Center personnel provide unique service to veterans

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2002 (DeploymentLINK) - What a servicemember experiences during his military career depends to an extent on his or her location on any particular day. That is what might determine what dangerous situation a person gets exposed to, and also what kind of benefits a military member might qualify for later in life. When that kind of information really matters, veterans of all the services turn to the Army's Center for Unit Records Research.

"We're part of the Department of Defense, but we really work for the veteran," says Don Hakenson, director of the Center for Unit Records Research. "It's our job to document every unit's location. We also document the activities of units."

That has been Hakenson's mission since 1980 when the organization began, as the Army Agent Orange Task Force. The herbicide, commonly called Agent Orange, was one of the plant-killing chemicals used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. The chemical compound included a toxic substance called dioxin. Herbicides were dispensed from airplanes, helicopters, trucks and backpack sprayers. When the Department of Veterans Affairs began paying benefits for illnesses related to Agent Orange exposure, it became important to be able to verify the extent of a veteran's exposure. The Task Force developed that ability, and still does so today.

"If you want to know how many spray missions took place near you, we can tell you, if you know your unit and the dates," Hakenson says.

The work of the Agent Orange Task Force proved valuable. In 1982, the VA asked if they could also help with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder claims. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a psychiatric disorder that can occur after experiencing or witnessing of life-threatening events such as military combat. Those suffering from PTSD may relive the experience through nightmares. In the early 1980s, the VA was seeing a large number of patients who might suffer from this disorder because of their military experience.

"If you were on active duty and you witnessed a traumatic event, and you're reliving that event over and over, you might be eligible for benefits," Hakenson says.

However, in order to process benefit claims, the VA needed to verify who had been exposed to such an event. Hakenson's team developed the skills and systems to research unit records and verify who was present at battles and other events that could give rise to PTSD. The organization was soon given a new name to reflect that ability.

Today, researching PTSD claims represents about 85 percent of the CURR's work. They receive between 4,500 and 5,000 PTSD cases every year, and not just because of combat. PTSD is a problem that can arise on every deployment, and even when there is no combat experience. Natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents or violent personal assaults like rape can result in PTSD. Any veteran who experienced such an event while on active duty might qualify for benefits.

The center gained another mission in the mid-1990s. The VA established a Gulf War Registry to track the servicemembers deployed to Operations Desert Shield and Storm. Then DoD learned that U.S. forces destroyed a cache of rockets containing the nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin in an Iraq weapons storage facility at Khamisiyah. It was imperative that DoD learn which servicemembers were in the potential hazard area and may have been exposed to low levels of those nerve agents. The Center for Unit Records Research and the Defense Manpower Data Center provided the databases used to determine unit locations during the Gulf War, and who was in each unit in the possible exposure hazard areas. Hakenson says their requirement was to track the location of every unit, down to the company level, for every day of the war.

"It was a massive project," he says. "First we had to go through all the records that had been retired. Then we gathered the S-3's and G-3's [battalion level and higher unit operations officers] to fill in the gaps."

The S-3/G-3 conferences came after a lot of work had already been done. The Center for Unit Records Research started reviewing records in mid-1994, deriving unit locations from a large number of Gulf War unit records. They gathered unit location information from a wide range of sources, including unit history data archives, operational logs, situation reports, after action reports and historical reports. The initial effort to record unit location data received a big boost in 1995 when the deputy secretary of defense established the Gulf War Declassification Project. The services' declassification offices joined the effort to review Gulf War operational records, declassify them, and routinely make these documents available to the center.

The Center declared its database operational late in 1995. Since then it has continually updated the database as additional unit locations are obtained. Today, it has more than 900,000 unit locations in its database of daily unit locations during the war. Based largely on that work, DoD released the Khamisiyah case narrative in 1997 and updated it in 2000.

Today, Hakenson's staff of 16 researchers continue to provide both location and event data for servicemembers of past conflicts. In addition to Gulf War and Vietnam veterans, they receive about 500 cases each year concerning World War II and Korea veterans, as well as the occasional World War I case. Many of those older cases call for Hakenson's team to verify a veteran's qualification for Purple Hearts or other awards. That kind of data is seldom stored in a computer database, unless CURR personnel put it there.

"You have to go where the records are," Hakenson says.

That can often mean a field trip to the Smithsonian Institute or the National Archives in College Park, Md. The Air Force History Office at Bolling Air Force Base is a rich source of information on veterans from that service. Background on sailors might be found at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Hakenson says daily journals, or morning reports as they were once called, have proved to be invaluable.

"Records were kept better by commanders in WWII than in the Gulf. The morning report was done away with in 1974. It reported the status of every person every day. We've used those to verify several people's qualification for the Purple Heart," said Hakenson.

DoD is working to establish new systems to better track servicemembers' locations during deployments, including the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System. When fully implemented, DIMHRS will provide uniform information availability on individual assignments and many other personnel aspects with unprecedented accuracy and detail.

As DoD improves environmental surveillance, and technology is developed to validate environmental exposures from individual sampling, detailed location tracking data may become less critical. But for the foreseeable future, the work of the CURR will continue to be critical. If American troops continue to deploy to multiple locations and face enemies who could have chemical or biological weapons in their arsenals, the Center for Unit Records Research could be needed more than ever. And Hakenson says he's glad his center is dedicated to the mission it's been given.

"We have an obligation as a nation to take care of our veterans who we've put in harm's way," Hakenson says. "Our mission is to help make that happen. That's why I love what I do."