What's the worst room anyone's ever seen during a room inspection?

I was still a private but right before a CIP one guys in another platoon and his room mate got drunk and had a chem-light war. They got it cleaned to the best of their ability late in the night but you could still see parts of the walls and ceilings glowing when the inspecting party came through.

I wasn't inspecting the room, but I had to escort an airman to the chow hall and back due to legal issues he was facing. I've wrestled for 5 years in my youth, and I've been in locker rooms all over. I have three kids and have changed many messy diapers. But nothing ever prepared me for the utter rank that was this airman's room when he opened the door. I literally couldn't breathe. He had to be told to shower all the time, which no doubt exacerbated the issue as well. Trash, old food, etc littered his whole room. These were the dorms at Ft Meade that the AF had just dropped over a million dollars in restorations in as well, so it was not an inherited mess or smell.

To answer the OP's question,

I would be OK with the room being in a state of moving if it was organized chaos. Having partially packed boxes, gear out while being cleaned, etc is fine. I would not accept basic unsanitary conditions with the excuse that "I am trying to clear housing" to cover trash, littered throughout the place.

Not that our room was trashed, but my roommate and I spent a holiday weekend drinking wiezen. The room was clean, but the air was so foul that even in the dead of winter with the window wide open, we could barely stand it ourselves. The inspection party got to the door and caught wind of us and just said that the room looked good and to get an air freshener. If I had known it was that effective of a deterrent, I would have done it sooner.

It has been many a moon since I dealt with troops in billets.

For run of the mill inspections, my favorite was the PVT with leftover pizza. I honestly don't know how long it had been on top of his wall locker, but long enough to turn blue.

Outside of inspection, there was the room I inventoried for a soldier gone AWOL. It was generally trashed, but included little gems like ammo, pyro, fireworks, and bottles of urine.

As a former MP I can attest to going into governmet quarters that were piled up with trash, rotten food, animal feces, and such. It's hard to imagine anyone living that way, especially with children in the home. As for a barracks room I had a young soldier who forgot to make his bunk. He desperately needed to wash his sheets after his exploits.

I was a billeting NCO during my final months in the Army. I "managed" an entire massive set of barracks for an entire MI brigade. My shop had keys to every single room in those buildings and frequently we had to go check on a room. I've seen things that would make your head spin.

I've seen a Command so far up a soldier's rear end that he had a room inspection during his packing-and-clearing phase. I can't even fathom that, and I privately expressed my dismay to his platoon sergeant.

I've seen a soldier running drugs out of his room. I've seen a soldier keeping a civilian wife in his room (lonely geo-batch). I've seen a guy who was sixty-something, retired for a number of years, recalled to active duty and forced to live in the barracks. Well not forced, but since he owned a number of rental properties, a farm, and a ranch, he didn't feel like getting a new place for his indefinite reactivation so he lived in the barracks a thousand miles from home.

The absolute worse was a room that was so bad, we had to strip the paint, rip up the carpet, remove all of the bathroom fixtures, and rebuild the entire room. Trash and unidentified fluids melded to the carpet. Dead bugs and live rodents, bags of trash, and a layer of grime on bathroom fixtures.

When I checked onto my second boat, I was assigned the second half of a two-man barracks room. As I opened the door to my new room, the first thing that greeted me was the overwhelming funk of forty thousand years. It was a smell best described as BO, Calvin Klein's Obsession, and death.

As I walked into the room, it looked like a laundromat had exploded mixed with several half-opened bags of fast food garbage.

However, my new roommate was nowhere to be seen. As it turned out, he was down on the boat for duty that day.

The next day, once I got down to the boat, I spoke with my COB (Chief of the Boat) as part of my check-ins and he asked me how things worked out with the barracks. I explained the condition of the room and he guessed my roommate right away.

I tried to get him to clean up the room after we went home for the night and he half-assed made an attempt (barely). The next day was a Friday room inspection, which we promptly failed. I again spoke to the COB about the situation and he told me "You're a Petty Officer, handle it!"

The next inspection saw my half of the room immaculate, a line of tape down the centerline, and my roommate's best impression of the city dump. When COB looked at the room, he decided my roommate wasn't ready to live in a barracks room, so that weekend he was made to clean up his side of the room, pack all of his belongings, and whatever wasn't issued went into a footlocker, then he was moved back to the boat for about 2 weeks.

One of the advantages of being in the Navy (shipboard) was communal berthing areas. Someone was designated as compartment cleaner every morning. The only "private" areas were our bunk lockers and sometimes we had a locker capable of handling our dress uniforms on hangers and maybe a few civilian items. Be that as it may, anyone who received PCS orders was required to field day the lockers and have them approved by our Leading Petty Officer (usually an E-6) prior to signing out. At the same time, if there was a "funk" coming out of your rack or even if it was simply messy in the locker you were certain to receive attention of an unpleasant sort. Most of my senior NCO's declared they could evaluate the caliber of a sailor by the condition of his locker and work spaces. When I was in 'A' school in Great Lakes, there was also a daily inspection Monday through Friday. The inspection of our rooms on Mondays was always a tougher one, so we never had things get out of hand really. My brother-in-law was Air Force and he told me some pretty horrific stories about base housing though (with fault in both directions).

The WWII-era two-story barracks we inhabited at Fort Gordon in 1968 had the usual large open troop bays with rows of double-decker bunks. There were NCO rooms on both floors. The one at the top of the stairs was the lair of an E-5 who was part of the staff at our mess hall. This NCO's quarters were notoriously below standard in cleanliness and order. (So was the mess hall, come to think of it.)

On a Saturday morning we saw the new 1SG, on his first inspection, exit our area for the upstairs and eventually heard some commotion when that upstairs room was found to be locked from the inside. Eventually the resident woke up and let the inspection party in. After a bunch of noises indicating some sort of tumult, the 1SG was clearly heard to say

"What is your excuse for this?!"

[3-second pause]

"SHORT!"

(Does anybody still say that?)