Sailors fighting President Donald Trump’s war with Iran are washing in moldy showers and rationing meals in the ninth month of a mission that shows zero signs of ending.
The USS Abraham Lincoln sailed out of San Diego in November on a deployment supposed to last seven months. Trump, 80, launched his air campaign against Iran in February. The carrier has been in the fight ever since, and its 5,000-plus sailors and Marines still have no homecoming date. The president said the conflict would last a “few weeks.” It’s been five months.
Bonnie York, whose stepson is aboard the Lincoln, told MS NOW she had been told a doctor or therapist on the ship warned the crew needed to reach port before people started “losing their minds.” She voted for Trump—and partly because he promised not to start any new wars. She no longer believes the country is safer for it. “You’ve essentially stranded them out there,” she said of the crew.
Relatives of the crew told the network they fear the exhaustion on board will get someone killed. A dozen spoke to the outlet about the conditions, and most asked not to be named, fearing retaliation against their relatives on the vessel.
Brett Snow, a Navy veteran with a son on the ship, said the grind has produced a situation “ripe for accidents.” Even in peacetime, he said, a carrier is one of the most hazardous places to work.
The crew has set foot off the ship for just two days in the more than eight months since it left California. There was a brief stop in Guam in December, then no port at all until the Lincoln reached Oman on July 7, ending 208 unbroken days out on the water. No U.S. carrier has spent longer at sea without a break in the modern era.
Families of the service personnel on the ship described toilets that are out of service, laundry rooms shut for weeks and long stretches without hot water.
Nicole Conrad, who, like York, voted for Trump, has not seen her son’s face for months. He has messaged her about locked showers, a shuttered laundry and a meal that came to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice. She now wants Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, to see the ship for himself. “He put our nose in a war that we shouldn’t be in,” she said.
The crew’s relatives went public two days after Trump handed Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, control of a new panel on military family welfare, the New York Post reports. He signed the order in the Oval Office on Monday. Its members are Christie Mullin, wife of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and 20 spouses of the Joint Chiefs, the service secretaries and each branch’s top enlisted leader.
Hegseth brushed off an earlier round of complaints about conditions at sea. Photographs of near-empty meal trays aboard the Lincoln and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli spread online in April, and the Daily Beast reported at the time on parents’ fury over their children going hungry on board. The defense secretary called that coverage “fake news.”
Rep. Sara Jacobs, 37, a San Diego Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the crew’s fatigue and mental health worry her deeply, and warned that history shows such strain can carry serious consequences, including a heightened risk of suicide. Trump, she said, “needs to end the Iran war now and bring our service members home.”
Other military families have had a different week. The Associated Press counted 51 cases of mothers, fathers, husbands and wives of serving troops taken into immigration custody since Trump returned to office. At least six have been deported. At least eight are still being held. No federal agency keeps a tally, and the Department of Homeland Security told the wire it compiles none, so the real figure is almost certainly higher.
The arrests have pushed back deployments, driven some troops to take leave and left others with nobody at home to mind their children. Experts told AP the reversal could damage readiness while the country is fighting a war.
One of the officials who has stepped in to get military spouses released is Markwayne Mullin, whose department is making the arrests, and whose wife took her seat on Trump’s commission for military welfare on Monday.
The Daily Beast has contacted his department, along with the White House and the Pentagon, for comment on this story.
