How to find a veteran's service records, and what to do when the fire took them

Most families start this the same way. Somebody dies, or somebody turns eighty, and what is left is a shoebox: a few photographs, a folded flag, a discharge paper nobody can read, and a story with holes in it. You want the dates. You want to know where he was and when.

Here is where the paperwork actually is.

Start with the DD-214

The DD-214 is the discharge document, and it is the single most useful piece of paper in this whole search. It carries entry and separation dates, rank at discharge, decorations, and usually the schools attended and the units served with.

If the family has one anywhere, find it before you request anything else. A great deal of what people spend months chasing is already on that page.

If nobody has it, it can be requested, and that request is the same one described below.

The full file lives in St. Louis

Everything else is the Official Military Personnel File, the OMPF, held by the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. That file is the assignment history: which unit, which base, from when to when, and every promotion along the way.

You request it with a Standard Form 180 (SF-180), or online through the National Archives. It is free.

Who is allowed to ask matters:

• The veteran can request their own file, always.
• Next of kin of a deceased veteran can request the full file. Next of kin means the surviving spouse, parent, child, or sibling.
• Anyone else can request it too, but only the parts releasable to the public, which is far less. Records generally open fully to the public 62 years after separation.

Include as much as you know: full name, date and place of birth, service number or Social Security number, branch, and rough dates of service. A request with a date of birth on it moves considerably faster than one without.

The part nobody warns you about: the 1973 fire

On 12 July 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center destroyed something like 16 to 18 million personnel files. There were no duplicates, no microfilm, and no index of what had been in the building.

It was not random. It hit two specific groups:

• Army: roughly 80% of records for personnel discharged between 1 November 1912 and 1 January 1960. That takes in most of the Second World War and most of Korea.
• Air Force: roughly 75% of records for personnel discharged between 25 September 1947 and 1 January 1964, for surnames falling alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.

Read those dates carefully before you assume the worst. Somebody who served in Korea and stayed in through Vietnam was almost certainly discharged after 1964, which puts them outside the window entirely. Their file is probably intact.

Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard records were not in the affected area.

If the file did burn

It is not the end of the search. The Records Center reconstructs files from other sources, and you can help by naming what you already know. The most useful alternates are:

• Morning reports and unit rosters, which recorded who was present with a unit on a given day.
• Pay records, held separately and often surviving.
• VA claim files, if the veteran ever filed. These frequently contain a copy of the DD-214.
• State adjutant general offices, which sometimes hold their own copies of discharge papers, especially for National Guard service.
• County courthouses. Enormous numbers of veterans recorded their discharge with the county clerk when they came home. This is the most overlooked source on this list and it costs a phone call.

Photographs are filed somewhere else entirely

This surprises people. If you are looking for pictures rather than dates, the personnel file is the wrong building.

Military photographs live with the National Archives in College Park, in the still picture records, searchable at catalog.archives.gov. Air Force imagery is largely Record Group 342; Army imagery is largely Record Group 111.

The thing to understand is that military photographers were almost never credited individually. Images were filed by unit, operation and subject, not by who was holding the camera. Searching a person's name will return nothing no matter how long you look at it.

What you can do is find their assignment history first, then search what that unit produced while they were with it. It is indirect, and it works.

The Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell holds unit histories, which sometimes do name who was assigned. For Vietnam specifically, the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech has a large digitised photograph collection.

Expect it to take a while

Requests to the National Personnel Records Center are measured in weeks and sometimes months, and burned-file reconstructions take longer. Submit it and forget about it; chasing does not speed it up.

While you wait, the most valuable thing you can do costs nothing: ask the person, if they are still here. A twenty minute conversation with a recording running will get you things no archive holds. Which sergeant he hated. What the food was like. Why he still will not eat creamed beef. The archive has the dates. Only he has the rest.

This site is one place to keep what comes back. After the Oath puts a service member's whole career on one page: the oath, the letters, every promotion, every posting. You do not need exact days, which matters here, because a request that comes back with a year and not much else still belongs on a timeline. The whole family can add to the same page, so whoever has the photographs and whoever has the paperwork are not two separate piles any more.