full image - Repost: Health and Welfare: The Smeagol Incident (from Reddit.com, Health and Welfare: The Smeagol Incident)
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I was led this way after posting in r/StoriesAboutKevin. Hope you enjoy the story.This happened at Fort Drum. If you've never been to Drum, congratulations. You made better choices than I did. Fort Drum sits in the part of upstate New York where winter starts in October and ends when the Army tells it to, which is never. The barracks are old. The heating works when it wants to. The walls are thin enough that you can hear the man next door blink. I say this not because it's relevant to the story but because I want to establish that the barracks at Drum are already depressing before you add a human being who has decided that personal hygiene is a suggestion.I was a Corporal at the time. I had my stripes for about four months. I was a 92G, same as now, running breakfast in the DFAC and trying to learn how to be an NCO without getting anyone killed or food-poisoned, which at the time I thought were the two worst things that could happen in the Army. I was wrong. The worst thing that can happen in the Army is being assigned barracks NCO duty for a floor that contains Specialist Pruitt.His name was Pruitt. Nobody called him Pruitt. Everybody called him Smeagol. I did not come up with the name. It was already in circulation when I drew the duty, passed down from the previous barracks NCO the way oral traditions are passed down in cultures that have seen too much. The name fit. Pruitt was a 25B, which is the Army's Information Technology Specialist. Help desk. Network support. The kind of soldier who fixes your computer and makes you feel judged for not knowing what a driver is. In Pruitt's case, "fixes your computer" was generous. What Pruitt actually did was exist in a server room for eight hours, attend the minimum number of formations required to avoid a counseling statement, and then return to his barracks room to conduct whatever it was he conducted in there, which based on the available evidence included gaming, screaming, and the slow biological decomposition of a man who had given up on the social contract.The noise complaints started before I got there. Pruitt played Call of Duty. Pruitt played Call of Duty with the enthusiasm of a man who believed the kills were real and the stakes were personal. You could hear him through the walls. Not just hear him. You could follow the gameplay. You knew when he died because the word he screamed started with F and did not stop for several seconds. You knew when he got a killstreak because the scream shifted to something celebratory but no less loud, like a Viking discovering a particularly well-stocked village. You knew when he was on the phone with his mother because the tone changed from rage to a kind of high-pitched whining that I have only ever heard from a grown man once, and it was Pruitt, asking his mother to put more money in his account because the PX was "basically a scam."Three soldiers on his floor had submitted complaints. One of them had gone through the trouble of writing it up formally, which tells you the level of desperation because soldiers will tolerate almost anything before they fill out paperwork. The complaints were about noise. They were also, secondarily, about smell.I'm going to address the smell now because the smell is what turned a noise complaint into a health and welfare inspection, and the health and welfare inspection is what turned a Tuesday afternoon into the single worst hour of my career up to that point and arguably since.The smell had been reported as "noticeable." Then "concerning." Then "I think something died in there, Corporal." That last one was from PFC Hogarth, who lived in the room directly adjacent and who had started sleeping with a towel stuffed under his door. Hogarth was not a dramatic person. Hogarth was the kind of soldier who could sleep through artillery and eat an MRE without complaining. If Hogarth was stuffing a towel under his door, something was wrong.I brought the complaints to my platoon sergeant. My platoon sergeant brought them to the First Sergeant. The First Sergeant decided we were doing a health and welfare of the entire floor, because you can't single out one room without it looking targeted, even when the target is obvious and actively fermenting.The health and welfare was scheduled for a Tuesday at 1400. The soldiers were given no advance notice because that is the point. You are checking the rooms as they are, not as the soldiers wish they were. I had a team of three. Myself, Sergeant Vecchio, and the First Sergeant, who was not originally planning to attend but decided to come along because, and I quote, "I want to see what's making Hogarth act like that."We started at the far end of the hall. Room by room. Most of them were fine. Soldiers at Drum keep their rooms in a range between "acceptable" and "I just shoved everything in the closet ten minutes ago," and both of those are passing. Some dust. Some laundry on the floor. One soldier had a George Foreman grill he wasn't supposed to have, which Vecchio confiscated with the enthusiasm of a man who had just found a free George Foreman grill. Standard stuff. Nobody was going to die.We worked our way down the hall. The smell got worse. It was a gradient. You could track your proximity to Pruitt's room the way you track your proximity to a landfill on a highway. At first you think you're imagining it. Then you're not imagining it. Then you're breathing through your mouth. Then breathing through your mouth doesn't help because you can taste it, which is a thing I wish I had not learned that day.First Sergeant noticed. He didn't say anything. He just started breathing shorter, which for a man who had done twenty years including two tours in Iraq was as close to a visible reaction as you were going to get.We reached Pruitt's door.I knocked. I announced the health and welfare. I heard movement