When I joined the AF in 1977...I came to work with some young guy who was wrapping up four years of service and getting out. The guy had a medical folder that was about five inches thick, I kid you not. Over a four-year period....he’d had just about every kind of treatment that you could imagine. The shop NCO expected this guy to be gone a minimum of eight hours a week. Two hours a week were marked down for physical rehab for some shoulder injury which he’d had for the entire time.
I’ve come across other characters with the same issues. When I retired in 99...my medical folder of twenty-two years was two inches thick.
My doctor’s file on me is all of 3/4” thick, and I’ve been seeing him for 41 years. Of course, all my x-rays etc are on a flash drive now...
Your military medical record sounds a lot like mine; 21 years of service, spent part of my AF career as an aircrew member and more than a decade on PRP. Other than physicals, a broken ankle and an occasion visit to the flight doc, there wasn’t much in my folder—and that was fairly typical.
Unfortunately, the base clinic and/or hospital becomes a magnet for malingerers, hypochondriacs, slackers and anyone else looking to get out of a day of work.
My best friend from my days in the Air Force spent the last decade of his career as a First Sergeant and Command Chief Master Sergeant. He ran into some of the walking wounded during his time in service and his philosophy was simple: if you’re sick, then you need to be treated. And if you’re chronically ill, you don’t need to be in the military. So, he’d suggest a medical board, or a referral to the mental health clinic. That was often enough to “cure” many of them, since the last thing they wanted was to lose that armed forces paycheck and benefits.
Unfortunately, the medical goldbricks take up a lot of space in the military healthcare system and the VA, so individuals suffering from “real” illnesses or service-related injuries have to wait weeks or months to see a specialist.
The poster child for this type of fraud is Major Jill Metzger, the Air Force officer who disappeared from a shopping mall in Kyrgyzstan back in 2006. She resurfaced three days later, her blonde hair dyed brown, and with an incredible tale of being kidnapped, overpowering her captors (she weighed less than 100 pounds) and running 30 miles to freedom (Metzger was a former winner of the women’s division of the Air Force Marathon).
Naturally, Metzger claimed PTSD and was medically retired for three years with full pension and benefits. Despite her debilitating case of PTSD, she competed in at least one marathon after medical retirement. Metzger later returned to active duty and (last I heard) she was stationed at Travis AFB, California. Incidentally, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was told to back off on probing her demonstrably false claims of kidnapping, because her husband was an OSI agent, and she had friends in high places.
How much of the time (and money) wasted on Metzger could have gone to young men and women who were wounded in the line of duty, or vets who have been suffering with military-related trauma for years? And sadly, today’s system seems to encourage this kind of behavior; I was told by one recently-retired Army officer that some units encourage all separating soldiers to claim PTSD, since many are approved and it will (supposedly) move them up the waiting list at the VA.
I was lucky; multiple deployments and 60+ combat/combat support missions in the Balkans—in an unarmed aircraft—without so much as a scratch. My only service-related medical condition is hearing loss and I’ve never pursued it since retiring from active duty over a decade ago. But I am positively infuriated by people like the ones you describe—individuals who see the medical system as a means of avoiding work and getting more freebies.