The military accession standards live in one public document — Department of War Instruction 6130.03, Volume 1 — and anyone can download it. It is long, it is written for the people applying it rather than the people it is applied to, and the paragraph that decides your question is four levels deep in a numbered list.

So the answers circulate secondhand instead. A recruiter’s recollection, a forum post from 2014, a cousin who went through eight years ago under a version that has since changed six times. Some of it is right. None of it comes with a paragraph number, which means none of it can be checked.

Nearly every orthopedic criterion in the instruction is one of three types. Which one you are looking at decides whether you have a problem, a waiting game, or a documentation job. Understand this and most of the rest becomes readable, so here it is without paying for it.

• Clocks. A time window. Disqualifying within a stated period, and the paragraph stops applying once it has passed. The most common orthopedic criteria, and the most misread, because people read the condition and stop before the date.
• Absolutes. No time limit and no symptom test. The phrase to look for is history of with nothing after it. These do not expire and no amount of recovery removes them.
• Symptom and function tests. Disqualifying only if the condition does something — causes symptoms, limits activity, interferes with wearing equipment. These are the ones your preparation and your documentation can actually address.

Most people discover they have a mix, and that the thing they were most worried about is a clock that ran out years ago.

This is the retained hardware paragraph, reproduced the way every criterion in the guide is reproduced — the text, then the paragraph number, so you can open the instruction and confirm it yourself.

That last sentence is the single most useful line in the instruction for most people reading this. It says plainly that metal left in you is not, by itself, a problem. Healed, stable, painless — three conditions, all of them documentable.

Eleven criteria quoted in full, drawn from ten separate paragraphs of the instruction, each carrying its own citation. Four fill-in worksheets at the back.

• Part 1 — The three kinds of paragraph. The framework above, worked through with examples.
• Part 2 — Knee. Ligament reconstruction, meniscus, cartilage, and the anterior knee pain criterion that catches people out.
• Part 3 — Ankle, foot and lower leg. The general paragraph to read first, the named conditions, and the twelve-month clocks.
• Part 4 — Hardware, implants and fusions. Fixation left in after a fracture, implants that are not fracture fixation, fusion and the contradiction it creates, joint replacement.
• Part 5 — The range-of-motion floors. The minimum degrees for hip, knee and ankle, applied regardless of why your motion is limited, and how to measure yours before anyone else does.
• Part 6 — Documenting your own history. What to request, from whom, and how early. What to document about function now. What a specialist letter can and cannot do.
• Worksheets. Sort your history into the three types. Record measured range of motion against the floors. Track records requested. Answer the questions you will be asked before you walk in.

It is built for the lower extremity. Knee, ankle, foot, lower leg, retained hardware, fusion, and the lower-extremity range-of-motion floors. If your history is a knee reconstruction, an ankle fracture with hardware, a fusion, or a foot condition, it covers your ground directly.

The spine is not covered. Neither is the upper extremity, apart from the absolute paragraph on dislocation, which names the shoulder, wrist and elbow and is quoted in full. If your question is about a back or a shoulder reconstruction, this is not the document for you and you should not buy it expecting otherwise.

It is written for applicants, not for people already serving. Volume 1 is accession. Volume 2 is retention, a different document with different thresholds, and it is not covered here.

Heath was born with bilateral clubfoot, had extensive surgery as an infant, a left-sided relapse in adolescence and a triple arthrodesis at sixteen. He enlisted in the US Army six years after that fusion and served in standard-issue boots — no insert, no orthosis, no profile and no duty restriction for the foot, and the same physical requirements as everyone else. He was medically retired for injuries unrelated to the foot, and he runs distance now at forty-one.

That is the reason this guide exists and also the limit of what it claims. It is a careful reading of a public document by someone with a personal stake in reading it correctly. It is not a clinical opinion, a legal opinion, or an account of how any individual file was handled.