Sailors suffering a mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln were told by President Donald Trump on Friday they hadn’t been stuck on board “nearly long enough.”
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Trump made the remark Friday when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long.
The Lincoln’s roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines are nine months into a deployment that was supposed to end in May, with no return date announced.
Multiple sailors have attempted to jump overboard during the extended deployment as doctors on the ship warn they are on the brink of “losing their minds.”
Families of sailors have described moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry service, and a meal that came to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice.
Annabelle Loma told the Military Times her husband had tried to go overboard and was placed on a medical hold.
“He’s scared. He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out his 13-year career is ruined, just like that,” she said.
The Lincoln has now spent more than 260 days at sea without a port call — a modern record for a U.S. carrier, according to The Guardian.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the reports of poor conditions and overboard attempts had been “completely misrepresented,” ABC News reported.
“Some deployments are longer than others, and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody,” Hegseth told Newsmax.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) fired back directly at Hegseth’s dismissal of the families’ accounts.
“These men and women signed up to serve their country. The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars,” Levin said, according to the Guardian.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao demanding answers about the deployment, ABC News reported.
The USS George Washington left port in Da Nang, Vietnam, last week and is heading toward the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln, the Associated Press reported.
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