I know its been awhile, but I need to vent

This is going to be a long angry post, but please bear with me.

As many of you know, I have been in the process of applying for an Army scholarship, the HPSP.  If I got it my tuition would be covered for the next three years in exchange for service after graduation.  I started working with the recruiters in May, filling out the immense application, submitting all the necessary paperwork, going in multiple times to talk to them and make sure I submitted everything.  And I did.  Unfortunately I was too honest, fessing up to my childhood "asthma", requiring my medical records from childhood to be sent.  Due to a miscommunication, my old clinic sent them every single medical record instead of just the ones pertaining to the "asthma", meaning the army had to go through a hundred pages of medical records instead of the usual 10-20.  It shouldn't have been a problem, since they had all of these records by October, but someone somewhere screwed me over.  Basically, a different department reviews the medical records and then clears you for a physical. The physical results become part of your application (along with the 60 pages of application, motivation essay, copies of identification, transcripts, letters of recommendation, etc). My application has been done (with some minor essay revisions because I wrote too much for the form) since early March.  I was waiting to be cleared for a physical.  More people started applying for this same scholarship in February, and were also waiting on a physical. The deadline approaching, I started calling my recruiters almost daily worrying about getting the physical in on time.  They told me that there was nothing to do but wait for MEPS to clear me and they would ask for an exemption waiver to try to buy some time.

Well folks, I got the call today, and the exemption did not go through.  After a year of work and effort I'm getting rejected from this scholarship not based on anything to do with me, not because I failed to submit information on my end, but because the system failed to get their shit done on time.  I did everything right, and I'm getting screwed, and getting screwed out of tens of thousands of dollars.  I might not have gotten the scholarship, it is competitive, but I won't even get a chance now due to sheer bureaucracy and incompetence.