Amid some of the hottest temperatures on record, many Marines are struggling to stay cool in barracks often without air conditioning, leading to lack of sleep, low morale and safety concerns, according to interviews with a half dozen Marines, former Marines, and troop family members, as well as a Military.com review of service documents.
"I think there's a big morale crush when you get home," a current Marine leader in the Corps told Military.com of their troops' air conditioning situation. "You've been out sweating all day or even just doing hard [physical training] in the morning and then you come back to shower and change, and your room is consistently hot."
Marines shared that they've spent their own money on portable coolers, fans -- sometimes even taking them from their workplace -- and window units they hide when leadership comes by, all in an effort to beat the heat and often against barracks policies that ban air conditioning units due to concerns about the stability of the power grid or old electrical wiring.
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Some have slept on cooler floors or in truck beds at night, run their car's air conditioning, left their barracks doors or windows wide open despite personal safety concerns, or sought cooler spaces off-post. One experienced heat illness exacerbated by the sweltering barracks.
"When you have that day after day, and you're just looking for that comfort relief … it gets really frustrating," one Marine said.
Many expressed exasperation with the policies limiting air conditioning, including the Marine leader who said they meticulously dug through their installation's regulations and found them conflicting, despite other leaders at the unit enforcing a portable A/C ban.
When that leader brought the conflicting policy to their own leadership, they were essentially stonewalled.
"That was the end of what I could do there," they said. "It's important to get away and it's important to have things to do to unwind and relax … but if our barracks don't provide that, then how are they supposed to do it?"
In May, Marine Corps leaders identified ventilation as one of their top barracks concerns, noting that long-standing temperature and water control issues in the decades-old facilities have led to increased instances of maintenance problems such as mold. Earlier this year, the service put quality of life -- including barracks improvements -- at the top of its priority wish list to Congress.
But as the service works to demolish or refurbish old barracks or build new ones -- a process top service officials have conceded could take a decade -- service members described to Military.com brutal conditions during the sweltering summer months due to temperature control problems in the barracks.
"It definitely affects how I sleep," one current Marine, who has been at both East and West Coast installations in recent years, told Military.com of their air conditioning situation. "I feel like it's very hard for people who don't live in the barracks to actually care about the barracks because, at the end of the day, they don't experience that trouble."
Young Marines, junior enlisted service members and noncommissioned officers live in the barracks, though many quickly take advantage of housing for married couples once eligible. Ultimately, some of the visibility of these issues comes from Marines themselves, with one Marine NCO telling Military.com that he encouraged his troops to stay on top of fix requests that might be stagnant for weeks or months.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded globally, with 2024 expected to break even more heat records. U.S. Marine Corps bases are situated in some of the nation's hottest climates, including Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, and Twentynine Palms and Camp Pendleton in California, which are among the service's largest installations. Even Japan, which is home to thousands of Marines, had its hottest July in recorded history this year.
Most of the Marines who spoke to Military.com described themselves or their peers finding no relief from the heat as they oscillated between field exercises, flight lines or motor pools only to return to their sweltering barracks. The service members interviewed by Military.com spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Some of the current and former service members Military.com spoke to said that they had experienced living in newer barracks where the air conditioning was working, a relief to them or their peers who work outside or in labor-intensive jobs. Other times, the barracks had air conditioning, but it wouldn't work well or only in some rooms of the facility, causing some to seek reprieve in their peers' quarters and ask for fixes that seemed never to materialize.
Some Marines took to knowingly skirting measures banning portable A/C or spot coolers.
"I bought my own A/C. I don't really care what the barracks rule says," said one Marine, who described sleeplessness in their hot barracks. "If I'm suffering, I'm gonna do something about it. A fan just wasn't cutting it anymore."
Problems with Policy
The policies limiting the use of A/C units do not seem to be uniformly applied across bases in hotter regions, though concerns about draining or overloading the energy grid are prevalent at most installations. For example, in 2018, Camp Pendleton announced that, after years of restricting their use, it would be relaxing its policy to allow on-base housing tenants to use portable air conditioners up to a certain energy threshold. It is unclear whether that policy includes the barracks, as the installation did not respond to clarifying questions by publication.
Other installations, like Camp Lejeune, require approval from the commanding general "to prevent facility damage, imbalances in room cooling, mold growth from over-cooling spaces, and electrical issues from improper installation of temporary units," Victoria Long, a spokesperson for the installation, told Military.com.
Long said that, in cases where repairs cannot be immediately made, the installation might issue fans or window units, or even temporarily relocate Marines to other barracks in the case of long-term outages.
At Twentynine Palms in the California desert, a spokesperson for the installation said that policy prohibits the installation of window units or space coolers in the barracks for fear of overloading the power grid.
