On Training

We want our Charter Members to succeed when they are sent on a task. We offer on-line training tailored to that task. The first activity was an excercise with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. We send three Members, one Russian speaker, one Mandarin speaker and one Marshallese speaker, to help the CDC with its non-English web pages. Training for this included an intro to the CDC as well as basics like security and proper conduct.

Our next major task is to send three Indonesian speakers to participate in Operation Garuda Shield in Indonesia, a military and humanitarian co-ordination exercise with the US Pacific Command and the United Nations.

Since our civilian Members will be working, eating and housed with military staff, we need to make sure that they become familiar with the military culture. So we're creating a course that will explain military traditions, courtesy and etiquette, how to identify someone's rank, and how to adjust to communal military living. All of this is important as we want our Members to have credibility ... We civilians might not recognize that a soldier and a marine are not the same thing, likewise for a ship and a boat, but if we're going to work alongside members of our armed forces, getting these little things right can make a big difference in our success.