SUBURBAN REPORTER 

The busiest training base in the Navy is now the smartest -- in a fashion. The last two boot-camp classes at Great Lakes Naval Training Center became the first that will use Smart Cards for the rest of their service careers. 

The Smart Card, which looks like a credit card, stores medical, dental and personnel records on a microchip. Starting Sept. 18, every naval recruit will be issued a Smart Card at Great Lakes, speeding up readiness for deployment. 

"During in-processing alone, it saves approximately 10 hours a week per sailor," said boot-camp instructor Larry Greenough. "It used to take up to four hours to outfit new sailors. Now it takes just an hour by simply swiping [running through a processor] the card." 

The Smart Card is used for purchasing meals, making phone calls, gaining room access, using the Internet, getting medical and dental information, and registering qualifications such as rifle-range scores or flight hours. The cards cost the Navy $6 each and contain eight kilobytes of memory. 

"We're going to use them to locate students like a tracking system," said Great Lakes spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Rob Newell. "Rather than taking a pass to the medical or dental office, a sailor will be required to use their Smart Card instead of logging in." 

Recruits used to be issued an immunization record book. If it was lost, recruits had to get all the shots again. 

"When I retired, I had four books of shots," said Smart Card on-site coordinator Frank Bandy. 

Military brass adopted the Smart Card four years ago with pilot programs on Oahu, Hawaii, for all four service branches. The Army began using Smart Cards first but funding for research and development dried up in 1996, and the Navy took over in 1997. 

"The Army used to take severalthousand hours and several days to process 1,500 soldiers," said Barbara Hoffman, deputy program manager of the Navy Smart Card program in Washington. 

"Now they can do it in under four hours."