The historical context of military records

Extensive research has been conducted on the record-keeping practices of the U.S. military.[1] Since the late 1990s, a portion of this research has been devoted to streamlining compensation claims for service-related disabilities, such as PTSD.[2] These efforts are of high stakes for veterans whose service records have been required to access the benefits earned through their service.

The link between documentary proof of military service and access to benefits has been a recurrent theme in U.S. history that began with the republic itself. Initially, benefits were awarded only to veterans in extreme poverty or those unable to work due to service-related disabilities. After the Revolutionary War, for instance, pensions were initially awarded only to officers. Later, in 1828, an act of Congress granted pensions to all surviving veterans.[3] In the case of Civil War veterans, their pensions were initially awarded only to those with service-related disabilities or those in extreme poverty. However, the system gradually expanded. Between 1862 and 1912, Congress and the executive government enacted a series of policies that created, in effect, a quasi-universal pension system.[4] Just as veterans today, civil war veterans were required to provide proof of their service to access their benefits. Originally, the pension system gave preeminence to documentary evidence while allowing testimonials for contextualization. The U.S. relaxed these requirements over time. By 1890, Congress passed the Dependent Pensions Act, which made anyone who had served 90 days or more automatically eligible for benefits.[5]

The Civil War was also when the government began documenting military operations on a large scale.[6] This occurred because the Civil War’s massive scale coincided with an accelerated industrial evolution whereby the paper industry switched from the centuries-old practice of producing paper with cotton and linen rags to a new, faster process based on wood pulp.[7] The new process enabled a massive expansion of the paper industry, thereby capitalized by the Union army to document its operations. In fact, by the end of the war, the compiled documents of the Union Army were so voluminous that they filled several buildings, and sorting them out took dozens of full-time personnel for several years.[8] Partly because of this extensive war record, the paper trail facilitated managing the provision of weaponry and other supplies at a massive scale[9], as well as accounting for casualties in the Union Army.[10]

Institutions Managing Military Records

In tandem with record-keeping practices, the institutions in charge of awarding veterans benefits have also evolved. Between 1828 and 1849, a commission managed veteran pensions. This commission was originally part of the Department of the Treasury. In 1833 the Department of War assumed the commission, and in 1849, moved it to the newly created Department of the Interior as the renamed Bureau of Pensions. Finally, in 1930, the Bureau of Pensions merged with other government agencies providing services to veterans to create the Veterans Administration, which exists to this day.[11] 

Each federal government agency was responsible for managing its own records for almost two centuries. For instance, the Bureau of Pensions, which relied on military service records to corroborate claims, was ascribed to the Department of War. However, in 1935, the government began concentrating its collections in a single institution: the National Archives.[12] In 1949, the National Archives was renamed the National Archives and Records Service (NARS) and placed under the wing of the General Services Administration. A new dependency was added to NARS in 1966: the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), which is responsible for all career records of civilian and military personnel.[13] Finally, in 1984, the NARS was reconstituted as an agency independent from the GSA and renamed the National Archives and Records Administration.[14]

What’s the state of personal military records?

A new wave of massive expansion of military records has been enabled since the dawn of the digital age. The scale of records within the Armed Forces is so massive today that keeping track of it is considered a big data enterprise.[15] This enterprise has had significant setbacks, the most significant being the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri.

In 1973, a fire in an NPRC facility destroyed 80% of 1912-1960 Army records and 75% of 1947-1964 Air Force records.[16] Veterans who served in any branches of the Armed Forces during the destroyed records periods can still obtain a certification from the NPRC about their service. However, the agency explains on its website that such certifications must precede archival reconstruction of the person’s service through alternative records such as orders of deployment or recruitment records. The process can take at least six months.[17] Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when the NPRC concentrated most military records in one facility, the NPRC now distributes the processing of requests for military records to one of twelve physical locations and two self-service websites. Re-routing of a claim depends on branch and service dates.[18]

However, plenty of information about military operations cannot be found in NPRC holdings. Information in the U.S. military is not limited to official, written records about their regular operations. Instead, information also “travels outside of traditional hierarchical systems in the military. Officers and enlisted personnel use a mix of informal and formal environments to best support their work.”[19] Furthermore, the information generated by active service members is not limited to their work duties but also includes personal documents such as photographs, personal journals, and email exchanges with friends and family.

Not only is there information about military operations that never makes it into the official record, but there is also some evidence that some records about veterans’ service can be unreliable or at least incomplete. For example, a study found that veteran records often underreport PTSD for people with mild to medium-level symptoms.[20] In addition, there is a burgeoning area of research devoted to understanding the misrepresentation of health issues among veterans to access benefits.[21] At the same time, there have been efforts to revamp the assessment criteria that military healthcare providers must follow in evaluating veterans' claims for disability benefits.[22] The result is that some veterans find themselves pressed to obtain benefits for service-related health conditions for which records may be non-existent and may have difficulty meeting the threshold of the health examinations.