"There would be an impact on the building and installation electrical systems with the installation of window air conditioners or spot coolers in every room," Capt. Johnathon Huizar, the spokesperson, said in an emailed statement to Military.com on Tuesday. "At scale, the increased power load across multiple barracks would impact the high voltage system and trip substation circuit breakers, potentially causing mass power loss across a portion of the installation."
While there are no plans to relax existing policy at Twentynine Palms or Camp Lejeune, where recent highs have hit 118 and 93 respectively, Huizar noted that extreme weather, including high temperatures, already strains the installation's HVAC system. Spokespeople for both installations said that public works personnel are working to prioritize living spaces to address the issue, including holding bi-weekly meetings with barracks managers and unit commanders, increasing the number of connection points for portable chillers to boost cooling in the barracks, conducting preventive maintenance, and responding "immediately" to downed HVAC systems.
"Sometimes, repairs are impacted by complexity, or they're delayed due to a shortage in critical parts, which is a nationwide challenge," said Long, the Camp Lejeune spokesperson, adding that some A/C issues are fixed before residents notice a temperature change. "Air conditioning systems have grown in complexity over the years, and Camp Lejeune has added additional control specialists to its public works staff."
A recently released study from the Defense Health Agency found that, between 2019 and 2023, Marines and soldiers experienced higher rates of heat illness than their peers in other branches, with the second-highest rates of heat-related ailments located at Camp Lejeune. Other Marine installations that reached the study's roughly top 20 locations where heat illness was most prevalent included Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms and Parris Island in South Carolina.
Maj. José A. Castillo, deputy director of the Corps' housing branch, said that, starting next year, Camp Horno, located aboard Camp Pendleton, will begin to receive air conditioning installation and that other installations will be evaluated under Barracks 2030, "which will provide Marines comfortable living conditions, preventing heat stress, exhaustion and fatigue and, ultimately, improving training and mission readiness."
Promises Made
Senior Marine leaders are aware of the temperature issues affecting the barracks, and as part of the Barracks 2030 plan that is designed to upgrade living spaces in the coming years, there is a concerted institutional effort to rectify Marines' living conditions, which were neglected during 20 years of the Global War on Terror as other priorities took precedence.
Marine Corps Installations Command told Military.com in a statement Wednesday that the Barracks 2030 initiative includes evaluating the need to install or refurbish air conditioning in barracks, adding that the decision to install air conditioning varies depending on the climate conditions and infrastructure needs at certain installations.
The senior enlisted leader of the service has been particularly vocal on the barracks issue, previously describing the poor living conditions as "undefendable," instead working to push the Corps forward in its efforts to rectify the problem.
"I know part of my job is to bring light to the room realities of a young Marine today in the barracks," Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz said while appearing on the Moments in Leadership podcast earlier this year. "That it's not OK for a Marine to come home -- because that's their home -- and have mold or the temperature is 98 degrees."
Ruiz said he received a social media direct message from someone holding a temperature gauge in their room late at night showing that the barracks was 98 degrees; he added that it is not "OK" to force "Marines to live in places like that."
"There was a promise that is made -- is being made this morning -- when the recruiter's telling a young applicant or their parents, 'Look, we got you," Ruiz said. "When they get in here, we have a place to sleep and it's going to be safe and they'll be rested to execute a live-fire range the next day or fix the F-35 engine, or whatever it is."
The impact on sleep is a real problem, according to the service members who spoke to Military.com, especially as it can lead to safety concerns when Marines are required to operate heavy equipment or participate in high-stakes training environments.
Katherine Kuzminksi, a deputy director at the Center for a New American Studies, told Military.com in an interview Monday that sleep deprivation shows up again and again when looking at military accidents.
"So in the Marine Corps, what that has looked like has been rollovers of vehicles that have ended in accidents in the past -- fatal accidents -- or just ones that have cost lost duty days to Marines," she said.
The difficult conditions shouldn't be happening for service members and in some cases haven't been addressed because Congress often sets barracks improvement and other maintenance needs against each other in budget battles, Kuzminski said.
"We want to test our Marines to the limits in combat and in training, but there is not a requirement to do that during their leisure time or when they're trying to rest and recover in order to perform their job," she said.
One parent of a service member, whose name is being withheld to avoid impacting their child's career, told Military.com that their kid was admitted to the emergency room for fluids, in part due to intense training and lack of temperature control in the barracks. She said that the service member requested a fix several times, but no relief came.
"Your body's fighting this heat and you're drinking so much fluid, but you're not getting a break," the mother of the service member -- a registered nurse with more than 40 years of experience -- told Military.com. "It's making it hard for him to like the military, and this has been his dream."
