After a record-long 286 days at sea, sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are speaking out about what they describe as "the worst deployment that they have ever experienced." In interviews with MS NOW Pentagon Correspondent Priya Sridhar, herself a former officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, the sailors said they are "afraid" that such extended deployments could become the norm, and expressed concern about the effect President Donald Trump's decisions will have on the Navy.

Sridhar met with the sailors in Thailand, where on Wednesday 5,000 service members disembarked from the Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for the first time in nine months. Even before the crew described their experience firsthand, reports had emerged detailing the poor conditions onboard the Lincoln. As Mediaite explains, the situation aboard the ship, "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."

Once on dry land in Thailand, the sailors recounted their experience to Sridhar. "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," Sridhar reported. "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."

Some sailors went further, telling Sridhar that "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." For many of the crew, this was their first deployment, offering a grim picture of what life in the Navy can be like under Trump. Their concern about retention echoes a long-standing challenge for the Navy, which has repeatedly identified keeping experienced sailors in uniform—particularly in high-demand specialties—as a persistent difficulty in recent years.

Although there has been plenty of lighthearted speculation about the trouble sailors might get into while in Thailand, the crew told Sridhar that their "top priorities" were "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. Really the 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."

The Pentagon has denied reports of the poor conditions aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships. Trump went further in his own assessment, declaring that the deployment was "not nearly long enough." The standoff between official denials and firsthand crew accounts leaves open the question of whether the Navy will adjust deployment lengths going forward, or whether sailors' warnings about normalization and retention will be borne out.

Source: Mediaite