Beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln Sailors Tell MS NOW Deployment Was ‘Worst They Have Ever Experienced’

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln confirmed their punishing 286 days at sea constituted “the worst deployment that they have ever experienced,” according to MS NOW Pentagon Correspondent Priya Sridhar.

Sridhar, herself a former officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, traveled to Thailand to be on hand Wednesday when the 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the beleaguered Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier were finally able to set foot on dry land for the first time in more than eight months.

The plight of the Lincoln, which deployed from its home base of San Diego on Nov. 21, began to make headlines when families of the service members aboard spoke out about allegedly bleak conditions, including rotten food, clogged toilets, and desperate sailors who reportedly tried to jump overboard.

The sailors were keen to speak with their families, Sridhar told MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart, who was guest hosting The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:

Now, I also got a chance to speak to some of the crew, the regular rank and file sailors who are part of this 5,000 member crew that have been on this record setting deployment, and many of them told me that this was, in fact, the worst deployment that they have ever experienced.

It was incredibly hard, and many of them expressed to me that they actually wish that they hadn’t even done a port call at this point.

They wanted to just go directly home. And another thing they told me is they are afraid that because of this war, these really long deployments without any port calls are going to become normalized. And they think that this is going to have a huge impact on retention in the Navy, especially for junior sailors.

So this is the first deployment they’ve ever experienced. So overall, Jonathan, I can say that the sailors top priorities was actually to FaceTime their family members. Because remember, it’s not just them that have served and sacrificed.

It is their families as well, their spouses who have had to single parent their kids for an extended amount of time. So really the, you know, major priority that they told me they wanted to do while they were here on shore was to FaceTime and see their kids, see their spouses and see their parents. So they finally got a chance to do that after nine and a half months. Jonathan.

U.S. Central Command has denied reports of poor conditions on the Lincoln and President Donald Trump declared their deployment was “not nearly long enough.”

Watch above via MS NOW.

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