Given my background, a number of readers have asked me about these reports.
Honestly, I've avoided saying anything because given my experience on long deployments, stories beginning with "families say..." are usually followed by breathless hyperbolic hearsay originating with some perpetually disgruntled Sailor.
You could serve Thanksgiving diner every day in the galley and there would be a Sailor who hated turkey and complained to his Chief.
You could field day (clean) and inspect every day (and you do) and some Sailor would be disgusted by the showers (and yet that same skylarking shitbird is also nowhere to be found when the LPO calls away field day in berthing).
There's always a broken fixture, a backed up toilet, a fire, a short circuit, a ruptured steam line, a leaking pipe, an endless list of failed equipment awaiting repair and not enough time in a day to fix any of it. You take one of the most complex machines ever built, fill it full of people, dunk it in saltwater, and drive the hell out of it every day, all day, well, shit breaks. People get tired. Welcome to life at sea.
So, up to now, these stories, the poor meals and lack of food, the backed up toilets and moldy showers, mail and communications being cut off, etc, well, I tended to take with a grain of salt (no pun intended). Deployment is ALWAYS difficult, endless work, lack of sleep, close quarters, no privacy, tension, tedium, even the smallest most mundane jobs can go bad in a hundred ways and there is absolutely no end to the long long LONG list of things that can kill you out there.
It just never ends. It FEELS like it will never end.
Extend that voyage, it gets infinitely worse.
You expect Sailors to complain. They have for centuries. I mean, hell, it's how you get through the day. You expect their families and those who aren't familiar with life on a warship at sea, those who've never stood the watch, to imagine the worst.
Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes it IS the worst.
Then, inevitably, it gets even more worse.
That's the thing about life on a warship, it can ALWAYS get worse. And usually does.
I was once on an old cruiser off Africa and through a series of comical and increasingly ridiculous events, we ended up with VERY limited fresh water. No, I mean, VERY limited fresh water, no showers, no laundry, literally reduced to brushing our teeth in warm canned soda (until we ran out of that). No air conditioning. In 100F+ heat. It SUCKED. You can't believe how bad it sucked. And it just kept getting worse. Four hundred unwashed men with yak mouth locked in a steal can in that goddamn horrible heat. And that went on for months because that's what the mission required. That was Ronald Reagan's Navy. That's a special kind of hell.
(and just because I'm telling this story, when we finally made port and they brought a water barge alongside to fill our tanks, that water was contaminated with JP4 jet fuel. Every cup of coffee after that had a beautiful rainbow sheen floating on top and smelled like a Shell Station. Just in case you ever wonder why so many of us end up with cancer or worse in our later years)
So, again, I take these stories filtered through my own often miserable experience. It shouldn't be like that. It shouldn't. We should be improving as a civilization, as people, as a military. Active duty today SHOULD have it better than the previous generations. No one should have to live like that. But they do. That's life in the military.
Being a Navy Sailor, being a Soldier or a Marine or an Airman isn't for everyone. And sometimes you don't find that out until you're in the middle of it.
HOWEVER
Now it's in the Military Times and let me tell you why that's different.
The Times used to be the Army Publishing Company, nowadays known as Sightline Media Group. They like to claim "independence" and non biased reporting, but no one carries water for the military, the defense industry and conservative warmongering politicians like the Times editorial board.
One of my favorite pastimes back when I was on active duty was to write letters to the editors of the Times, often under a pseudonym. I'd show the letter around before sending it off, and we'd wait for it to be published and howl in laughter at how the words were edited to reshape whatever criticism I'd written to fit the Times' gung ho narrative.
Sometimes it was so blatant, just such obvious propaganda, you'd wonder why the retired officers running the outfit didn't just write the letters themselves.
SO, for the TIMES' to be reporting hellish conditions onboard the Lincoln, out in the open, well, that's significant. It must be very bad indeed. Yes, I do note the "families say" weasel words in the headline, but still there it is and its bad.
Bottomline: again, from my own experience, the military will endure damned anything so long as the mission is clear, the nation is behind them, the danger close and present, and most of all: the leadership is from the front and by personal example.
But this deployment, this nation, this idiotic war, and these so-called leaders are anything but.
Jim Wright
Multiple sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have attempted to go overboard as the carrier's deployment stretches into its ninth month.
www.militarytimes.com
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