Matthew has been a soldier in the U.S. Army for 31 years. He joined the military straight out of college, first committing to an initial five-year contract, but found that the opportunities that the military gave him made him want to stay. He loved traveling, learning foreign languages and rising to the physical challenges of his job.
“I could have retired at any point,” he told New Lines during a phone interview, asking to withhold his surname because he is still on active duty. “It was fun, challenging, rewarding and, frankly, I was having a good time. It just felt satisfying. That is why I stayed in up to this point.”
His time deployed abroad amounts to a total of eight years, during which he served in places including Afghanistan and Sudan, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, with responsibility for overseeing hundreds of troops and leading tactical operations.
After decades of service, he is now approaching retirement but is finding that the process of leaving the forces is far from smooth. Before he can leave, the Army wants a plethora of paperwork and forms to prove exactly where he has been and what he has done while serving — places and duties that the Army has assigned to him.
Despite the might of the U.S. military, the most powerful fighting force on earth has a surprisingly hands-off approach to personnel recordkeeping. Soldiers are expected to keep their own paper trail. Every year, more than 200,000 military personnel prepare to retire from the U.S. armed forces. But first they must wade through a bewildering array of bureaucracy to prove that, throughout their career, they did what the military ordered them to do and indeed went to the places where the military sent them. If they fail to show the documents that they are responsible for keeping, they risk loss of pay and benefits from their retirement pension.
Heather J. Hagan, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army, told New Lines that the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, known in the military as G-1, manages and maintains soldiers’ records. Additionally, the Army Review Boards Agency can correct errors or injustices on what’s known as a DD Form 214, with evidence provided by an applicant or in a record. Army Human Resources Command can make similar corrections. The problem, however, is that individuals are encouraged to be their own recordkeepers up to the point of the official documentation and data entry, photocopying and filing their paperwork each time they get a new role and making sure that all of this is properly lodged with the appropriate military office when they move jobs.
When it comes time for a service member to leave the military, they are then expected to present these documents to the Department of Defense to prove they have done what they say they have done, been where they say they have been and earned what they say they have earned. “That is a lot of paperwork,” said Matthew of his 31 years of service. “It is a long history to maintain inside of an accordion file.”
The whole process of collecting these documents is so involved that it is advised to start up to two years before their intended “separation” from the service — military speak for the point of departure from being a member of the armed forces to becoming a civilian. “I talked to other military members that were separating [and] when I mentioned that I’ll be out of the military in about a year, their eyes got a little bit wider,” Matthew said. “They were like, ‘Are you just starting now?’” If he fails to locate all the paperwork he needs, including documents dating back to his initial entry in the 1990s, he could find that he misses out on crucial benefits or that the Veterans Affairs Department of the U.S. Uniformed Services could refuse to cover some of his medical conditions.
The problem is particularly pressing because many of the young men and women who signed up to defend their country in the aftermath of 9/11 are now reaching 20 years of service, typically the time that career soldiers consider retirement. Like Matthew, they will be scrambling to log all the documents they need — and, for many, it is a matter of either cashing in on the benefits they are owed or not receiving such benefits at all.
Service members are taught from the beginning of their military careers to keep everything they are given — from award citations to performance reviews — and store it in some variation of what the Army calls an “I Love Me Book.” Many service members remember being taught about the book on day one of their time in the forces.
The book, often a ring binder or accordion file of loose papers, is supposed to encourage a sense of self-reliance and independence. It should contain everything and anything relating to the service member, from their waiver to join the military — an individual’s exception, usually medical-related, to enlist despite not meeting the standards — to the contract they signed when they raised their right hand at the Military Entrance Processing Station and pledged allegiance to serve their country, enlistments and appointments to duty stations, assignment orders, training, performance reviews, medals and even disciplinary actions.
The book can be a useful way for young recruits to keep track of important documents, but as service members move countries and jobs and have families, recordkeeping can become an afterthought. “It’s prudent and smart to keep track of your own stuff, but it can just get so complicated,” Matthew said.
That is partly because getting the documents to file in the “I Love Me Book” can be far from straightforward. Take a service member who has been given an award for serving in a particular country. In an ideal world, the service member should get a document from a superior officer in their unit saying that they have been presented with this award. They should then photocopy that document and visit their department’s administration office to have it logged in their personnel file.
Once at the administration office, there is typically a wait to be seen. Offices are usually closed during breakfast or lunch hours, or within about 50 minutes of the end of the duty day at 5 p.m., or 3 p.m. the Friday before a holiday weekend. Once they are called to be seen, the soldier hands in the award document — which needs to have all the necessary signatures — to whoever is in the office. Once logged, the service member should then check their personnel files online using their common access card from a computer. This can only be done on computers that can access U.S. government websites or have Department of Defense certificates installed. Only when all of these steps have been successfully completed can a member of the armed forces file away those treasured photocopies in their “I Love Me Book.”
All of this has to happen while the service member is doing their day job, usually in snatched moments between assignments and other more pressing duties. The problem is compounded by the fact that many records departments are headed up by junior soldiers processing paperwork in understaffed offices.
Aline Stroud was a private first class in the Army Reserve deployed to Kuwait in 2018-2019 as a human resources professional, known as a 42A specialist in military parlance. She said that HR processes are often undervalued in the forces but are an essential part of life in the military. “Sometimes it feels like HR jobs get swept under the rug and can go unappreciated,” Stroud said. “But if you think about it, we support the soldier so they can have peace of mind that they and their families are taken care of.”
