Posted on 04/28/2008 4:05:30 PM PDT by BulletBobCo
(CNN) -- The U.S. military is promising action to address conditions in a barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after a soldier's father posted images on YouTube showing a building that he said "should be condemned."
"This is embarrassing. It's disgusting. It makes me mad as hell," Ed Frawley said of the building where his son, Sgt. Jeff Frawley, had to live upon his return this month from a 15-month deployment to Afghanistan.
Frawley said Monday that Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody called him to say he shares Frawley's anger and that "there's no excuse." Cody said he would not want his own sons or any troops to return to such conditions, Frawley said.
Frawley's 10-minute video shows still photos from throughout the building, which appears to be falling apart and filled with mold and rust.
Paint, which Frawley said is lead-based, is chipping. Ceiling tiles are missing. A broken drain pipe allows sewer gas into the building, while another one has tissues stuffed into it in an apparent effort to stop the gas from coming in.
Photos from the communal bathroom show some of the most disgusting images. In one, a soldier stands in a sink to avoid what Frawley describes as 3 inches of sewage water that filled the floor when toilets overflowed.
At times, "sewage water backs up into the sinks in the lower floors of these barracks," Frawley said in his narration. "The soldiers have to tell one another who's taking a shower when they turn the sinks on, or the person taking the shower gets scalded with hot water."
"The conditions depicted in Mr. Frawley's video are appalling and unacceptable, and we are addressing the concerns he expressed," said Maj. Tom Earnhardt, spokesman for the 82nd Airborne, in a written statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
But there’s plenty of money for anchor babies, welfare moms, food stamps, bridges to nowhere and other assorted loser causes.
I give a couple of guys I work with now that were in the Air Force a hard time about being cream puffs, and always having the nicest barracks, and housing. They just say, well the Air force decided to spend money on their airmen instead of other things.
The Army has a long way to go to provide real decent living conditions for their single soldiers. Speaking from experience.
Let’s hope the heat gets felt up the chain
DC Chapter ping.
If I hear anyone says this is a liberal media bogus hit piece, I’ll pop them in the head!
Call your Congressmen and Senators and tell them they should be ashamed that this sort of thing goes on under their watch.
Anytime one leaves a building vacan for an extended period of time, it is goint to rot.
I lived in that building when I was in the 82nd.
See #7, and pop away.
This is beyond uncalled for. Congress needs to fix this now. What a slap in the face to our military.
My one reservation is that the "nuked" toilet seat looks like it was vandalized.
Disturbing.
After some recent visits to Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Jackson, I was impressed with how well everything was maintained. Even the obviously older construction.
I remember some barracks at FIG (Fort Indiantown Gap) in the 1980s. They were third world quality.
I suggest the officers of these men move into these barracks and live with them. And how about a cot for their congressman as well? There is no excuse in treating our fighting men this way when multi-millions of our tax dollars have been stolen by the crooked government we’ve tried to prop up in Iraq.
I used to know some people who were living on Fort Meade, MD, about six years ago. Family quarters then could be pretty squalid.
A lady I worked with at the time was on the NSA Family Action Board. She said that then Director of NSA, Lt. Gen. Hayden, had to lean on the fort commander to clean the place up. He succeeded to some extent, I suppose, because Hayden was obviously close to GW, because today he is Director of NSA’s chief nemesis, CIA.
Very true.
We spend enough money to give every Iraqi man, woman, and child 25 years salary, and then treat our soldiers like this (and I can confirm that Ft. Bragg--and other bases--actually are like this.) We rebuild their bridges while ours fall apart. We build them power plants and oil facilities, while we watch oil prices skyrocket.
We tell them democracy and rights are great, while we confiscate their weapons. We hire "contractors" to carry weapons over there while preventing our own citizens from having them here.
And we have people saying that living in tents is "cruel and unusual punishment" for convicts, while our self-sacrificing heroes in the military make them their homes for so long.
Things are so upside down. The least we could do is make the barracks livable.
Peeling paint, mold, bad plumbing, broken toilet seat...none of these seem like super expensive fixes (I don’t know how bad the plumbing is). This shouldn’t have been allowed to go on for so long. I suspect that maintenance was allowed to slide since “new barracks are being built”.
Hell, they could probably get the local VFW or Knights of Columbus to come over and fix most of this while they are on deployment.
The sewage comes from heavy rains, flooding the ground and pressurizing the septic fields and or a broken, blocked one way valve.
In the 80’s I lived at Bragg in ‘Old Division’. Old, wood, open bay WWII barracks. SF hand nice barracks, like these, only we hardly ever lived there. Usually in the worst base, if on base, buildings we could scrounge, or in a CONEX or in a truck or if we were on a usually nature hike, on the ground or slung between a tree. A lot of the mid 30 NCO’s looked 50 and had gray hair.
Appalling. And there is no excuse for these kind of conditions. These volunteers deserve the best in the service and after their service. With all that we give away, servicemen and women are by far the most deserving.
When our ships deploy pretty much everything works. In port, between deployments, the living conditions were unbelievably bad. I would have opted for that barracks.
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