Last fall, Megan Greenwell pulled up the website for the National Personnel Records Center and sent off a request for the military records for a character in her book. What came back startled her: “We are unable to locate a record with the information provided. … or the record needed to answer your query was lost in the July 1973 fire that destroyed millions of records.” Not long after, she requested her own grandfather’s military service records. She got the same reply.
This fire happened 50 years ago last July. Surely, Greenwell thought, someone has written about this monumental moment in American history? But she couldn’t find much.
“Some of the most irreplaceable artifacts in world history have been destroyed by fire, from the papyrus scrolls at the Library of Alexandria to a fragment of Jesus’ crown of thorns at Notre-Dame de Paris in 2019,” she writes. “The fire at the National Personnel Records Center wrought a different kind of damage. Few of the individual records that burned held any particular national or global significance. Their primary value to historians was in the aggregate: 17,517,490 tiny bundles of evidence adding up to a thorough picture of Americans’ participation in some of the world’s most devastating conflicts.”
The resulting story is a powerfully written deep dive into what happened when the sixth floor went up in flames—and the subsequent FBI investigation. But the piece also took Greenwell on a journey that led her to long-lost answers about her grandfather, who fled Nazi Germany.
