Dick Cheney redacted it. Donald Rumsfeld signed off. George H.W. Bush ran the CIA months later. The government's investigation into CIA abuses — abuses that overlapped directly with the destruction of millions of military service records — was edited before the public ever saw it. Cheney's handwritten annotations are in the declassified record. The 86-page appendix he removed is not. The Erased Generation.

You're researching your family's military history. You submit the request. Then you get one word back. Destroyed. A fire in 1973 wiped out 80% of Army records from an entire generation. This book tells you what happened — and how to find what survived. The Erased Generation.

The OMPF wasn't just paperwork. It was assignments, promotions, medical records, wound documentation, and performance evaluations. The complete official account of a soldier's service.

The 1973 NPRC fire destroyed the file. It didn't destroy the trail. Draft cards. Service numbers. Morning reports. Unit transfers. Hospital admission cards. Wound verified. VA index files. These records may have survived. And in the right hands, they can rebuild what the fire took. The trail is still there.

Did you know the building that housed millions of military personnel records had caught fire four times before it burned to the ground? An FBI teletype sent directly to the Director documented four prior fires inside the National Personnel Records Center — trash cans, restrooms, different floors. No suspects. No charges. The same document classified the July 1973 fire as possible arson. Nobody was ever charged. Why?

A fire-resistant vault on the sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center survived the 1973 catastrophic fire. But in 1975, just as the Church Committee began investigating CIA abuses, the contents were deliberately destroyed due to 'mold and mildew'. What was really inside the vault? The Erased Generation

The Official Military Personnel File — the OMPF — wasn't paperwork. It was proof. Inside every OMPF: enlistment contracts, unit assignments, promotion orders, and medical records. The complete story of a veteran's service — in one folder. Veterans' benefits depend on it. Disability compensation requires it. Burial honors need it. In 1973, the government stored 17.5 million of them in one building — with no duplicate copies. And then they burned.

In 1943, a classified research unit at Columbia University was asked to help the U.S. military reduce bomber losses over Germany. The Statistical Research Group. Funded by the government. Unknown to the public until after the war. The military was studying where bullets hit returning planes — and preparing to armor those spots. Abraham Wald, a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who had fled the Nazis, stopped them. You're looking at survivors. The planes that got hit where you're not seeing holes — those are the ones that went down. The records that survived the 1973 NPRC fire tell only part of the story. What we know about an entire generation of veterans depends largely on where they happened to be stored that night.