Posted 13 December 2009 - 09:52 AM
Well, I stand corrected. Just looked at my DD214 and my wife's, and neither has a seal - just original signatures. I did have in the same folder with mine a notarized copy with the notary’s seal. That must have been what I was thinking about.
Still, my point was that only the original copy is the "official" one for the purposes of claiming benefits, etc. and to forge a copy for the purposes of fraud is a federal crime. Also, the award certificate is not the document that authorizes the award. That either of these can be forged is not debatable: of course they can be, as can just about anything else.
That anyone "gets away" for any period of time getting unearned benefits based on a forged DD214 is a statement on the poor oversight and probable laziness of the government employees who are approving such things. But, that's nothing new or unique to these documents. People defraud the government and break the law all the time: they cheat on their taxes, they dodge their alimony and child support, they speed, and they spit on the sidewalks, the list is nearly endless.
However, all of these bad things reflect the personal behaviors of the criminals. To blame their actions on eBay or available blank forms is to absolve them of their actions and put the accountability on some inanimate object. This is the same reasoning that the anti-gun crowd uses: blame the guns and not the criminals. Do away with the objects so that you can absolve yourself of having to pass judgment and make moral decisions about the behaviors of others. This, of course, frees such like-minded people of the fear that their own actions will be judged by others and allows them to live amoral and unethical lives themselves.
But I digress...
IMO, these blank award certificates are just like the unissued awards themselves. The certificates are provided in great-whopping-big reams to unit S-1's, PAC's, and installation personal offices, just like the awards and ribbons are supplied to units.
Recently, on another thread, a Forum member posted that he has just "rescued" some outrageous number of unissued, still in the box, awards from a unit supply room that that was being cleaned up. I don't recall the exact numbers that he was talking about, but I seem to recall it was perhaps as many as a hundred or so. At the time, the consensus of the other Forum members posting was "great job!," "good score," "you're a fine fellow for saving all that history," ect. The OP even said that he would donate a few of the awards to a local VFW or something for guys who have "lost" an original award. He got even more praise for that. Finally, he did say that he might sell a few, but you know, only to other collectors and at shows, certainly not on "Evil Bay." Again, high praise all around for taking such a principled position.
OK, so now we have the issue of unissued award certificates. Same government property. Same "rescue" effort. Same "saving" of the history. Same "providing replacements to vets who've lost their originals." What's different? Suppose some of those "rescued" awards were engraved. Would the guy who saved them from the trash now be a zero instead of a hero? Suppose he wasn't the one doing the engraving but someone who had bought one of his rescued awards? Where would his culpability lie?
Of course, those same blank certificates along with a blank DD214, forged convincingly, and all added to original, unissued medals (maybe even engraved) would make for very nice groupings. That would be reprehensible, but blame the forger, not the blank documents and unissued awards nor the guy who "rescued" them from destruction and disposal.
These forms and documents are easily available: that genie is out of the bottle and can't be put back. (IIRC, the DD214 electronic copy was included with the CD ROMs of digital forms distro'ed Army-wide in the late '90's. Also, the forms are available on-line to just about any Active Duty troop who can log onto the PERSCOM pubs and forms library. Heck, as a retiree, I could get an account with very little justification.)
I think the question we need to be asking each other is how do we, the collecting community, guard ourselves against the forgeries that are certain to appear in the militaria marketplace. The Veteran's Administration can check its computer data-base (even if it doesn't do so diligently), but we are not so well resourced.
The only answer that I could submit is... knowledge. More and better information is what collectors of all generas need. Of course, there are those who have knowledge that they won't share under the excuse that to make the information public is to give the forgers what they need to get better. I personally find that attitude more than a bit self-serving, since the guys who advocate that position already have the information to protect themselves at the expense of other collectors.
But that is another discussion for another time.
Mike
