By Anna Von Reitz
You have not been discharged from military service. A DD 214 is not what it appears to be and is not sufficient to do the job.
To get completely out and away and to receive the money and credit you are actually owed requires you to "discharge yourself"---- like discharging yourself from the hospital.
The form needed to do this is the DD 2168 which is readily available on the internet as an interactive form you can fill out and then print off and sign.
The instructions about where to send it are with the online form and includes Coast Guard.
For those of you who served in more than one branch of the service, it is necessary to add a brief "itinerary" of service, for example, "I was inducted into the Coast Guard on May 3, 1989 at Long Beach, California and served four years prior to discharge on June 5, 1993. I then joined the U.S. Marine Corps......."
This blow-by-blow is necessary because the bureaucrats need to sequentially process the paperwork releasing you from each branch of service.
