Living conditions

This is not your father’s military. In today’s armies troops live in 2 to 4 man rooms, the duty day ends at 1630 hours and weekends are often days off. Gone are the days when conscript troops live in open bay barracks with twenty to thirty men to a floor. The modern army, the all volunteer army, is more like an ordinary job than ever before. There are people who enlist and after basic spend their entire careers going to work like any one else, with less clothing choices. For the fashion impaired, like most soldiers I know, this can only be considered an advantage. This is not your father’s army. That is unless you are in the National Guard.

The National Guard never experienced the culture shift that brought on this drastic improvement in living conditions. When we did away with the draft the government had to start treating soldiers as valuable commodities instead of an infinitely renewable resource that you could throw away after two years. We generally serve one weekend a month a two week annual training, usually in the summer. There is little to no expectation of ‘normal’ living conditions.

Our first stop on this journey was a little post in California. For a number of reasons this post received the absolute minimum improvements since its establishment in 1940. The barracks were almost identical to the cut out section of a WWII ‘Patton’ barracks in the Smithsonian. The one in the Smithsonian was in much better repair. My first stay there was way back in 1996. It was beastly hot, and I could look over my shoulder when I lay in my bunk and see through a gap in the wall about a quarter inch thick. Today they are marginally better. Two of our battalion’s barracks had dry wall and the claim there was air conditioning that would kick on when it got hot enough. Apparently triple digits inside wasn’t hot enough.

Living in cave like bare beamed two story buildings does not tell a soldier you care, it tells a soldier you don’t know and don’t care. If the living conditions were bad, there were worse things like the water. I went to pick up water in a 400 gallon trailer called a ‘Water Buffalo’ for some odd reason. We test the water at the pick up point and the drop off point to see if it meets army standards for safety. The army standard is 1ppm of chlorine at the point of consumption. We did our little test, then we did it again. Then I sat back and had a cigarette while the tester and I discussed our results. The color scale measured from 0, unacceptable to 10ppm, but there was no instructions about what to do if it was at 10ppm. We brought the trailer back, and went to test the water coming from the taps and drinking fountains. Same result. In every case the result was off the scale. We report it up. There is no other option is the reply.

Wearing body armor when the temperature is above 90 degrees consumes gallons of water a day. You can adjust to living on stuff that has more chemicals than pool water, I did, it just does interesting to the digestive system. Most troops just sucked it up, went to the closet sized PX and bought bottled water. We are nothing if not adaptable.

At our next stop we are living in the remodeled cousins of those dilapidated morale sumps. This were once WWII POW barracks, both German and Japanese soldiers were brought here to be held until the war was over. They are also two story and on the same general design, but they are much wider, and most importantly have been remodeled. There is both heat and AC, bathrooms on both floors with functioning showers and shower stalls. Most importantly the toilets have stalls around them. Back at the last stop the showers were four shower heads to a 30 man barracks in a single concrete room. We felt lucky to have stalls on out toilets in our barracks, some did not have them. Privacy is a luxury both rare and prized in my current world.

I live in a single room with 20 other soldiers, all sergeant or above. At the end of the room lives SFC Big Daddy and two other SFCs in a single room, and the senior enlisted man in the company, 1SG Pappy has his own room. There are things you learn living in an open bay. Like all things you learn about other people, some are important, some are not, and for some, you need mental floss. I could have gone my entire life without ever seeing one of our older NCO’s run out of the latrine, holding his t-shirt over his crotch to get a towel.

Living in a big hollow room you have to learn to get along, there are no tall fences so you have to be good neighbors. It is polite to take cell phones outside to have conversations with your loved ones, there is little more annoying than having half a conversation occurring next to where you are try to sleep. Earphones are a requirement for movies watched on your computer, unless you are sharing. Then there is the principal that if you show it you are inviting commentary on it, from video to body parts. Thick skins are grown they do not simply appear over night.

The irony is that when we finally get to the war zone we will be living in 2 man rooms, in living containers (shipping container sized housing units each with 3 2 man rooms). Here, in training there are no secrets, no place to hide (except the crapper stalls) and this is not always a bad thing. On the other hand it means you occasionally have to see SGTs Dragon and Nighthawk sitting on a bunk, wearing mullet wigs will they discuss the merits of NASCAR, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and why the onlyh good music came out in the 80s.