Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran.
Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.
Worried families vented their anxieties about loved ones onboard the Lincoln at an emotional town hall meeting with navy leaders in San Diego last Thursday, Stars and Stripes reported. One spouse among the 200 or so family members said that her husband had texted her that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”.
The families’ worries were expressed directly to navy leadership, represented at the town hall by the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, and other top officials.
Sailors and families described the lot of the crew as “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump yesterday downplayed the toll on American sailors enduring the record-setting deployment.
In a brief exchange with reporters before flying to New York for an event to highlight falling violent crime rates across the US, Trump refuted that family members have raised concerns about the deployment’s length and even said that the more than 260-day deployment is “not nearly long enough.”
The current crunch has been months in the making. The warship left San Diego on November 21 and was originally intended for the Pacific but was redirected to the Middle East once the US-Israel war with Iran began.
Since then, MS Now revealed, the 5,000-plus crew has had only two days on land, in Guam in December and Oman in July. The deployment was scheduled to end in May but has been extended a couple of times amid the ongoing war.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the accounts as “more fake news”.
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