inside. Not urgent movement. Not the scramble of a man trying to hide something. Slow movement. The movement of a man extracting himself from a position he had been in for a long time, which I later confirmed was accurate because the impression in his mattress suggested Pruitt had not changed his primary seating location in weeks.Pruitt opened the door about eight inches. He did not open it all the way. He stood in the gap the way a troll guards a bridge, except trolls presumably have better ventilation. The smell that came through the eight-inch gap hit me in the face with the confidence of something that had been building strength for months and was ready to introduce itself to the world.I said, "Open the door all the way, Specialist."He said, "It's kind of messy, Corporal."First Sergeant, standing behind me, said, "Open the door, Specialist." He said it once. He said it in the tone that First Sergeants use when they are offering you the opportunity to make this easy and when that opportunity has an expiration date measured in seconds.Pruitt opened the door.I want to describe what I saw in the order I saw it, because the sequence matters. Each thing I saw made me think I had found the worst part, and then I would see the next thing and realize I had been an optimist.First thing. The floor. The floor was not visible. I do not mean it was cluttered. I mean the floor had a layer. The layer was composed of clothing, food wrappers, energy drink cans, napkins, something that might have been a towel at some point but had since become a different substance, and a pizza box that was not closed because closing it would have required the structural integrity that the box had lost approximately two weeks prior based on the condition of the remaining pizza inside it, which had developed a fur. The pizza had fur. I want to be clear about this. The pizza was growing something. I am not a biologist. I cannot tell you what it was. I can confidently tell you it was green and fuzzy.Second thing. The desk. Pruitt was a 25B. His desk had two monitors, a keyboard with keys that were visibly shiny from skin oil, a mouse pad that had changed color from its original state to something that could be described as "human contact gray," and approximately thirty cans of Mountain Dew arranged in a pattern that suggested Pruitt had simply been placing them down when finished and allowing them to accumulate in whatever natural formation cans adopt when left to govern themselves. Some were on their sides. Some had been used as ashtrays. One had something in it that was not Mountain Dew and was not ash and I chose not to investigate further at the time. That was a good decision. I stand by it today.Third thing. The bottles. There were bottles along the wall by the desk. Plastic water bottles, the 16.9-ounce kind you buy in bulk. Approximately a dozen of them, lined up against the baseboard like soldiers at a very unfortunate formation. They were full. They were not full of water. They were yellow. They were capped. I looked at them. I looked at Pruitt. Pruitt did not look at me. He was looking at a spot on the ceiling with the intensity of a man trying to leave his body through his eyeballs.I want to address the bottles because I think it's important to understand what kind of commitment this represents. Pruitt's room was approximately forty feet from the latrine. Forty feet. I know because I paced it later, not because I wanted to but because I needed to quantify the laziness for the counseling statement and "he's a short walk from the bathroom" did not feel specific enough. Forty feet from his door to the latrine. Pruitt had decided that forty feet was too far to travel to urinate and had instead been using water bottles. And capping them. And lining them up. There was a system. The system was horrifying, but it was a system, and the fact that Pruitt had developed a methodology for something that should never require a methodology told me more about the man than his entire personnel file.Fourth thing. The trash can. The trash can was next to his bed. It was a standard-issue small plastic waste bin. The kind you put a bag in and empty when it's full. Pruitt had not emptied it. Pruitt had, at some point, vomited into it. Pruitt had then, at some subsequent point, vomited into it again. The trash can had become a repository for what I can only describe as layered biological events, each separated by a stratum of fast food wrappers and energy drink cans like some kind of geological record of bad decisions. The bag, if there had ever been a bag, had dissolved or fused with the contents. The bin itself was leaking from the bottom, slowly, onto the floor, which explained a stain near the bed that I had initially assumed was a shadow but was not a shadow. It was never a shadow.Vecchio, who had been standing to my left, stepped back into the hallway. He did not say anything. He just left. I heard him breathing through the wall. First Sergeant did not step back. First Sergeant stood in that room and took it all in with the expression of a man watching his retirement get further away with every passing second.Fifth thing. The wall behind the bed. There were stains on the wall. I am not going to describe the stains in detail because I have limits and also because I genuinely do not know what caused all of them. Some were clearly food. Some were clearly beverage. Some were in the category of "I have a theory but confirming it would require a forensic kit and more willpower than I possess." The drywall itself, near the baseboard behind the trash can, was soft. Not stained. Soft. Moist. The biological runoff from the trash can had been making contact with the wall for long enough that the drywall had begun to absorb it. The wall was digesting the trash juice. The building itself was being corrupted by this man's existence.I turned to Pruitt. He was still standing by the door. He had put his hands in his pockets, which under any other circumstance I would have corrected