Army; operational records missing
The Army Times reports that thousands of operational records from the war against terror are missing – almost all of the records of the 82nd Airborne Division;
McHugh’s letter was addressed to the committee chairman, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., and the panel’s senior Democrat, Michael Michaud of Maine, who said in an email July 12 that the records were of critical importance to veterans.
“The admission that there are massive amounts of lost records is only the first step,” Michaud said. “I appreciate the Army issuing orders to address this serious problem, but I’m concerned that it took a letter from Congress to make it happen.”
“Our veterans have given up so much for our country, and they deserve a complete record of their service — for the sake of history, as well as potential disability claims down the road,” he said.
Apparently, many of the records were erased off of hard drives when units left theater and were unsure about whether they could return to the States with classified material on their computers. And of course, there was the inability of units to maintain complete records.
The missing records do not include personnel files and medical records, which are stored separately from the field records that detail day-to-day activities.
So from a Stolen Valor perspective, future liars can’t claim that they were awarded a medal and the records were lost in this fiasco, unless they try to claim that they should have been awarded a medal for an action that was lost.
Thanks to David for the link.
Category: Big Army
Eh…I might be missing something, but isn’t “claiming a medal for an action that was lost” SOP with many fakers?
So they lost a list of their SIGACT’s?
Digital or dead tree – multiple backup copies are ALWAYS a best idea.
I hope the 82nd can get some good digital forensics people to read and recreate the deleted data from the erased hard drives.
There is guy right now, working under the bare bulb in his mom’s basement, concocting his stolen valor glory story that will try to use this to his advantage.
Can’t say this surprises me. I’ve read somewhere that a huge part of the records for at least one major HQ in Vietnam can’t be located today (want to say it was either the Americal Div or one of the Field Forces, but I’m not positive).
That was during an era where the records were required to be archived on paper. We store much if not most of that digitally now.
It’s a helluva lot easier and quicker to wipe digital records than it is to burn linear feet of paper. So given human nature and the inevitability of errors and misunderstandings . . . .
New posers arriving in, 5…4…3….2….1….
Yeah!! So, while I was on my classified mission with the 82nd (secretly reassigned from the Navy)shhhh. I singlehandedly wiped out a company of Hajis using my Gerber tool and a slingshot. I was awarded 14 Silver Stars with coconut clusters but dang it! They wiped the hard drive and there is no record!
We maintain an entire CALL (Center for Army Lessons Learned) and Army Center for Military History. For what?
I put this forward to CALL twice. They should create a database for deploying units. Every unit that deploys should have a couple of authorized representatives (the 1SG and Unit Additional Duty Historian) that can log on and record “daily reports” (or whatever you want to call them)…similar to 1SG Morning Reports in the old days. I urged it to not be anything to onerous or time consuming. Just a simple record of what went on that day or over a few days.
Pretty pathetic when I have a very detailed record of my great-great grandfather’s daily activities in the Civil War (because the morning reports and Commanding Officer’s records were archived properly) yet we f*ck up our own records in the modern “information era”.
Marines kept records on daily record logs. This site shows many even back to daily logs during the Vietnam war. I’m sure other services had to as well.
http://www.recordsofwar.com/vietnam/usmc/USMC_Rvn.htm
They had the same problem during Desert Storm. Although Army regulations say that all unit records generated in combat are permanent records, and are supposed to be retired to the National Archives (after the Army holds on to them for a while), many units didn’t. I’m told that the S-2 of the 2 ACR had the regimental records destroyed before they returned to teh states after Desert Storm because htey were all classified. The Center of Military History has teams deployed (I was on one in Desert Storm), as does CALL, but they don’t collect everything. Mostly they collect oral histories (or lessons learned) and write about specific actions, but not the entire campaign. That comes later, using the unit records–which are all pretty crappy since the Vietnam War–and which are nonexistant in the case of this story.
VOV, ByrdMan: this won’t do much regarding the higher-level awards. Could conceivably lead to some false claims of lower-level ones, but the fact that personnel and medical records weren’t affected argues against that. Awards should have been in the personnel “bin” vice operational. If it was approved, it should have gone into the personnel files. Not there means not official.
Yes, some will use this as a crutch and claim “the Army purged my (fill in the blank)”. Reality is that is easily proven to be BS. Not in the personnel file means the presumption is “never happened”. And if it was inadvertently omitted from his/her OMPF, the individual should have the award cert and orders to show it’s legit – and be able to get his unit to correct things by getting it into his official personnel file.
IMO, where this could hurt someone is in a retroactive application for a deserved CIB/CMB/CAB, or for someone who actually did have an award that got misfiled with the operational records and not correctly processed. As I recall, at least some of those can be submitted well after the fact (I believe I’ve seen some DA correspondence to that effect for the combat badges). However, without supporting operational records proving a retroactive application for a combat badge or tracking down a misfiled legitimate award recommendation may have gotten quite a bit tougher – if not impossible.
@8 Damn it, that was going to be my story! I am a Vietnam vet but I was going to claim, at age 62 that I wiped out that company and they lost my records and my awards! Now I have to come up with a different poser story. 😀
Maybe Julian ASS angeHas them?
It doesn’t help that we are doing all our work on CENTRIX in Afghanistan instead of SIPR. I wasn’t able to save a year’s worth of data that I would love to have brought back to my unit because of that one issue.
In Iraq we mostly used SIPR and I saved most of my stuff to my AKO-S because that’s what we used for computer communication.
This would not surprise me one bit either. In my old unit I tired to find accounts of actions that occurred during OIF 1 and there were none available at the unit.
As soon as units re-deploy hard drives are being wiped and all records of SIGACTS are gone. Unless they are backed up by a higher headquarters or someone has kept stuff they really aren’t supposed to a lot of history is lost.