Veterans Can’t Get Benefits Due to 1973 National Personnel Records Center Fire

The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) on the outskirts of St. Louis caught fire on July 12th, 1973. No one knows what began the blaze, but the lack of a sprinkler system and thousands of paper files contributed to a four-and-a-half day fire. It’s considered the worst archival disaster in U.S. history.  In the end, 16-18 million veterans lost their records. This includes an estimated 80% of Army personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960 and 75% of Air Force personnel whose service ended between 1947 and 1964. About 6.5 million documents were saved. Since the disaster, the NPRC has worked hard to help veterans and their families recreate the service records which were lost in the fire.

Charles Cohen didn’t realize that his records were among those destroyed until he tried to obtain a plot in the Beverly National Cemetery in New Jersey. Cohen wants to be buried next to his father, who served in the Army during World War I. That’s when Cohen learned he would need his service records in order to get the plot and that those records were destroyed in the 1973 fire.

Cohen filed a request with the NPRC and received a certificate of military service. But the certificate stated that he entered the Army and left it on the same day, April 24, 1946. It also states that he never rose above the rank of private. Cohen says that he left World War II as a First Sergeant and the Korean War as an Acting Company Commander. The certificate states that date of birth is “not available”.
“I think they just put that down because they didn’t want to go looking for anything else,” Cohen said. He didn’t understand how this could be his new military record, due to the inaccuracies.

Emil Limpert is a World War II veteran who earned a Purple Heart but who was denied benefits because his records were lost in that fire. Limpert is 90 and only applying for benefits at this time because he is “down to nothing”. After finding out that there is no record of his service, a GoFundMe fund was set up to support him financially while he continues to try to prove his military record.
The NPRC handles 5,000 requests each day from veterans or their next of kin who are seeking benefits, burial services, or answers to questions about the past. There are 25 people at the facility devoted to preserving the 6.5 million records that survived the fire and 40 people handling incoming requests.

In most cases, the NPRC is able to get information from other government agencies and veteran groups for proof of service. If they can pinpoint a date of entry or discharge, they can issue an official document like the one sent to Cohen. If they can’t find any information then it’s the end of the road for the veteran. It’s as if they never served.

Cohen can use the certificate he received for military benefits, including burial rights. Cohen feels insulted, though. He said, “I want credit for everything I did.”

Cohen says he was a member of the 609^th Transportation Company, an all-black unit, in World War II. He watched friends get sick in Japan from radiation poisoning when they weren’t warned of the danger by the U.S. military. In the Korean War, he served as part of the US Army Corp of Engineers. He experienced racism while he served but doesn’t like to talk about it.


https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/veterans-cant-get-benefits-due-1973-fire.html

SMH; so many utter foul ups within this multi-faceted Veterans Affair Service Agency and they were so: ill prepared - under staffed - woefully using an antiquated data base system and with the DOD getting the high end of the budget each year the cuts always end up coming out of the VA agencies pockets.

And as with this article you've brought here for us to read, this is just the tip of the ice berg for so many of our Vets and the mind-boggling hassle that falls back on their shoulders to 'PROVE YOU SERVED' before you get any benefits that you 'EARNED FOR THAT SERVICE' - it's just insane.  The abject frustration - the mammoth reams of paper work - the number of humans that one retire/wounded veteran has to speak with to try to get any help is enough to just make them give up and say 'F - IT' and they often do.
 
And as bad as that loss of those 'hard copy files' were to be in non-fire proof containers - the poorly handled software updates and lame attempts to do partial data base changes {cost cutting measure to save some bucks} ended up shutting the entire nation wide VA hospital system down.

At times, the bad news coming from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs seems unstoppable: D-grade medical facilities, ongoing security and privacy breaches, and a revolving door of departing leadership. In September, during a hearing by the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, lawmakers learned about an unscheduled system failure that took down key applications in 17 VA medical facilities for a day.                        
Characterized by Dr. Ben Davoren, the director of clinical informatics for the San Francisco VA Medical Center, as "the most significant technological threat to patient safety the VA has ever had," the outage has moved some observers to call into question the VA's direction in consolidating its IT operations. Yet the shutdown grew from a simple change management procedure that wasn't properly followed.
The small, undocumented change ended up bringing down the primary patient applications at 17 VA medical centers in Northern California. As a result, the schedule to centralize IT operations across more than 150 medical facilities into four regional data processing centers has been pulled back while VA IT leaders establish what the right approach is for its regionalization efforts.
The Region 1 Field Operations breakdown of Aug. 31 exposed just how challenging effecting substantial change is in a complex organization the size of the VA Office of Information & Technology (OI&T). Begun in October 2005 and originally scheduled to be completed by October 2008, the "reforming" of the IT organization at the VA involved several substantial goals: the creation of major departments along functional areas such as enterprise development, quality and performance, and IT oversight and compliance; the reassignment of 6,000 technical professionals to a more centralized management; and the adoption of 36 management processes defined in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2539837/government-it/the-va-s-computer-systems-meltdown--what-happened-and-why.html

From back logs in appointments to    miscommunications between the Veteran being able to go 'off site' for appointments but never getting approval to do so - the length of time from a Vet returning from activity duty to actually seeing a physician might mean a wait as long as 1½ years - and some of those patients have DIED while waiting!