Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted in a Sept. 22 letter to Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand that eight sailors attempted suicide while deployed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and its support ships. The aircraft carrier strike group spent more than seven months in Mideast waters for military operations against the rulers in Tehran.
One sailor jumped overboard from the Abraham Lincoln in early August before being recovered by an air wing search-and-rescue helicopter. Another sailor “attempted to go overboard in March and was stopped by his shipmates,” Cao said.
The carrier group played a key role in the U.S. bombing campaign against the Iranian people and in Washington’s ongoing blockade of Iranian ports. Many of the troops — workers and farmers in uniform — were totally unprepared for the months of intense combat conditions without any shore leave.
The USS Abraham Lincoln was accompanied by a cruiser and destroyers and with its dozens of aircraft, involving around 7,000 people — sailors, Marines and other troops.
The Lincoln set an unenviable modern Navy record for having spent more than 280 days at sea without a port call. That means they had no respite from the war drums, and limited replenishment of supplies or maintenance for the ship.
“Earlier in deployment,” Cao’s letter said, “the ship experienced localized piping failures and temporary issues with its reverse osmosis desalination units.” Translated into English, this meant conditions for the sailors deteriorated.
Top government officials have tried to pretty up the situation. War Secretary Peter Hegseth insisted that conditions aboard the Lincoln were “completely misrepresented.” In an astounding piece of denial, President Donald Trump said the deployment “was not nearly long enough.” And the Democrats, who have no more concern for workers in uniform — as they showed graphically in Vietnam, Afghanistan and other wars they led — other than their efforts to benefit from this becoming a midterm election issue.
Meanwhile, Navy brass asserted that these suicide attempts were consistent with the overall percentage among U.S. sailors worldwide. In 2024 the Navy reported 356 suicide attempts, and there were more than 1,500 attempts among all active duty military personnel that year. This just underscores the fact that U.S. troops aren’t given proper training to prepare themselves for combat conditions.
Concerns about conditions sailors faced on the USS Abraham Lincoln were publicly aired at an August town hall meeting in San Diego, a major U.S. naval base. Family members and others there told military officials about how these sailors — their children, parents and other relatives — were forced to live day to day in cramped quarters with substandard food and sanitation, and expressed their concerns about more suicide attempts to come.
Navy officials tried to downplay the situation. “Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship,” one Navy official said.
Our trade unions need to intervene, to fight so that workers are not just thrown into combat without adequate training. They need to learn how to handle the tools of war. This has nothing to do with being gung-ho partisans of the U.S. rulers’ imperialist war abroad. It has everything to do with being able to work together to survive and return home.
As the capitalist rulers drive toward more wars, amid sharpening competition with their rivals for markets, raw materials, exploitation of labor, and profits, this becomes an increasingly important question for the working class.