First, if you need your record within 25 weeks, don’t bother sending a request to the  National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis Missouri they are taking 25 weeks to ship records.  If you can’t go in person you can hire someone to get your record for you. Click on this list of companies that will get your record for you fast.  

The link below is for the SF180, which is the document you need to fill out in order to obtain your DD214 or other Military Records.  You need to sign the SF180 and fax or mail it to the NPRC in order for them to send your record to you.

When I ordered records from the NPRC in 1997 I waited a year and a half and never heard anything.  Then I hired somebody to get them and he copied the records and shipped them to me in about a month. Since then I understand the Records Center has gotten much better, but it if you want anything more than a DD214 you may wait more than a year. Priority is given to copying and shipping out DD214’s. All other requests apparently go to the back of the line.  How other requests ever get to the front is a mystery as the Center gets over 20,000 requests a week. Hiring a private researcher that has access to the records seems the logical choice, just as you would hire one to get records from other branches of the National Archives.

Why you would use a private company to get your record is clear when you find out
it currently takes 25 weeks( half a year) to get them.   How to get your record fast.