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CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. - The Marine Corps will say good-bye to one of its top enlisted Marines, as a 30-year veteran and the senior enlisted person in the administration field retires.
Master Gunnery Sgt. James D. Adkins, staff non-commissioned officer in charge of the Marine Corps Administrative Analysis Team, will be recognized for his contributions to the Corps with his family and friends during a retirement ceremony aboard Camp Johnson, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, tomorrow.
Early on in his journey, Adkins attended the first personnel course to be held at Camp Johnson in 1982.
The Chicago native served his first assignment with 9th Motor Transport Battalion in Okinawa, Japan.
“That’s where I picked up meritorious lance corporal and corporal,” said Adkins. “During that time I went to Korea and Philippines.”
From there Adkins moved on to a small unit of 70 personnel with the 3rd Forward Air Defense Battery aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif. where he served as the administrative chief.
But Adkins has never been a single-hatted kind of guy. During his tour in California, he competed on the All-Marine Wrestling Team, a passion of his that he had pursued since high school.
With his second enlistment approaching quickly, the Marine Corps sent him back to Chicago where he found the two loves of his life… chess and Miriam, his wife.
“I used to play a lot of chess on the beach,” said Adkins. “A friend of mine said he had a buddy who was a college champion and wanted to know if I would play him. We went over to his house over the weekend and when I got to his house that’s when I saw my (future) wife and I said, ‘That’s going to be the mother of my children’ but my friend told me that she was the girlfriend of the guy I was supposed to be playing.”
But Adkins made sure he would get what he wanted.
“I played him and I beat the hell out of him, all four games,” he said. “I didn’t even give him a chance. I just wanted him to know that there was absolutely no way he could compete against me and that I had my eye on her.”
That was 26 years ago and they are still happily together, and his chess game hasn’t slowed down either.
“When I started to play in tournaments I noticed there was a different way of playing all together and I saw that they were better,” said Adkins. “I started reading some chess books and playing the computer my wife bought me and once I could beat the computer, the guys at the tournaments weren’t beating me anymore either.”
He competed in the Sea Service Chess Championships which qualified him for the Armed Forces Chess Team in 1990 and has been the Marine Corps champion or representative almost every year since. Most recently, he served as the U.S. team captain at the NATO Championships held in Lithuania in August 2011.
With as much heart as he put into chess, he put even more into his work and his Marines.
Serving three combat tours, Adkins earned himself two Meritorious Service Medals.
“There was a big accountability issue out there,” he said. “The war was just starting and there were Marines scattered throughout theater with no real accountability which resulted in some logistical problems.”
To alleviate the issue at hand, Adkins created a database system that reduced the number of accountability issues drastically and condensed a 24 hour operation of 13 personnel to a four hour procedure manned by two people.
The system he created went on to be used throughout the armed forces.
He not only created databases for accountability during his time in the Corps but also applied his database knowledge to temporary assigned duty, force protection and military occupational specialty rosters which led to his position with MCAAT, an administrative inspection process that will soon become web-based.
As part of the MCAAT inspection team, Adkins primary mission was to provide the Commandant of the Marine Corps and commanders detailed evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of personnel and financial operations; reliability of financial reporting; to ensure resources were expended in compliance with applicable laws and regulations; and act as a conduit between the field activities and as a representative for the commandant.
From all of his experiences throughout his career, the one thing that Adkins wants to pass on to junior Marines is the simple saying engraved on his challenge coin, “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway.”
“I’ve lived by that,” he said. “I have never been and I don’t think that anybody should be the type of person that just comes to a unit and falls right under the current system. Your goal should be to make it better.”
Adkins will no longer be searching out discrepancies in paper work or evaluating how well an administrative team functions or talking with Marines on a daily basis and sharing his experience and knowledge whenever needed but he will remain a caring man with a love for the Corps that will never fade.
| Date Taken: | 05.10.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 05.10.2012 08:37 |
| Story ID: | 88214 |
| Location: | CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 117 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Adkins retires after 30 years of service, by Cpl Miranda Blackburn, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
