Yes. In some cases, records get lost or burned. These things happen.
The other thing that's interesting is if you're sick in the service now, you go to the medical officer and he gives you some pills. It wasn't done that way in Korea or World War II. If you were sick you went on what they referred to as sick parade. You had to dress up in your best uniform, your full kit. You were inspected. If the sergeant who was inspecting you didn't think your cap badge was shiny enough or your webbing was blancoed well enough, you'd be on the charge. Then you'd go along and eventually get to see the medical officer. If you were lucky, you got treatment; if you weren't....
I can give you an example. When I was in the Canadian Forces I brought two people to the medical inspection room. The MO said, “I'm going home now. The first person who's ready for me I'll give excused duty. The second person will get M and D.” That meant medicine and duty, or, in other words, they gave you a pill and sent you back. One poor guy had blisters on his feet and had to take his boots and socks off. The other guy had a sore throat. So guess what happened? That was literally how some of these things happened.
I noticed that my hearing was going when I was on a French language course. I went to the medical officer and said, “I think I'm losing my hearing.” So he got his glasses out and starting tapping on the glasses case and said, “What am I doing?” I said, “You're tapping on your glasses case.” He said, “Oh, that's all right. You can hear me.” I said, “I can't hear you; I can see you right out of the corner of my eye.” Nevertheless, no sick report was made out. When I applied for a hearing pension many years later when I was on another French course with the public service and couldn't hear the tape recorder, they found no record at all of my reporting that problem in the first instance. They do those things.
They get lost and misplaced. Sometimes rather than go through all this stuff on sick parade--maybe someone sprained his ankle or something like that--a guy would just stay and hope it went away in a couple of days.
There are a lot of problems with any system of documentation. I was with another government department and we lost people's records; we lost documents. I was with unemployment insurance and we sometimes lost a person's record of employment. The poor individual had to wait months before getting UI. So it happens. It's a way of life that documents get lost.