Requesting Service Treatment Records: Who Holds Them and How to Ask

They are the health file built while a person was in uniform. The National Archives describes health records as covering the outpatient, dental and mental health treatment that former members received while in military service, and says they include induction and separation physical examinations as well as routine medical care such as doctor and dental visits and lab tests, when the patient was not admitted to a hospital.

Inpatient care went into a different file with a different custodian, which is the first place a request goes wrong. The National Archives calls those clinical records, generated when active duty members were actually hospitalized, and states that they are typically not filed with the health records but retired to the National Personnel Records Center by the facility that created them. A hospital stay and the sick call visit that preceded it can therefore be in two different files with two different request paths.

What the file shows is what somebody noticed, examined and wrote down at the time. Not what hurt. What got recorded.

This is where the topic gets hard, and the reason is real. Custody changed twice, and the dates are branch specific. The National Archives narrates the first change in one paragraph: in 1992 the Army began retiring most of its former members' health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs, over the next six years the other services followed suit, and in 2014 the military services discontinued the practice of retiring the records to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The chart it publishes gives each branch its own date. Records go to the Department of VA, Records Management Center for separations in these windows. Army, 10/16/1992 to 12/31/2013. Navy, 01/31/1994 to 12/31/2013. Air Force and Space Force, 05/01/1994 to 12/31/2013. Marine Corps, 05/01/1994 to 12/31/2013. Coast Guard, 04/01/1998 to 09/30/2014.

For separations on or after 01/01/2014 the record went to a service processing center instead: the AMEDD Record Processing Center for the Army, BUMED Navy Medicine Records Activity for the Navy and the Marine Corps, and the AF STR Processing Center for the Air Force and Space Force. The Coast Guard line runs a few months later, on or after 10/1/2014, to USCG HSWL SC Medical Administration. Separations before a branch's first date generally leave the health record filed with the personnel record at the National Personnel Records Center, which is how it worked for everyone until the 1990s.

The row the National Archives publishes is labeled Air Force Reserve / National Guard, and it works like this: discharged or retired from the Reserves or National Guard between 06/01/1994 and 12/31/2013 goes to the Department of VA, Records Management Center, and on or after 01/01/2014 goes to the AF STR Processing Center. That start date is a month later than the active-duty Air Force line above it. A month is enough to send a request to the wrong building.

The chart carries no Space Force reserve row, which is what you would expect from a row that starts in 1994. Space Force does appear on the chart, sharing the active-duty lines with the Air Force, so the sensible inference is that a Space Force reserve record would follow the Air Force too. That inference is not something the National Archives says, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

Current service is a different question from separated service, and the locations chart answers it separately. All active and non-active duty Army National Guard records are listed with The Adjutant General of the appropriate state, DC, or Puerto Rico. Current Air National Guard officers not on active duty, and Air Guard members released from active duty, are listed at the Air Reserve Personnel Center at Buckley AFB, while current Air Guard enlisted not on active duty go back to the state Adjutant General. Current Navy Reserve is with Navy Personnel Command. Individual Ready Reserve and Fleet Marine Corps Reserve are with Marine Forces Reserve.

So for a Guard veteran the first question is not which form to fill out. It is which government held the record: a state, or the United States.

Often, and the National Archives says so in plain terms. Veterans who plan to file a claim for medical benefits with the VA do not need to request a copy of their military health record from the National Personnel Records Center, because after a claim is filed the VA will obtain the original health record from the center. The same page adds that many health records were lent to the Department of Veterans Affairs before the 1973 fire, which is why a record that burned in St. Louis sometimes survives in a VA file.

Records the VA gathers for a claim end up in the VA's own claims file, the C-file, next to the exam reports and the decision documents. A veteran who wants to see what the agency actually looked at usually learns more from the claims file than from re-requesting the same records elsewhere, because the claims file also shows what arrived and what did not.

The National Archives tells veterans who filed a medical claim to contact the VA to find out whether their record is already on file, and gives 1-800-827-1000 as the number that connects to the nearest VA office.

The free route comes first, and it runs online through eVetRecs at vetrecs.archives.gov, which the National Archives points to for most health and medical records, with identity verification through ID.me. There is no charge for basic military personnel and medical record information provided to veterans, next of kin and authorized representatives from federal, non-archival records.

By mail or fax the form is Standard Form 180, Request Pertaining to Military Records. Page three carries routing tables organized by branch, separation date and type of record, and the address you use comes from that table rather than from a general address. The National Archives notes that additional information is required when the request is for clinical or medical treatment records. Every written request for non-archival records has to be signed and dated within the last year.

Navy and Marine Corps medical records at the National Personnel Records Center carry an extra note on the locations chart: they are filed separately from the Official Military Personnel File, they are not accessioned records, and they stay subject to Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act restrictions. Requesting the personnel file does not automatically produce them.

A short return is a fact about custody and about what somebody wrote down at the time. It is not a verdict about the person who served.

There are ordinary reasons a file arrives light. Care that nobody documented is not in it. Inpatient records were filed by the treating facility rather than with the health record, so a hospitalization may need its own request. Separations inside the 1992 to 2014 windows moved to the VA, so a request aimed at the wrong custodian returns only what that custodian happens to hold. And for a large group of Army and Air Force veterans the file may have burned in July 1973, which the National Archives handles through a separate reconstruction process with its own forms.

The response to a gap is another records question. Work out who else would have written something down about the same event, and ask them. Unit and organizational records, treating facility records, and, where a file burned, the alternate sources the National Personnel Records Center uses for reconstruction all exist because paper files have always gone missing.