaluated you based off of appearance and the uniform, and they asked you questions pertaining to the job itself – your leadership style, stuff about ethics and other things.”

Wittenauer won the competition in Oklahoma City to become an Expert 7, then he won against the best of the best at the national competition in Key West. The format was similar, as he and the other six Expert 7s faced a board who grilled them with questions.

Wittenauer was deemed the best. He will recognized at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on June 22.

It is the culmination of a fulfilling professional life in the National Guard.

“Truly each and every day I get the opportunity to help somebody,” Wittenauer said. “I don’t know if the next person I talk to that I’m going to change their life or give them something or make them realize, yeah, I could do something better with my life.

“Not everybody I come into contact with needs fixed. Some people just need to have somebody push them a little bit harder and help them gain confidence in anything they want to do.

“Every month I have the opportunity to stand in front of all the brand-new enlistments. The one thing I give them is, ‘I promise you that you’re going to get better by walking through this door, but you have to want it. You have to want to help others as well.’

“Ultimately, most people who join the military, they might tell you it’s college. They might tell you it’s for the money. They might tell you it’s the uniform or the adventure. It’s truly because they want to help others, and if you can get that out of them, they’re going to find the passion as well, and each and every day it’s going to mean a little bit more to them.”

Wittenauer has made the most of his National Guard experience while balancing a hectic home life in Dixon. He and his wife of 16 years, Heather, the principal at Jefferson Elementary School in Sterling, have four children: Maggie, 13; David, 10; Joe, 8, and Ellie, 5.

Wittenauer routinely finds himself rushing back from Aurora to attend sporting events and dance recitals.

“I couldn’t have done any of this without my family, especially Heather,” Wittenauer said. “There’s some long hours involved, some travel, and somehow we’ve made everything work out.”