This reminds me of something I wrote on my first week at my first real duty station, so pardon me as I wax Kilroy with memories of being a 23 year-old PFC in September of 2007:

I have my own room. As soon as I stepped in it and sufficiently cluttered it, the little hallway that leads to the communal kitchenette, sink-n-mirror area, and teensy latrine, I caught on to the Army's trick.

In basic training, I lived in an open bay with 52 females altogether. We slept in bunk beds that we pulled out from between lockers at night, then pushed back between those wall lockers in the morning to train with our respective platoons. I had the top bunk, I couldn't stand my bunk mate, and I was in fact put in charge of that bay twice - once during basic, once as a holdover afterwards, and for the most part, I couldn't stand the other people in the bay, either. Every night I had to apply two coats of wax to a "kill zone" on the floor painted green with "Attack Dogs, 1st Platoon" written on it and other such hooah images. This "kill zone" was about 10 ft. by 45 ft. While I loved parts of basic training, I never loved the bay.

In Foxtrot Company at AIT I lived in an open bay with about 35 females altogether. We slept on bunk beds, but I managed to avoid having a bunkmate until the very end of my stay in the company. This was because, to secure one of the scarce remaining bottom beds, my bunk was right next to the door. Since the bays were locked from the inside, this made me the permanent auxiliary fire guard, whose responsibility it was to answer the damned door (among other things we tended not to do when we pulled duty). It also made me the first person the drill sergeants generally saw when they came storming into the bay to yell at us for this or that (twice, to me, a barking command to put more clothing on).

In Echo Company at AIT, I lived in two-woman rooms arranged as suites with a latrine connecting two rooms, and hence shared by a cumulative four females at maximum capacity. The latrines featured two shower stalls, in which I would wedge my back against the wall and make use of my nearly gymnastic flexibility to carry out the seemingly simple task of shaving my legs. If you got a clean roommate with a sense of privacy, you were fortunate. W was that for me while I was going through class. If you got a cluttered, dirty roommate who never shut the hell up even when you were reading a book, you weren't fortunate, and J was that for me after I graduated. There was never any avoiding your roommate because the beds, while not bunk, were on opposite walls of a room about the size of your average college dorm room. It was up to the roommates to draw the invisible line of demarcation through the room, separating this from that. It was up to padlocks and fingers crossed in the hope of integrity to prevent valuables from being stolen, items from being "borrowed," food from being eaten, without the express permission from roommate #2.

So now, here at Fort Hood, I have just moved into heaven. When I open the door to the area I will undoubtedly share with a roommate some day, there is a door immediately to my right. About five paces forward, there is a door to the left. The door on the right sports a lock for my key, and I open it to find my room. My room. There is nothing at all within the tiny confines of 361-A that I have to share with a goddamn soul. 361 in general, yes, what with the kitchenette and the sink and the cabinets and the teensy latrine. But there is a room at Fort Hood with a bed and a dresser and an entertainment center and a walk-in closet and it's all fuckin' mine. I take this itty bitty, teeny tiny, eensy winsy space, and regard it like it's the Four Seasons, like it's the Hilton, high-class luxury and beyond, simply because it has a door between my bed and the rest of the world. It offers me privacy, true privacy, something that has happened infrequently enough since I enlisted as to still be enumerable by finger-count.

I'm thrilled beyond belief. I have a home, such as it is. A year in TRADOC has trained me to believe that this is where it's at and it is, it is. I will never complain about the barracks, not these barracks, because it could be a 52-girl bay, or a 35-girl bay, or a two-girl room. It's fuckin' mine.

Naturally, a couple of years later, I went on to complain about the barracks, but I didn't mind them as much as a lot off people did, and even though I've had my own place for years now, I still miss them, sometimes.