Thomas Brooks

Background

About Thomas Brooks

My name is Thomas Brooks. I graduated from high school in 2010. As soon as I graduated, I went directly into the Marine Corps. I started off as a cryptological linguist and went to the Defensive Language Institute to learn Arabic. Around the halfway point, the Marines realized they had too many Arabic linguists and I was reassigned to be a fiscal management resource analyst, aka a comptroller or a fiscal clerk. I passed the school house for comptrollers at the top of my class. I was then sent to 3rd Marine Division located in Okinawa, Japan. As a comptroller, my responsibilities included gathering financial data, analysis said data, creating financial reports, and tracking expenditures. I was also responsible for funding documentation creation, writing up contracts, conducting audits, creating Lines of Accounting (LOAs), handling the Defense Travel System (DTS), and budget analysis. For a few years I was also responsible for the funding for all exercises taking place in the Pacific Theatre and setting a few up personally. During my time as a comptroller, I was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars and the welfare of thousands of Marines. I did this while working out of a severely understaffed office the majority of the time and doing the work of multiple people. I made such a good impression that I received multiple awards and had other comptroller offices fighting over me when it was time for me to rotate out. Before I left, I trained over a dozen Marines on how to do the job, including several in supervisory positions above myself. After my time as a fiscal clerk, I then went on to become a Marine Security Guard (MSG). As a MSG, my primary function was to safeguard government property, classified materials, and embassy personnel. I was stationed in Ottawa, Canada; Juba, South Sudan; and Jerusalem, Israel. Alongside my primary duties, I also had multiple secondary responsibilities such as budgeting the food money, payroll for local national employees, training the Marines how to apprehend an intruder, and taking care of the daily operations of the embassies. After I left the Marines in August 2017, I went to class to work on my Ph.D. for 2 years. Just before my last class, I got a job as a security guard for Securitas. Due to my background and outstanding work, I was quickly and repeatedly promoted in just a few months to be the operations manager. Now I run the day to day operations for the Albany branch. This includes payroll and site inspections/management.