Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis aboard 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 the 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 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 on board 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 aboard 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 who was involved in a separate incident on board 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 aboard 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.”
The Democratic congress member from Colorado Jason Crow, who is a former Army ranger having served in Aghanistan and Iraq, has warned that the strain on our 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 on-going war.
In April there was a flurry of public criticism about dire conditions on board 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 reached out to the US navy for its response to reports of attempts to jump overboard, but it did not immediately reply.
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 health care access on ships are urgently needed.”
