Sounding The Alarm

Ed Pilkington writes:

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.

A woman at the meeting told Cao that the navy had “broken trust between us and the leadership”, the paper reported.

The Navy Times gave details of thwarted suicide attempts onboard the aircraft carrier during the current deployment. Annabelle Loma told the outlet that her husband had tried to jump overboard after his spell at sea kept being extended.

“He’s scared. He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out his 13-year career is ruined, just like that,” she said.

The paper quoted another sailor’s wife whose husband was involved in a separate incident onboard the Lincoln in which he prevented a fellow crew member from jumping, grabbing them and bringing them back on deck.

Mike Levin, a Democratic member of Congress from California, has sounded the alarm over conditions onboard the warship, which is in its fifth month of combat operations against Iran. He described the lot of the crew on X 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.”

Jason Crow, a Democratic Congress member from Colorado who is a former army ranger having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, has warned that the strain on service members and their families on the Lincoln is “building week by week”.

The current crunch has been months in the making. The warship left San Diego on 21 November 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.

In April, there was a flurry of public criticism about dire conditions onboard the carrier. Photos emerged of poor-quality and rationed food, and there were reports of water shortages, moldy showers and broken laundry machines.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, dismissed the accounts as “more fake news”.

Levin responded to Hegseth’s remark this week. He said: “These men and women signed up to serve their country. The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars.”

The Guardian contacted the US navy for its response to reports of attempts to jump overboard. After this article was published, a navy official responded, saying that they were aware that “extended deployments place a significant strain on our service members and their families, and we are grateful for the resilience and sacrifices they make”.

The official said that the health and wellbeing of every Lincoln sailor was a priority: “Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.”

Religious, medical and mental health professionals were available as part of a “comprehensive support network” that included “onboard deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains”. The official recognised that the war had disrupted traditional supply hubs, but added that “current reports from the ship confirm continuous access to clean water, functional AC and healthy meal options”.

The mental health challenges faced by active-duty US navy personnel are well known. A study from last year looked at the unique stress factors faced by sailors on deployments and found the most common included loud noises, lack of rest, and inadequate mental and physical healthcare.

The researchers conducted a survey of deployed sailors and found that almost half complained that they were not receiving adequate help in coping with stress at sea. The study concluded that “given the high rates of military suicide, including within the navy, efforts to improve healthcare access on ships are urgently needed”.

And Larry C. Johnson writes:

The Guardian published an article on Wednesday reporting that multiple sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln have attempted to jump overboard as the ship’s deployment stretches into its ninth month and over 260 consecutive days at sea. According to the article:

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.

Pete Hegseth, the clown serving as Secretary of War, dismissed the complaints of the Navy families as “fake news.” The only liar here is Hegseth.

The Guardian article elicited a response from a good friend who recently retired from the Army. Here is what he sent me:

And finally the truth. This is making the rounds. If the Lincoln has 5,000 people on it and it hasn’t seen land in 38 weeks… they are starving, no packages, rationing coffee, waiting to die from a fucking Iranian hypersonic. They say the number is 6 attempts. Nearly a year at sea no land, etc. the real number of attempts is likely 5-fold or 10-fold.

You have more attempts at suicide on a NORMAL carrier operation. It’s just normal, a factor of statistics. That’s BEFORE being sent to your death on a purely political mission from someone who openly hates military members and thinks they are pussies for getting hurt or dying.

Six attempts sounds like a lot, but that number is WAY WAY too small. As an officer, like them, I have had to do a number of Army Regulation 15-6 Command Investigations on Soldiers committing suicide. All officers have, it’s a normal function. Suicide is a very real and stable number, too. And that’s while you are still in. They have no clue what’s waiting for them the first night they return home (or wherever) and they have time to spend alone thinking about it ALONE WITH NOTHING TO DISTRACT YOU EXCEPT YOUR ONLY FRIENDS JIM AND JACK (i.e., Jim Beam and Jack Daniels whiskey), Did you know they do roving patrols on all Navy ships called “fire-guard”? That term has become blanket use for all services. It means a rotating schedule to monitor the perimeter to make sure there are no…”fires”. Wrong…the guard is to prevent people from trying to kill themselves on the spot. “Fire guard” still happens today, in Army basic training, when you go to the field, when you go on exercise or deployment etc. it has nothing to do with a fire. Suicide is a part of daily life in the military.