because that is a thing NCOs correct, but I was so far past uniform standards at this point that I would not have cared if Pruitt was wearing a cape.I said, "Specialist, how long has your room been like this."He said, "It's not usually this bad, Corporal."That was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Hogarth knew it was a lie. The wall knew it was a lie. The wall had been absorbing evidence that it was a lie for what appeared to be months.First Sergeant said, "When was the last time you took the trash out."Pruitt thought about this. He thought about it for long enough that the question clearly required research."Maybe October?" he said.It was already early December.First Sergeant looked at me. He did not say what he was thinking. He did not need to. His face said it for him. His face said, I have been to war and nothing there prepared me for this man's trash can.The cleanup was Pruitt's responsibility but it was my problem, which is the barracks NCO experience in a sentence. I supervised the cleanup. Pruitt was given gloves, trash bags, and cleaning supplies. He was told he had until 1800. He was told the room would be reinspected. He was told that if the room did not meet standard, consequences would follow. Pruitt said roger. He said it the way a man says "roger" when he intends to comply just enough to avoid the immediate threat and not one fraction of an ounce more.The cleanup took the entire afternoon. Pruitt filled nine trash bags. Nine. From a single barracks room that was smaller than some walk-in closets. The bottles went first because Pruitt seemed to understand on some level that the bottles were the thing he most needed to not be seen carrying down the hallway in front of other soldiers, so he double-bagged them and made the trip quickly and without eye contact. The trash can was another matter. Pruitt picked it up by the rim and the bottom stayed on the floor. It separated. The structural integrity of the plastic had been compromised by the contents to the point where the bin came apart in his hands and what was inside made contact with the carpet and the smell that had been contained, relatively, by the walls of the bin, was now free.Pruitt gagged. Pruitt, the man who had been sleeping three feet from this object for weeks, gagged at its contents when they were presented to him outside the context of the bin. Somehow the bin had been acceptable. The bin's contents on the floor were too much. There is a psychology paper in there somewhere and I hope someone writes it because I don't want to think about it any harder than I already have.The carpet in that section had to be replaced. I put in the work order. The work order required a description of the damage. I wrote "biological contamination from extended contact with waste material." The facilities sergeant who processed the work order called me and asked what that meant. I told him. He was quiet for a moment and then said, "I'll mark it priority."The drywall behind the bed was patched. Not replaced, patched, because replacing it would have required opening up the wall and nobody wanted to know what was behind it. The patch held. I checked it before I left Drum. The patch was holding but the wall around it had a slight discoloration that I chose to believe was normal aging and not residual contamination. I chose to believe that because the alternative was thinking about Pruitt's trash can again and I had done enough of that for one lifetime.Pruitt received a counseling statement. Then another. Then another one about two months later when the smell started coming back, because of course it did, because Pruitt had learned nothing from the experience except that he needed to lock his door more often. His chain of command handled the pattern. More counseling. A corrective action plan. Room inspections every Friday for eight weeks, which Pruitt passed because Pruitt was capable of meeting the standard when someone was going to check. The rest of the time, Pruitt returned to his natural state the way water finds its level.Pruitt PCS'd about five months after the health and welfare. I was not involved in where he went. I did not ask. I did not want to know because knowing would have meant feeling sorry for whatever NCO was about to discover that the Army had mailed them a man who treats a barracks room like a composting experiment. Somewhere out there, a sergeant opened a door and smelled something and thought, this seems wrong. That sergeant was correct. That sergeant was meeting the legacy of Specialist Pruitt, and I am sorry for that sergeant, but I am not sorry enough to have kept Pruitt at Drum for one additional day.I think about Pruitt occasionally. Not with the kind of complicated, keeps-you-up-at-night thinking that some soldiers leave you with. With Pruitt it's simple. Pruitt was a dirtbag. Pruitt was not broken. Pruitt was not struggling. Pruitt was not confused. Pruitt was a man who had decided, consciously and with full clarity, that other people's standards did not apply to him and that the forty-foot walk to the latrine was an unreasonable ask. Pruitt had a GT score high enough to be a 25B. Pruitt could troubleshoot a network switch. Pruitt could not be bothered to throw away a pizza that was growing a civilization.Some soldiers you lose sleep over. Some soldiers you tell stories about at cookouts. Some soldiers you hope found their path and figured it out and landed somewhere that made sense for who they are.Pruitt, I hope you ETS'd and found an apartment with a landlord who does inspections. I hope you discovered that the civilian world also has trash collection and that it occurs on a schedule. And if none of that worked out, I hear the Air Force has openings. They've got their own maid service over there. It's just an Airman in a tutu, but it's more than you were doing for yourself.The bottles, man. I still think about the bottles. Forty feet. The latrine was forty feet away.
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