Consider what a Department-level form is for. DD Form 785 — DD Form 785, Record of Disenrollment from Officer Candidate-Type Training, June 1968 — was established to Officer Candidate-Type Training, Record of Disenrollment from, and it was placed in the DD sequence because the underlying transaction occurs throughout the Defense establishment in substantially the same shape. Standardizing the record was cheaper and more reliable than letting six services each design their own.
The practical effect of Department-level issue is interoperability. not stated establishes the requirement across the Defense enterprise; not stated keeps the document current for all of it. No service maintains its own variant, which means a completed record travels between components — service to agency, agency to joint command — and arrives in a format the receiving office already knows how to read.
You are looking for edition not stated, listed as not stated. Department-wide supersession is a single event rather than a rollout, which is what distinguishes edition currency on a DD form from the same question on a service publication: nobody anywhere is still accepting the previous version out of habit.
Work down the page in the printed order, and understand why the order exists. The identifying block establishes whose record this is and under what circumstances it arises. The body of the form then answers questions that are only meaningful once that context is fixed. The signature block comes last because a certification signed before the entries are complete certifies nothing.
Verify the printed edition against not stated first. Field structure shifts between editions, and the office that receives your record is reading the current one. That office may sit outside your service, which removes even the informal accommodation you might expect from a colleague who used the old version last month.
Unclear entries are resolved from the printed instructions first and from not stated where the two texts diverge.
Download the form
The set published here is PDF, covering 1 pages with roughly 26 fields. More than one format survives because the Department serves users under very different conditions, from a desk with current software to a location where a printer is the only reliable output.
The difference between a fillable and a printable pdf is a difference in what the file contains. A fillable release carries an interactive layer: each box is a defined field with a name and a data type, and what you type is stored as data inside the document. A printable release has no such layer — it is an image of the page, and the only place your answers can go is onto paper. The distinction matters downstream, because a Department record often gets scanned and forwarded several times before it reaches its final file, and typed characters survive that chain in a way pen strokes do not.
Xfdl appears in the set for reasons of institutional inertia rather than preference. It is the IBM Lotus Forms format, once the Department's electronic forms standard and deployed widely enough that it outlived the decision to move on. IBM Lotus Forms Viewer or an equivalent client opens it; a pdf application will not.
Every format is free, as published government documents are. A note on tools, though — the interactive field layer that makes a fillable pdf useful is precisely the part browser viewers handle least reliably. Save the file, open it in a full pdf reader, and the fields behave as the form's designer intended.
What the form asks for
- Section 3 - Reasons and circumstances for disenrollment.
- Date submitted.
- To: (Appropriate agency of the service concerned) (Include Zip Code).
- From: (Appropriate agency of the service concerned) (Include Zip Code).
- Section 1. Identification information on student at time disenrolled. 1. Last Name - first name - middle initial.
- 3. Branch of Armed Forces.
- 4. File or service number.
- 5. Social security number. Do not include dashes.
- 6.a. Birth date.
- 6.b. Birth place.
- 7. Sex.
- 2. Rate or grade.
- 8. Home of record address.
- 9. Other address.
- Section 2 - Program information applicable at time disenrolled. 10. Training station address.
- 11. Type of program (OCS, ROTC, Academy, NavCad, etc.)
- 12. Specific type of training (Supply, Pilot training, Bombardier, Infantry, Artillery, etc.).
- 13. Date entered program.
- 14. Date disenrolled.
- 15. Date scheduled for commission (If training had been completed successfully).
- Section 4 - Evaluation to be considered for future acceptability for other officer training. Press space bar to mark X in first box if highly recommended, second box if recommended as average candidate, third box if only if needs of service outweigh reasons for disenrollment, fourth box if recommended if physical defects corrected, or fifth box if not recommended.
- 6. X if other remarks apply.
- Remarks.
- Typed name and grade.
Submission follows not stated and whatever local instruction supplements it. Make a copy before the original leaves. Department forms travel across organizational lines by design, and the administrative distance that makes them useful is the same distance that makes tracing a lost one difficult.
Cross-referenced documents are found by series and number, with nothing further required. That the DD sequence is unified across the Department means a cited number identifies one form and no other, which is the practical payoff of centralizing the numbering in the first place.
Procedures that touch both Department and service processes will cite forms from both sequences, and the coincidence of numbers between them is exactly that — coincidence. An Army proponent maintains the DA series for the Army; not stated or another Department office maintains the DD series for the whole Department. Two independent registries, two independent numbering runs, no correspondence at any value.
A form is downstream of the policy that requires it, and revision usually starts there: a directive is reissued, a collection requirement is altered, notice language is updated by statute. The form is republished as a consequence. Since none of that reaches individual users, an archived copy quietly becomes wrong, and verifying not stated each time you download is the whole remedy.
What you have here is the document and a description of it, which is a different thing from guidance. This page is not an organ of the Department, gives no legal or procedural advice, and makes no representation about the outcome of any filing; the offices that administer the requirement are the only ones positioned to answer that. Applicability, eligibility and procedural questions belong to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office designated in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 785?
- DD Form 785, Record of Disenrollment from Officer Candidate-Type Training, June 1968
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?