As this whole Walter Reed story was spreading, it occurred to me that the barracks funding problems aren’t just limited to hospitals. You would hope that of all military housing they would be the top priority, but it still doesn’t mean healthy soldiers are living in decent barracks.

New buildings, major upgrades and new furniture take literally years to show up because the approval process is so slow. Just like the now-infamous Building 18, if something breaks in a regular barracks, it takes forever to get fixed, if it ever does, because the only people who care about the broken toilet are the ones who need to use it.

My barracks managers have always been corporals and sergeants who turned into frazzled, stressed-out versions of their former selves after they took over the role of barracks manager. Annoyed residents took it out on them with the AC died or when a window was broken and nothing happened.

NCOs simply don’t have enough rank to get things done quickly. Everything they ask for or need for the barracks has to be approved by somebody else, so blaming Building 18′s problem on them is crazy…and I have a feeling if you assigned someone of a higher rank to the job in the first place, the motivation wouldn’t be there because they don’t live in the barracks.

Most of the places I’ve lived so far have been okay. Not spectacular but other than some dirt, dust, and assorted leftover trash, the rooms I was assigned to were always decent.

Then I got to Albany. The barracks there are disaster, they are so old they still have “Fall-Out Shelter” signs attached the exterior walls. The heating, air conditioning, and plumbing systems are probably the originals since they died on a regular basis. We used to joke about how we never had hot water and AC at the same time and one time we had NO water of any temperature for several days.

When I first moved in, I spent two days scrubbing fuzzy green mold off every flat surface, including the insides of drawers and wall lockers. Several rooms were condemned because of mold problems. When my door lock broke, I had to climb in and out of a window for five days before they fixed it. A friend of mine had a ceiling tile crash to the floor in a flood of water from a leaky pipe upstairs.

Each room was assigned one or two reclining easy chairs, a few of which were disturbingly mold-spotted, but while I was deployed to Iraq the battalion commander decided we didn’t deserve a comfortable place to sit and had the chairs trashed.

No really, the only reason we were ever given for the massive chair disposal was that he didn’t think we rated easy chairs. So they filled up dumpsters with perfectly good furniture and hauled them off to the dump. I guess that way they could say they were doing something about the barracks problems because it was quick and didn’t cost money.

There’s a lot of talk about officers’ heads rolling over Walter Reed but I have to wonder if a lot of them were even aware of the problem. The officers I worked with on a daily basis never visited the places we lived and we couldn’t exactly bring up barracks complaints to them without pissing off all the enlisted people who outranked us. Sometimes the unit COs would visit but there was always a Super Field Day Extravaganza beforehand to make sure the barracks looked pretty.

The worse part about the barracks is that living in the barracks usually means you get treated like a five year old. But if you get married and move to base housing, suddenly you’re off the hook and free to live however you please. A single slob is constantly harassed but a married slob? Nobody cares, as long as the lawn’s mowed you’re cool…