Here’s another example: in the big units, such as 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne…if the unit makes it 82 or 101 days without a DUI everyone gets a 4 day weekend. Well, they never got over 3 weeks without one, regularly. So they had to increase the denominator to…suicides. Everyone gets a long weekend if we make it to 82 days without a suicide in OUR OWN UNIT. Guess how many days off there were? None. Had to change the denominator again…honestly. I think the new denominator was actually drugs. We may have made it to 82 days without someone CAUGHT AND CHARGED with using drugs in the barracks or whatever. Couldn’t make it to 82 days without a DUI or a suicide though.

I participated in initial invasion of Iraq on 26 March 2003. I just turned 44 and left active duty over a year ago. 44-20=24.

44 years old minus 20 equals 24 years of PTSD (from actually killing people…Wild West in those days) of divorces, a few loose suicide attempts, mostly big wave surfing in Hawaii where you don’t really expect to come back in. Granted I was an enlisted soldier in the invasion of Iraq, but then attended West Point and started an entire successful officer career AFTER THAT, including more combat deployments.

As I have mentioned before I am the class president of my West Point class and have been for 20 years or whatever, and so I have the numbers of dead from day 1 of West Point until now. Committing suicide at West Point is very regular. The preferred method since everyone is in pretty good shape and runs a lot is a run to Bear Mountain Bridge and then jumping. We had at least 5 commit suicide I think while I was there. And keep in mind they could have just quit and gone home for the most part. And then we lost some in combat particularly from 2009-2012 when everything heated up again post surge etc. but we have lost many more due to suicide, as officers. With families.

You know what one of the more “fun” decisions I get to make as class president? Where their names go and how they are placed on the class list. We have 3 demographics of dead classmates. Combat, suicide or non combat injuries (helo crash in training, etc).

I get to listen to and deal with everyone single one of my dead classmates’ families argue about should their name be on the list of “fallen in combat” if the majority either killed themselves while deployed in combat, killed themselves shortly after coming home from combat or many years later. You can imagine how emotional those conversations are.

Only 6 suicide attempts of 5,000 on an aircraft carrier that is a tinderbox of rage, frustration, and waiting on death? Multiple by 5, minimum. Eventually they end up just telling direct line supervisors if your sailor or soldier kills themself, it’s on YOU.

I also heard from the mother of a sailor who served on the USS Tripoli. She wrote:

I believe I told you I’ve been worried about the mental health of these sailors & marines aboard the navy ships at war. Why? Because they removed all chaplains off my sons ship, the USS TRIPOLI. They kicked them off in Diego Garcia, right before their last leg of trip to entering CENTCOM. This pisses me off. I called so many politicians and raised those alarm bells about their removals. I asked how many other chaplains were removed on other ships??? Again nobody would call me back or email me these answers. And here we are, sailors trying to commit suicide at war. Good GOD, Hegseth NEEDS TO BE FIRED! I guarantee you many military families aren’t aware that their loved ones chaplains were removed before going to war. This is a critical asset to have a chaplain while at war!!! They see so many gruesome things (casualties, kids and friends blown up) that is hard for any human to deal with. This infuriates me!!! Who the hell can get this message to blast on all news, Hegseth had NO business in removing those chaplains. Politicians need to demand his firing and immediately place chaplains back on every navy ship, especially at war.

This crisis is real and Donald Trump and his lame Secretary of War are doing nothing to address the problem.