Its not easy. There are a number of different deppartments responsible for different medals. After almost 10 years of putting it off I started to claim the ones I am still missing. Jaques Calero helped me get a couple of Foreign awards some years back. That worked well as they were issued by the Legion HQ (I guess they had a stock of blank docs and fill them out as needed. The veterans affairs dept of the army is processing 2 other requests, they have to check a number of things but it seems they are making a bit of progress, the document for one of the medals arrived last week. A simple campaign medal, which I assumed would be the easiest to claim has taken a few years and I still have heard nothing after 3 letters to them. This claim is direct to the army. I would say, go for it, you have nothing to loose.