The consequences of this set of policies and gaps in organizational records are of high stakes for veterans. Those who did not keep copies of their service records are at risk of being denied service by Veterans Affairs (VA). In the absence of a robust governmental system to keep track of veterans’ records, active service members are encouraged to start managing their own records early in their service.[23] While the military trains enlisted personnel and commissioned officers on their official record-keeping functions, personal record-keeping skills are not part of the official curriculum. Additionally, the military does not include personal record-keeping as part of their regular ongoing educational series for enlisted personnel or required workshops before discharge.

The VFP research found military members create and maintain a wide array of different personal records in both analog and digital formats. An initial round of surveys of 267 active duty military and veterans found most used digital photographs and videos, with a significant portion still relying on more analog materials such as letters, postcards, and collecting physical objects. A series of focus groups with 99 participants identified over 225 themes within the data—rather than reviewing all of them, let me highlight a few things here.

Not surprisingly, participants indicated the use of a wide range of communication methods, including phone calls, emails, social media, texting, and letters. One participant highlighted the importance of a simple phone call back home, stating,

“when I was in Germany, I would get homesick. There was a payphone right off base, and I would put that mark in there, and I would dial Homer National Bank Time & Temperature…that just kinda made my day that I was listening to somebody back home, so to speak.”

Other participants discussed how they used different methods at different times during their service. For example, one participant discussed shifting from letters to texting and phone calls. Another noted how writing letters during deployments encouraged them to start writing a journal.

Yet another participant noted how much they valued postcards stating,

“I love just taping them up, being able to go somewhere else in my mind, and due to the simplistic nature of postcards, you can just keep it simple, synthesize the high points, tell someone you love them, send them a picture that matters, or receive one from back home, and that was just really powerful to have that.”

In discussing the preservation of their materials, many indicated privacy and security concerns, such as those who worked in special operations with classified materials and others who are wary about the security of cloud storage. Veterans also identified the need to preserve their materials for the public. As one noted,

“DC is going to need pictures for their museums. They’re going to need things that were essentially completely blocked for us to share from 9/11 forward.”

Just like my father’s physical footlocker, modern veterans store their analog materials in closets, boxes, attics, and garages. For some, its convenience, while for others, it helps compartmentalize difficult memories. As one veteran noted,

“A lot of it, I just wouldn’t be interested in that because everything’s in my garage. It’s locked away right now. I purposely have to prepare and go down to the garage and get the stuff out if I’m going to go down memory lane because it can be triggering for a lot of people. I know with a lot of the female Veterans I work with, any type of seeing a man in uniform is triggering for them in that way.”

Storing their digital materials remains a significant challenge for most veterans. Some noted holding on to hard drives and not being able to access them, others keep old cell phones, and several using cloud storage lost passwords, had accounts hacked, or even found the hosting companies went out of business.

Not surprisingly, veterans take great pride in their service and, subsequently, in the desire to keep and preserve their records. These objects, be they analog or digital, encapsulate important moments in their lives; as this participant notes,

“it’s like being your first time away from family, so there’s a lot of experiences that got kept in those letters, of how you were feeling, or how your family was feeling, at that moment, so it’s just something to look back to…it reminds you that you’ve grown, that you’ve matured.”

Finally, a significant number of veterans discussed losing records and the impact that had on them. While some of the loss came from forgetting passwords, as I just mentioned, many participants discussed the frequency of losing items during official military moves. This is best summarized here as one veteran stated,

“I think the biggest challenge is that every PCS season, it’s like a roulette wheel for what’s gonna go missing. Every time you move. But you know, just being – I kind of keep everything that’s super, super important locked up in folders and a safe, and I hand-carry it with me.”

Here are just a few key findings from the focus groups to summarize:

1. There has not been a complete shift from physical to digital—both maintain an important role within personal records;

2. Veterans collect a significant amount of artifacts in addition to more traditional records. These include jars of dirt, trinkets, and other mementos;

3. Active duty personnel are now encouraged to create so-called “Love me binders,” during their time in service. These binders include copies of important documents such as travel orders, promotions, reviews, awards, etc. The binders serve as a way to ensure veterans have access to their official records in case the military or VA loses them;

4. Training regarding documenting their time in service and preservation of personal records needs to occur earlier in one’s military career to avoid losing important records.

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NOTES

[1] e.g. Moering, “Military Service Records: Searching for the Truth”; Soyka and Wilczek, “Documenting the American Military Experience in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars”; Lois M. Joellenbeck, “Medical Surveillance and Other Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces: Revisiting after 10 Years.,” Military Medicine 176, no. 7 (2011): 64–70, https://doi.org/10.7205/milmed-d-11-00081; B. Christopher Frueh et al., “Documented Combat Exposure of US Veterans Seeking Treatment for Combat-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” British Journal of Psychiatry 186, no. JUNE (2005): 467–72, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.186.6.467.

