Military Personnel Records Center
[5] The Military Personnel Records Center was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, and opened in the fall of 1955 after three years of construction.
and developed a bad reputation as being non-customer friendly, with an average wait time of between 11 and 16 weeks for record responses.
[9] Until 1996, the Military Personnel Records Center operated through a complex system of paperwork forms with little computer automation.
[12] The fire was reported after midnight on July 12 and firefighters arrived just 4 minutes and 20 seconds after the first alarm sounded, but smoke and heat forced them to withdraw shortly after 3 AM.
[14] The source of the hoax was a sham email circulating online that advised veterans and dependents to request original records via the NPRC if they did not want them to be destroyed.
[15] Director Peter S. Gaytan of the American Legion National Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation (VA&R) Commission posted a bulletin, dated September 30, warning about the hoax and explaining that the NPRC would only perform scans to "minimize the handling of fragile documents or reduce the time it takes to locate a record.
[14][16] Gaytan warned in his bulletin that a surge in requests could delay document retrieval needed for burials, benefits, loans, and employment; the National Archives shared this concern.
[14][13] When it learned of the hoax, the NPRC informed the Department of Defense and modified its online application process to minimize any excess requests.
The purpose of any electronic scanning would be to reduce the handling of fragile records during the reference process or to reduce the time necessary to locate and answer an OMPF inquiry.Despite the NPRC warning, National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) officials were deceived by the hoax and posted part of the sham email on their website.
"[15] The U.S. Coast Guard posted a notice about the hoax in the Military Personnel section of its website, warning of "false reports circulating around the internet to veterans' groups.
"[19] John Constance, the National Archives and Records Administration director of congressional and public affairs, said: "We have a limited number of people to do the work and anything that ramps the requests up this quickly is a big production issue with us.
"[19] Susan Cooper, the archive's public affairs officer, said that some records were being digitized "for reference and preservation" because frequent handling caused "some wear and tear.
"[19] The Air Reserve Personnel Center also published Garamone's article in the November/December 2004 issue of its newsletter,[20] and the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps websites both continue, as of 2023, to display notices about the file destruction "urban legend.
"[21][22] In 2014, two employees of the Military Personnel Records Center were discovered to have unlawfully disposed or destroyed over eighteen hundred documents by either abandoning them in lesser used areas of the MPR facility, removing the documents and then destroying them off site, or abandoning the records in a wooded area in western Illinois.
