State of FORCECOM August 2016

Good Day, Marines,
** September in the US is Disaster Preparedness Month. The West coast has droughts and fires. The central part is flooding and the East coast is getting hit by hurricanes. And our International members have more then their fair share of wind, weather and such.
Never ‘assume’ that something can’t or won’t happen in your area. We all know how ‘that’ will end up. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [ https://www.nws.noaa.gov/com/weatherreadynation/prep.html ] and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention [ https://www.cdc.gov ] offer handy guides on how to prepare.  It doesn’t even need to be a big, local disaster.  Right now there are several small local towns without power due to a forest fire.
The fire is no where near them, but has taken out parts of the power grid headed into their area.
If you want to take this into a larger venue [your work place, school, your local church, etc] Ready.gov has an entire month’s worth of plans.
https://www.ready.gov/september

** Now with another International Marine Muster come and gone and with the major awards season over, now is a good time to check out your personnel records on the database.  No one’s going to know something is missing but you so it’s a good to get in the habit of reviewing your personal records every couple of months or so.
And besides, you may discover an award or two you didn’t know you received.  That’s always a nice surprise.
It’s a fact of life in electronic record keeping that sometimes things go missing. An email may get eaten by a spam folder.  Records can be lost on a hard drive. It is the responsibility of the individual to keep a copy of all his personal records, awards received, courses completed, etc.  If you find an error, it’s certainly acceptable to point it out and request the data be added, updated or changed.  Just know that you’ll need to provide documentation so that the appropriate correction to the database. Documentation can be a scanned copy of the certificate, an email from the issuing authority, a copy of a Unit or Brigade report noting the award, etc.
I can’t emphasis this point enough: if it can’t be documented, it can’t be changed, corrected or added.  If this all sounds familiar, it’s something I try to stress every few months or so.  It’s never a good idea to wait until the last moment to discover something’s missing, especially if you’re getting ready for a formal dress event like your Unit Holiday formal dinner or an upcoming Brigade Muster.
Just think of it as ‘preventative maintenance’.

** Certificates from the awards issued will be going out to the BDE OICs for distribution; some electronically [email] and some by snail mail.
Give us a bit of time to make every gets to it’s end destination.  If you don’t see/hear/receive your certs by the end of September, please contact me and I’ll track down where things went astray.

To close I want to welcome the new Marines who have joined the Corps over the last couple of months and the new units that have joined our ranks.  I’m looking forward to working with each and every one of you.

Keep it safe out there and be nice to each other.

Stand Easy, Marines

BGN Jari “Gato” James
COFORCECOM