She said her main duty in Kuwait was to make sure awards were properly recorded. According to regulation, an impact award or an award for a tour of duty is supposed to be submitted 90 days prior to the service member’s release date. “That usually never happened,” she said. “People were always submitting late awards, which resulted in some soldiers leaving theater without an award in hand.”
The process for a service member to receive an award goes through a long chain of command for approval, and even though the award has been approved on several levels, it isn’t entered into the service member’s records until they request that it be entered. Having no award in hand means that they would have to track down the physical paperwork from their location in the continental U.S. while the award may still be in an office overseas. In some cases, the military unit that the service member is receiving the award from may not be the same unit they’re attached to when they return. For that reason, the person who should do the paperwork might remain abroad and the unit in the U.S. would bear no responsibility for any award.
The information logged throughout a service person’s career and contained in the “I Love Me Book” should be all the paperwork necessary to obtain the coveted DD Form 214, which is frequently requested by veterans and their families to showcase details of the service member’s time and accomplishments in the armed forces when that individual leaves the military. This Department of Defense-issued document summarizes one’s entire service record, including decorations, ribbons and campaign medals, as well as the name and inclusive dates of any official operations the member served in.
Matthew said that as he was reviewing the requirements for retirement, he thought his Officer Record Brief, which displays his Department of the Army photo as well as the schools he attended throughout his military career, the clearances he obtained and other pertinent information all on one page, would suffice as proof. But he is finding that is not the case.
“Essentially, you have to rejustify everything” for it to appear on the DD214, he said. “You have to re-prove and document everything that’s on there. That can be a significant challenge. There’s a reason why the military basically [says] that you can start the process for retirement about two years out.”
The consequences for failing to update official military records can be serious, with service personnel potentially missing out on pay or benefits that they earned during their career.
Individuals get special entitlements based on where they have served and what they have done. For instance, some can be eligible for civilian clothing allowances, special tax treatment or extra pay for being deployed to hostile environments. But all of that, even after the fact, still has to be proven with paperwork.
The Defense Finance and Accounting Services homepage advises service members: “Your pay and allowances are important to us. Keeping them straight is a team effort between you, your finance office and our military pay experts.”
Service members who have exposed flaws in their leave or earnings statements often find that the finance office is quick to deduct pay when there is an overpayment and slow to rectify an underpayment when it’s owed back to the service member. The repayment to the service member is called “backpay,” and can amount to quite a paycheck when the error has been in the system for a long time.
The military has moved to a system called the Integrated Personnel and Pay System (the name varies slightly for each branch of the military) in an effort to create a more advanced and integrated electronic recordkeeping method. According to Hagan the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army streamlines recordkeeping by integrating numerous legacy systems and databases into one system. “IPPS-A ensures accurate and timely processing of soldier actions and provides them full transparency of — and the ability to track — their personnel actions,” she said.
Michael T. Dickerson, chief of media relations at the Air Force Personnel Center, said, “A record that is not accurately updated can result in missing various benefits and would require a formal correction process to amend.”
Dickerson said that while each service has its own office of corrections, records should be updated long before retirement. “Early in their careers, airmen and guardians should regularly review their electronic records to ensure accuracy,” he said. “Avoid waiting until departure or a missed promotion opportunity to track down documents; instead, address any issues as they arise.”
While each military unit has HR professionals like Stroud lodging paperwork and pay, it is still the responsibility of the service member to nudge the process along and keep track of their own documents.
Prior to the most recently updated automation, the methods being used were developed in the 1950s and refined three decades later. That’s why a soldier like Matthew, whose career began in the ’90s, might have a lot of catching up to do. He still has to gather all of his hard copy documents, dating back to former President Bill Clinton’s time as commander in chief, so he can present them to be entered and stored electronically.
With the IPPS-A, Hagan says many of the Army’s manual paper processes, such as for leave, awards, name changes or retirement, are now automated. This “helps to eliminate the input of duplicate personnel information into multiple databases, reduce errors and increase efficiency. Upon approval of an action, IPPS-A sends the documentation direct to a soldier’s military record, reducing the potential for missing items on the DD 214.”
When a service member is finally discharged from duty and leaves the forces, their records — along with any unaddressed errors or omissions — are then transferred to be permanently housed at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. At this point, they become a part of history.
Rashale Brockington, customer service manager at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, says they receive 30,000 to 40,000 requests for records each year. The records go back hundreds of years and include service records for members of every branch of the military.
Documents may be requested in years to come by historians or even family members and descendants not yet born. This makes it that much more important that the records in the archives are accurate, because it becomes nearly impossible to fix them retroactively at that stage.
“It’s important to preserve history and for veterans to have access to their records,” Brockington said. She recommends service members ensure all their information is correct and complete before they leave the service and their records are released to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. “Make copies and put it someplace safe,” she said.
Matthew said that it is pretty much routine for anyone ending their career in the military to need to track down extra documents to prove all they have done in the military. “The corrective actions fall on the same people that are just as overworked, such that they didn’t get it right the first time,” he said.
He will only be able to leave the military when his records are complete, and he is finding that a lack of recordkeeping could slow down his entire retirement process. Should he choose to leave and say that his records are accounted for in their entirety when they are not, he could then have a difficult time fixing any errors or omissions discovered while outside the confines of the military service.
“It’s on the service member,” he said. “The problem doesn’t get better with time, it just compounds.”
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