[2] Frueh et al., “Documented Combat Exposure of US Veterans Seeking Treatment for Combat-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”; Richard J. McNally and B. Christopher Frueh, “Why Are Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Seeking PTSD Disability Compensation at Unprecedented Rates?,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 27, no. 5 (2013): 520–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2013.07.002; James Knoll and Phillip J. Resnick, “The Detection of Malingered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 29, no. 3 (2006): 629–47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2006.04.001; Brian P. Marx et al., “The Reality of Malingered PTSD Among Veterans: Reply to McNally and Frueh (2012),” In This Reply to McNally and Frueh (2012), We Offer Some Additional Insight into the Studies They Use to Support Their Argument That We Should Be Worried about Malingering among Veterans. We Also Describe Other Research on the Disability System of the Dep 25 (2012): 457–60, https://doi.org/10.1002/jts; Richard J. McNally and B. Christopher Frueh, “Why We Should Worry About Malingering in the VA System: Comment on Jackson et Al. (2011),” Journal of Traumatic Stress 25 (2012): 454–56, https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.

[3] Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002).

[4] The key difference between the pension system for revolutionary and civil war veterans lies in the large scale of the latter. The Civil War was the first military conflict that resulted in a massive mobilization of men of fighting age. In fact, it is estimated that the Union Army had mobilized 35% of northern men between 15 and 44 years by 1865. In fact, the scale of the mobilization was directly correlated with the large-scale of the pension system when compared to previous wars Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674717664..

[5] Skocpol.

[6] Alan C. Aimone and Barbara A. Aimone, A User’s Guide to the Official Records of the American Civil War (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing, 1993).

[7] Lyman Horace Weeks, History of Paper Manufacturing in the United States, 1690-1916 (New York, NY: Lockwood Trade Journal Company, 1916).

[8] Aimone and Aimone, A User’s Guide to the Official Records of the American Civil War.

[9] Darwin King and Carl Case, “Duties of Accounting Clerks during the Civil War and Their Influence on Current Accounting Practices,” Academy of Accounting and Financial Studies Journal 8, no. 3 (2004): 61.

[10] Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘Numbers on Top of Numbers’: Counting the Civil War Dead,” Journal of Military History 70, no. 4 (2006): 995–1010, https://doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2006.0239.

[11] Cimbala and Miller, Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments.

[12] The National Archives had a years-long conception. The land where the future archival institution would be housed was purchased in 1903, but congress formally created the agency until 1923, and it ordered the construction of the building until 1926. The building took a couple of years to complete, and its original 132 staff were hired until 1935. A critical factor in the founding of the National Archives was the American Legion, which advocated for symbolic and material compensation for veterans of the Great War in the interwar period. Robert M Warner, “The National Archives at Fifty,” The Midwester 10, no. 1 (1985): 25–32..

[13] Walter W. Stender and Evans Walker, “The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster,” The American Archivist 37, no. 4 (1974): 521–49.

[14] Warner, “The National Archives at Fifty.”

[15] Loryana L. Vie et al., “The U.S. Army Person-Event Data Environment: A Military-Civilian Big Data Enterprise,” Big Data 3, no. 2 (2015): 67–79, https://doi.org/10.1089/big.2014.0055.

[16] The 1973 fire is actually the second time that the military suffers a massive loss of records to fire. The first such incident occurred in 1800 at the Department of War. In this incident, documents from the first ten years of the union were lost Warner, “The National Archives at Fifty”; Stender and Walker, “The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster.”. Other governmental agencies have similarly lost records to fires, but those stories fall out of the scope of this article. Stender and Walker, “The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster.”

[17] National Personnel Records Center, “Access to Official Military Personnel Files - Veterans and Next-of-Kin,” National Archives and Records Administration, 2021, https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/ompf-access.

[18] National Personnel Records Center, “Request Military Personnel Records Using Standard Form 180,” National Archives and Records Administration, 2021, https://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records/standard-form-180.html.

[19] Soyka and Wilczek, “Documenting the American Military Experience in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars,” 184.

[20] Maria A. Morgan et al., “Discrepancies in Diagnostic Records of Military Service Members with Self-Reported PTSD: Healthcare Use and Longitudinal Symptom Outcomes,” General Hospital Psychiatry 58, no. February (2019): 33–38, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2019.02.006.

[21] Moering, “Military Service Records: Searching for the Truth”; Frueh et al., “Documented Combat Exposure of US Veterans Seeking Treatment for Combat-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”; McNally and Frueh, “Why Are Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Seeking PTSD Disability Compensation at Unprecedented Rates?”; Knoll and Resnick, “The Detection of Malingered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”; McNally and Frueh, “Why We Should Worry About Malingering in the VA System: Comment on Jackson et Al. (2011).”

[22] Knoll and Resnick, “The Detection of Malingered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”; James C. Jackson et al., “Variation in Practices and Attitudes of Clinicians Assessing PTSD-Related Disability Among Veterans,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 24, no. 5 (2011): 609–13, https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.

[23] Charles Holmes, “The Army I Love Me Book or Binder,” Part-Time-Commander.com, accessed April 30, 2021, https://www.part-time-commander.com/the-army-i-love-me-book-or-binder/.