Cleaning Up The Fort
The Secretary of the Army admitted today the conditions at Fort Bragg in North Carolina are unacceptable - and promised the barracks will be fixed up. As CBS News National Security correspondent David Martin reports, today's announcement came after the shoddy conditions were exposed in a video posted on the Internet.
A YouTube video shows soldiers who spent 15 long, hard, difficult months in some of the most remote dangerous areas of the mountains of Afghanistan.
But when they came home, what they returned to outraged Sgt. Jeff Frawly's father, Ed, Martin reports.
He narrated photos of the conditions his son and the other soldiers from the 82nd Airborne found in their barracks at Fort Bragg. Watch the video to see.
As for the showers, the YouTube video says: "That dark spot behind the peeled paint is mold. This is right over the head of where the soldiers stand when they take their showers."
And Sgt. Frawley's father was mad as hell.
"Wouldn't you do something if it was your son? Wouldn't you get mad?" he said.
So he posted the photos on YouTube. In one week, he got a quarter million hits.
"This is about being a parent, being an America," he said. "This is about Americans being embarrassed about having their soldiers come home and put in this."
The barracks were repaired immediately.
As one soldier said: "Within two hours, we had our installation management on site here to help us out with this."
Which only makes it harder to explain why it couldn't have been done before the soldiers got home.
"We've got old barracks throughout much of the Army," TK said. "But old barracks are not an excuse for not meeting the needs of soldiers."
The Army has barracks for 98,000 soldiers worldwide and it's inspecting all of them to see if there are any more horror stories waiting to pop up on YouTube.