Bluesky

In July, a parent whose son was serving on the Navy ship USS Lincoln wrote an alarmed letter to Stars and Stripes, expressing worry that the dire conditions being reported from aboard the ship were harming sailors. The Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East since last November and has seen combat in the Iran War. It was scheduled to return home in May, but its mission has been indefinitely extended.  “My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” the letter read. The writer added, “Our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”

The anxiety expressed in that letter was well-grounded. Since then, reports from two publications that are well-sourced with the Pentagon — Stars and Stripes and The Navy Times — have made clear that there have been multiple suicide attempts aboard the Lincoln. While the Navy denies that there is a widespread mental health crisis on the Lincoln, the families of sailors, as well as political leaders, have begun to loudly decry the distressing conditions aboard the ship. 

On August 8, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, complaining, “There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”

The roots of the critical situation aboard the Lincoln go back to poor military planning by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth in the run-up to the Iran disaster. They had assumed that overwhelming US airpower would lead to a quick victory, comparable to the coup the US was able to pull off in Venezuela in January. This scenario radically underestimated the resilience and capability of the Iranian government. 

As The New York Times reports, 

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.

The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.

Iran had in fact destroyed or severely compromised US military bases all over the Middle East, not just in Bahrain but also in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. This meant the sailors on the Lincoln had to receive food from farther away and had no easy access to shore leave. 

While the supply chain issue has been slowly mended, for a time it meant a rapid deterioration in living conditions. Even a CNN report that tried to minimize the problems acknowledged that there was “a dearth of fresh food for many months. For a stretch…their meals were reduced to tuna mixed with noodles, or corn dogs. Several described losing significant weight.” Other problems included black mold that would drip on the sailors, extended periods without laundry, and backed-up toilets spewing human waste. 

Even more demoralizing than these physical problems was the psychological toll of an interminable mission with no clear end goal or purpose. As one sailor told CNN reporter Pamela Brown:

At first when we learned that we would be doing combat operations it was intended to be a 2 week thing. But unfortunately that became a 7 month thing… They told us it was to help Iranian protesters, then they told us we are out here to denuclearize Iran, now it’s to support a blockade. The purpose of even doing this is inconsistent….This is a big let down with consistent extensions that affects our loved ones who have their lives on hold until we return.

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The Trump administration and its media outriders have decided that the best way to handle this scandal is to add insult to injury. 

On Friday, Trump was asked by a reporter if the deployment has gone on too long. The president replied, “No. Not nearly long enough.” He denied that the families of service members were concerned about conditions aboard the ship. He did say that the Lincoln was “moving” and was about to be replaced by a “very similar” ship. A Pentagon spokesperson claimed, “Legitimate challenges of a long combat deployment are being twisted into a false narrative.”