The USS George Washington aircraft carrier has arrived in the Middle East, where it is expected to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln from its record deployment amid concerns about poor living conditions and morale. US Central Command announced on Thursday that the Washington arrived in the area on Wednesday, and posted an image of sailors working on the flight deck as the ship transited the Arabian Sea. No date has yet been announced for the Lincoln to return to the US.
In an interview this week, the wife of a sailor onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln told the Guardian that she has been getting brief glimpses over the past few months of what life is like on the aircraft carrier, mostly through text messages. And that as the deployment has stretched on, and on, she has noticed a change in her husband’s messages. But photographs he sent of what she described as his sometimes sparse meals as supplies ran low have left her worried.
One meal she described as just a “couple of pieces of bacon and three or four chicken wings”. It’s just when I ask him a question, I’m like, OK, wait a minute, that’s not right,” she said. Reports from families of crew members published in the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes military newspapers described food and water shortages, disrupted mail services, plumbing problems, low morale and worsening mental health, prompting Democratic lawmakers to demand answers from the Pentagon.
I think they’re treating them like a uniform, like a pawn on a chessboard,” the wife said in a telephone interview. Over the weekend, Adm Brad Cooper of US Central Command visited the ship, and released a statement saying the Lincoln “currently has among the lowest number of cases related to mental health” of the navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers, but acknowledged “that doesn’t mean all is perfect”, describing long deployments at sea as “uniquely challenging and tough”. A navy official, in a statement last week, also recognized that the war had disrupted traditional supply hubs, but said that “current reports from the ship confirm continuous access to clean water, functional [air conditioning] and healthy meal options”.
But the wife of the sailor still worries for her husband and his shipmates. The couple are in their early 20s and he works on the planes on the flight deck. She said her husband told her that morale among some sailors was low, and that they had been unable to receive packages from home for some time, but she believes the sailors are reluctant to speak out because they fear the consequences for their careers.
It’s their family members who are saying: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ They are the ones putting their foot down,” she said. Carl Otis Schuster, a retired US navy captain, said he thought more attention should be paid to the “human element” of these deployments, adding that “until we do that, you’re going to have repeats” of the kinds of problems that have emerged. The Lincoln’s crew, he said, had “shown really strong resilience”.
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