USS Lincoln Families Speak Out About Its Deteriorating Readinesss

Modern U.S. aircraft carriers are small floating cities.  Some 5000 sailors (and Marines) serve on them and despite their size let’s face some facts.  They are complex and require down-time for maintenance after a deployment. There’s also what a crew endures.  While carriers are our largest ships (over a thousand feet long) it’s startling to many how little space there is for actual living. Sleeping, eating, showering etc.  So yes, even a normal deployment is a grind on the crew. And morale drops quickly when meal portions are sparse, laundry is delayed, there’s mold in shower areas, toilets don’t work etc.  So family members are speaking up!

Naturally the Pentagon is saying all is well.  While acknowledging shortages of things like fresh veggies and fruit for meals (understandable on nuclear subs that stay submerged for months but surface ships can be replenished) but dispute there are shortages of actual meal portions.  They also say the things with laundry, showers and toilets have ‘just been addressed’ – just what you’d expect THIS Pentagon/administration to say.  Still, I’m inclined to believe what I read in this article from The Independent.  I’ll bet you trust what it says far more than any Hegseth bullshite.

Let’s start with something basic. A normal deployment is usually six, perhaps seven months. Obviously that gets extended at times but the Navy likes to maintain the normal deployment to allow rotating carriers through necessary maintenance and repairs. Significantly extended deployment means yard time for maintenance that would normally take months can wind up taking years.  So common sense tells even a dumbass MAGAs that grinding down the ships this way is bad.

Then there are the people who serve on ships.  Whether surface ships or submarines space is at a premium. Bunks in berthing areas are stacked three, sometimes even four high with only a couple of feet walkway between bunks on opposite sides of the compartment. So is storage space for uniforms and any personal gear.  You can get a sense of it in the title pic which shows a berthing compartment on the USS Bush. Like the Lincoln it’s a Nimitz class carrier. Imagine having to answer the call of nature and making your way out of one of those bunks down the passageway (often squeezing past another crew member) to get to the Head (Naval slang for bathroom/toilet) only to find it’s out of order!  Or unable to shower (even a “navy shower” where you wet down, turn off the water to soap yourself and then turn it back on to rinse) sometimes because so many are also out of order.  Or running out of clean clothing because the laundry facilities are having their own maint./repair delays.

Then there’s meals. I can recall infantry school at Camp Pendleton four decades ago where they weren’t giving us even grade school kid portions much of the time. And that was only less than three months! It’s not like the crew can complain except to their Chief (Petty Officer) who can raise the issue – and these days it seems get ignored.  But they can and do to folks back home. They can also take pics.

I seem to recall reading recently Hegseth wants to limit their ability to talk to folks back home.  If morale is already dropping like an anchor this would REALLY cause the fecal matter to interface with the rotary oscillator (sh!t hit the fan) so we’ll see.  But families are as I said speaking out. It makes me wonder how long this has been going on for it to get to this point but ten bucks says it’s been a long-term set of problems.  I suspect we’ll see more such stories in the news but what’s coming out is disturbing as hell:

Morale is plummeting on an American aircraft carrier that’s running short of food and other supplies as its exhausted crew wages President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, worried family members say.

Sailors and Marines serving on the USS Abraham Lincoln have told relatives about being served a half-cup of rice and two tortillas for a meal, and said the ship’s store often lacks soap, deodorant and toothpaste, MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Crew members are also worn out by working long, grueling shifts, with some rarely getting a day off, and described broken toilets, moldy showers without hot water and no laundry service for weeks at a time, relatives said.

“The morale is not good,” said Bonnie York, whose stepson is aboard the Lincoln. “Apparently, the ship’s doctor or therapist said they need to hit port soon or people are going to start, you know, losing their minds.”

Again, this crew deployed last November on what was supposed to be a seven month deployment. We are now heading into the TENTH month and there is no word on when they might finally get to come back home.  Or even have a port call. Remember I noted they’ve  had a grand total of just two days ashore.  During Vietnam carriers were deployed at ‘Yankee Station’ off the coast out of range of Vietnamese weapons) this length of time or longer BUT there were always at least two breaks.  Usually to the Philippines or Australia.

That too was a proverbial war with no end in sight. But as I said this crew and others on other ships are going through worse. For a President who got elected (if barely) in large part on a promise of ‘No more forever wars.”  No wonder doctors on the ships are growing concerned. The physical and mental grind is taking a toll. One has to ask how many who might have stayed in the Navy/Marines will tell the NCO responsible for retention to f**k off when their enlistments end?  That means more money to train up new people for complex tasks and a deficit of experience. That especially will affect leadership down the road with fewer NCOs and commissioned Officers with experience to share.

And again, those ships (not just the carriers) will need far more time in the ‘yard’, or worse being put into dry-dock for extended repairs.  For carriers the cost will be appalling. Not to mention our ability to project power. For the moment the cold, hard fact is that the crew of the Lincoln and other ships is in increasingly dangerous territory:

Navy veteran Brett Snow, whose son is also on the Lincoln, warned that conditions on the ship could lead to disaster, noting that an aircraft carrier was an extremely hazardous workplace even during peacetime.

“It’s the most dangerous place in the world already, and now you’re grinding it out, day in and day out, with no breaks,” Snow said. “It’s an environment that’s ripe for accidents.”

Maybe, just maybe families speaking up will push Congressional Republicans to rein Trump in and force him to accept a deal much like the one Obama got.  All their bullshit flag waving for decades has gotten them a lot more votes than conservatives should have been getting.  Hopefully there will be (plenty) more doing what families (and former sailors) have been doing:

Nicole Conrad, whose son is serving on the Lincoln, told MS NOW she wanted Hegseth to personally check on the conditions there.

“Go visit. If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself,” she said.

Conrad and the two other parents who spoke to MS NOW said they had voted for Trump but were unhappy with his decision to go to war against Iran.

She has plenty more to say in the linked article which I urge you to read.  One hopes she will turn out to be one of many who think Trump shouldn’t have started this war and that ‘none of us wanted to be in’, that we aren’t ‘safer’, have ‘depleted a lot of things’ and that Trump has pushed our military to the edge.  The Navy veteran Snow quoted earlier says sure, Iran has to be denied nuclear weapons but added “he didn’t think the president’s strategy was working.” Well DUH!

I sure hope with the primaries almost over that Democrats (and hopefully a few Republicans) talk about this through the midterms.  A LOT of MAGAs are deeply pissed at Trump over this war. We don’t need to get them all to vote for Democrats.  But if we do things right we will convince a lot of them to either vote third-Party or not vote at all.

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