Abe Lincoln is homeward bound so we can cancel the pity party.
Hopefully the Navy has enough cheese on hand to go with all the whine being served up over the USS Abraham Lincoln’s long deployment in middle eastern waters. Like a lot of others who have spent extended periods carving boring circles in the water aboard one of our haze-grey hotels, I’ll pass on the pity party.
It’s the Navy, right? It’s all about ships and ships go to sea carrying sailors (and often Marines). It’s the name of the Navy game, and there’s nothing in the rule book that specifies how long that game might last. I’m suspecting most of the furor is prompted by a relatively small number of Abe Lincoln sailors crying the internet poor-ass because they don’t like conditions aboard the Nimitz-class bird farm that spent 270 straight days underway without making a port call.
Reports of skimpy unappetizing chow, plumbing failures, grueling duty schedules, and plummeting morale filtered through the ether to reach families who promptly complained to politicians and journalists causing headlines about poor American sailors being cruelly mistreated by the establishment. And that establishment, don’t you know, is those guys blockading Iran and patrolling the Strait of Hormuz under orders from the Orange Man and his bloodthirsty minions. The press and politicians facing mid-term election campaigns jumped on the story with gleeful abandon. A tough cruise through turbulent waters in the middle east suddenly became a tsunami of cruel and unusual punishment for the Abraham Lincoln sailors.
How’d you like to be some poor ensign serving as collateral-duty morale officer aboard Abe Lincoln? If anybody’s got cause to jump overboard, it would be him…or her. But our Navy is smarter and harder than that. Officers, Chiefs, and leading petty officers aboard that ship doubtless worked tirelessly to deal with inevitable problems caused by extended deployment aboard an old ship carrying 5,000 souls involved in a day-on-stay-on duty schedule. It interests me that we don’t hear much similar complaint from sailors manning the small boys, destroyers, and frigates that are part of the carrier’s ever-present escorts.
The USS Abraham Lincoln carries its own clinical psychologist, trained behavioral techs, mental health counselors, and a batch of empathetic chaplains. There’s even a support pooch named Fathom aboard that trots around as a distraction for homesick sailors. Makes me wonder how guys aboard ships plying the Pacific on extended combat operations during World War II managed to gut it out minus such readily available psychological support. Chow gets short and boring on long cruises, heads back up, and things break from overuse or neglected maintenance. That stuff happens. Take a turn and suck it up. The thing about long deployments, as anyone who has survived one will tell you, is that they don’t last forever.
Despite all the political harumphing and trips to familial fainting couches, none of the Abraham Lincoln’s sailors died on that long deployment, but that’s not for lack of trying by one misguided swabbie who planned to end his agony by jumping overboard. He was subsequently rescued and is now facing charges which should—but do not—include being a complete dumb-ass. Dig around that story a bit and you’ll discover the guy was a teenager married to another teen with two kids. How he got into the Navy remains a mystery to me, but no doubt he’s on his way out shortly.
Despite all the attendant hoopla, the story is now spiked, overcome by events. The USS Abraham Lincoln is homeward bound, relieved on station by the USS George Washington. The outbound carrier made its first port call in Thailand after 270 days at sea. Interesting to me is the lack of reports from Pattaya about misbehaving sailors on liberty. Apparently, that long, grueling period at sea didn’t cause task force sailors to nuke the liberty port or morph into raving berserkers.
Not saying I’d relish shore patrol duty on that first liberty call in Thailand. I painfully recall having that duty in Subic Bay when a carrier pulled in from a long stint on Dixie Station off Vietnam. It was not pretty. Likely there were some goofy antics in Pattaya, but the guys and gals reportedly managed to release pent-up steam without major incidents. So, the Navy turns the page on another long cruise haze-grey, underway and mission complete. Wonder how long it will be before we start hearing horror stories from the George Washington.
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