264 Days at Sea. Two Days on Land.

Five thousand Americans have been aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln since November. They have set foot ashore twice. When families said the food was inedible, the Secretary of War called it fake news.

US Navy photo

The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln has been off the ship twice since November 21.

The first was Guam in December, where many of them were not permitted to disembark. The second was a restocking stop in Oman in July, where the sailors who were allowed off were confined to a secure compound inside the port and did not leave it.

That is the entire shore leave for more than five thousand Americans across nine months.

In early July the ship set a modern record for the most continuous days at sea without a port call. Nobody was trying to set it. It was set on them, by extension after extension, and there was no ceremony, and as of Wednesday the number stands at 264.

What they left with, and what happened to it

The Lincoln left San Diego on November 21 for a Pacific deployment scheduled to end in May. It was rerouted to the Middle East before the war with Iran began on February 28. The deployment has been extended repeatedly, with no announced end date. The ship is thirty-seven years old.

The crew has now supported forty days of continuous combat operations.

The conditions, as described by family members to MS NOW, Navy Times, and Stars and Stripes, and repeated at two town halls with Navy leadership last week: moldy showers. Broken toilets. No hot water at times. Shortages of soap, toothpaste, and deodorant. Water contamination. A mail system so disrupted that care packages have been lost in transit for months.

And the food. One sailor’s texts to a relative, shared with a reporter: no milk in three months. Supplies take so long to arrive that nothing fresh is included. Nothing fresh at all except meat, because meat is frozen, and sometimes the meat arrives rotten.

At one of the town halls last week, Navy leaders explained to the assembled families that fresh fruit and vegetables cannot be delivered to the ship, because by the time they reach it they have spoiled.

That is the official position and it is presented as a logistics fact rather than as a description of a choice. The choice is the length of the deployment. The spoilage follows from it.

April, and what the Secretary said

In April, several outlets published photographs taken aboard the ship by sailors and passed to their families, showing extremely small portions of food described as inedible.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called the reports fake news. Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, pushed back on the reporting as well. The Navy subsequently posted photographs of the ship’s chow halls displaying a variety of food options.

Four months later, families are still describing shortages, and Navy leadership sat in a room and told them the produce spoils before it arrives.

The families’ answer to the fake news characterization, given to reporters this month, was that the reports were not fake, and that they remain worried about their sailors’ nutrition.

The families

More than two hundred people met with Hung Cao, the acting Secretary of the Navy, in person last week. A second meeting was held virtually. MS NOW obtained recordings of both.

At one of them, a spouse told the assembled officials, in tears, that she had received a message from her husband that same day saying that he hoped he did not wake up tomorrow.

A parent said their sailor had told them they thought they would die on that ship. Another said their son reported that he and his shipmates think constantly about going over the side, for relief.

Navy Times reported multiple incidents in which crew members attempted to go overboard, or were stopped before they could.

Maria Rodriguez said her husband caught a fellow sailor at the edge and pulled him back onto the deck, and that three others ran to help, and that he told her afterward he had never felt adrenaline like it in his life.

Annabelle Loma’s husband is a thirteen-year Navy veteran. He attempted to go overboard during this deployment. He is now on medical hold.

What she told the Navy Times about him is the sentence I have not been able to put down.

He is scared. He thinks he will get a dishonorable discharge, and that his thirteen-year career is ruined, just like that, because he was burnt out. That is not fair, she said. That is not right. That is not what he should be worrying about right now.

A man reached the end of what he could bear, and survived it, and the thing occupying him now is whether the institution that put him there will punish him for it.

The wording

Asked about the reports, a Navy spokesperson said that based on information available to the command, they have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.

Read the sentence slowly, because every clause in it is doing work.

Based on information available to the command. Not identified an increase. Reported.

That is not a denial that sailors are in crisis. It is a statement that the command’s own reporting system has not registered a change, offered in response to families who are describing, by name, on the record, the specific things that system did not register. The Navy has also declined to provide a number for how many crew members have attempted to go overboard or self-harm.

A retired Navy captain who served aboard the Lincoln told a CNN affiliate that it is not uncommon for a strike group to experience somebody wanting to jump overboard during a deployment, that it does happen, and that the fact of it happening on this one is not surprising.

He is correct, and it is the most damning thing anyone has said about this, because the argument is that a rate of despair which would be alarming anywhere else is normal here, and that normal is therefore acceptable, and that a ship nine months into a seven-month deployment with two days of shore leave should be measured against that baseline.

What this costs and who is paying it

Six days ago the President of the United States said American munitions are in unlimited supply and that the country is in great shape. Three days before that he posted at midnight that reporting on depleted stockpiles was treasonous and that the leakers would be hunted down and given long prison sentences.

The men and women operating those weapons systems have not had fresh milk since May.

They are missing the births of their children. They are missing funerals. The care packages sent to them are lost somewhere in a mail system nobody has fixed, and their families are learning about their mental state from text messages, and the Secretary of War’s public contribution to this so far has been to say that the photographs of their food were fabricated.

Senator Richard Blumenthal has demanded answers by August 27. His questions to Hegseth and Cao are worth listing, because they are the obvious ones and nobody in the executive branch has volunteered a single answer to any of them. How many times has the deployment been extended, and why. What are the Navy’s plans for a continued carrier presence in the region. What metrics is the Navy using to assess mental health and fatigue aboard. What are the actual conditions.

And the last one, which is the question underneath the entire war: what military objective is the continued deployment of the Lincoln intended to achieve.

Acting Secretary Cao told the families that the Lincoln will be relieved by the Theodore Roosevelt strike group. He did not tell them when.

Vice Admiral Joseph Cahill told them the Navy hears them loud and clear regarding the impact on families, on service members, and on the long-term ability to sustain the health of the force.

That is the whole of the official response. An acknowledgment, a relief with no date, and a Secretary of War who has not retracted anything.

The crew has been ashore twice since November. The war is in its sixth month. Nobody has said when it ends, or what winning it would look like, or when those five thousand people are coming home, and the only reason any of this is public is that their spouses and parents started talking to reporters, which is the one supply line the Navy could not interrupt.

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If you or someone you know is a service member or veteran in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.