YouTube Barracks Video Prompts Call For Change

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Backed-up plumbing, peeling paint and other corrosive conditions in aging barracks at Fort Bragg prompted U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole to propose changing the way maintenance is handled on U.S. Army bases.

The North Carolina Republican said Friday she wants a pilot program that was tested at Fort Hood in Texas to be expanded Army-wide.

Called the First Sergeant's Barracks Initiative, it transfers responsibility for daily maintenance of barracks to a beefed up team dedicated solely to maintenance that would report directly to the base commander.

Now, the units that occupy the barracks must do much of the work themselves, and they often face delays when requesting help from base work crews on more complicated jobs.

Dole introduced a bill late Thursday to expand the pilot program to all Army installations.

“Anything less than safe and clean housing is unacceptable,” Dole said in a phone interview.

Problems at some of the 1950s-era barracks at Fort Bragg in central North Carolina came to light last week when Sgt. Jeff Frawley's father videotaped the conditions and posted them on YouTube.com.

Ed Frawley said he was disgusted that troops with the 82nd Airborne, who had been serving in Afghanistan, came home to such an environment.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that he'd watched the video and found the conditions “appalling.”

“Soldiers should never have to live in such squalor,” he said, adding that “current needs must not be sacrificed to future capabilities.”

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UPDATE: An indictment of our Army's competence:

The latest outrage is a father’s video of a U.S. Army barracks at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division.

It shows the quarters where his soldier son and other soldier sons were sent to live upon their return from combat. Mold and mildew and peeling paint are bad enough, but what about a big barracks bathroom ankle-deep in raw sewage?

Scandals like this latest one and an earlier eruption of public outrage over the miserably maintained quarters where wounded soldiers were warehoused at Walter Reed Army Hospital are an indictment of the core competency of our Army.

If the Army cannot afford to maintain minimally decent standards of housing and feeding our soldiers — and treat them with the best medical care and all the loving attention they deserve when they're wounded in combat — then, by God, the Army doesn’t deserve to have ANY soldiers at all.

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Technorati Tags: citizen media, Frawley, YouTube