NCO History Inquires

The NCO Historical Society has responded to hundreds of historical inquiries. Questions come from academics, historians, students, the press, veterans, and interested citizens. This is the location you can request our services to help you locate material related to NCO history.

Request Assistance

Please fill in the below contact form and click the SEND button. Please note, we do not have access to personnel records, and we can only provide information on the US Army Noncommissioned Officer Corps and Enlisted soldiers in general.

For questions about specific soldiers, you should begin your search at the National Archives.

Cite our material

The standard format for a Web citation is: <author’s name> <title of document> <<URL>> <date of document> (Accessed <date accessed>)

Use the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to identify the source of the material, as specified in the standards document RFC1738. This begins with a code for the type of access involved (“http://”, “ftp://”, “gopher://”, etc.). The appendix to RFC1738 suggests that URLs in citations should be prefixed with “URL:” and surrounded by angle brackets; for example: <URL:http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/>
However, including the “URL:” prefix seems ugly and unnecessary, as the angle brackets and access code suffice to identify the code as a URL, and nobody follows this advice.

If the accessed document is dated internally, use that date for the citation. If there is no date given, use the date at which it was first accessed (prefixed by “Accessed” in parentheses, as shown above). Optionally, give both (for example, if you have any reason to think the document may have been amended since its nominal date of creation).

If you use information obtained from this site, please provide a reference back to us, unless an author copyright supersedes this. While no generally accepted form has been agreed upon for such citations, the following (or a slight modification of it) should prove acceptable:

Elder, Daniel K. 2013 The NCO Historical Society. [Online] Available at: http://ncohistory.com

Frequently Asked Questions

We do not have access to any personnel records, we are an unofficial organization and all our items are discovered through open source research. The National Archives holds Federal military service records from the Revolutionary War to 1912 in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. Military records from WWI – present are held in the National Military Personnel Records Center (NPRC), in St. Louis, Missouri.

The term “Famous NCO” is subjective, and as such it can be a sore point if a recommendation is not acceptted. Please use our Inquiry Page to make a recommendation. We will make every attempt to include a person, however they must 1) have been a US Army Noncommissioned Officer, and 2) The must have been involved in a noteworthy event, either famous or infamous.