Stuck at Sea for 9 Months

What's happening aboard the USS Lincoln

On the night of August 6, roughly 200 family members of USS Abraham Lincoln sailors and Marines filed into a room at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego to confront the Navy’s top leadership.

One spouse, in tears, said her husband had messaged her that same day saying he “hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.”

The Lincoln left San Diego on November 21, bound for a roughly seven-month deployment to the Pacific. It was redirected to the Middle East at the start of the year, ahead of Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran that began February 28. It has now been deployed for more than 260 days, including over 200 consecutive days without a port visit — a modern Navy record.

The USS Lincoln in 2021

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and other senior officials at the meeting had no answer to the one question every family wanted answered: When is the ship coming home? The Navy still has not answered that question, citing operational security.

Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines are aboard. Rep. Mike Levin says that crew members describe “moldy showers, broken toilets, no hot water for weeks, meals that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas.” Most alarming are reports that sailors have attempted to jump overboard.

The Navy has said that a sailor fell overboard on August 3 and was safely recovered; the incident remains under investigation. The service has not characterized it publicly as a suicide attempt and says it has seen no increase in reported suicidal ideation or attempts aboard the Lincoln. Cao would later confirm, on the record, that “a small number of mental health cases were treated” aboard the ship.

There are a lot of anonymous accounts online about what’s happening aboard the Lincoln, and it’s unclear which are true. What isn’t in dispute is the sheer length of the deployment, the active combat operations, disrupted logistics, mental-health incidents aboard, and bipartisan alarm in Congress.