According to Navy Families, USS Abraham Lincoln Sailors Are Trying to Jump Ship
The Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier has spent a record 250 days without making land, leaving its crew reportedly coming apart at the seams.
Photo via Unsplash, Vidar Nordli-Mathisen Splinter Iran War
Update: A predictably empathetic Donald Trump, commenting on these stories about sailor suicide attempts and the generally terrible morale aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea without a single port stop for more than 200 days, was asked by the media whether the ship had been deployed for too long. His reply: “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.” What a fellow he truly is.
It’s only been a couple of months since the last time I was writing a story based on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier coming apart at the seams, but this time around it certainly sounds like the biggest problem isn’t inoperable plumbing or toilets, but instead U.S. sailors that have been pushed to their absolute wits’ end.
This week, multiple military publications, including Navy Times and Stars and Stripes have been reporting that the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been facing cascading crises of morale and mental health in its crew, all naturally downplayed or handwaved by the likes of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It has even been reported that not one but multiple sailors have in recent weeks attempted to jump overboard from the Abraham Lincoln as it remains stuck in an endless deployment thanks to the failure of the Trump administration to end the Iran War. The ship has been at sea for more than 250 days without any return to land, a record for a U.S. aircraft carrier in modern times. It’s more common for a carrier to reach port every 30 or 40 days. And its 5,000 crew members are reportedly paying the price, in their ninth month at sea.
SHOCK REPORT: Desperate sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have tried to jump overboard amid an extended Middle East deployment, as families sound the alarm over severe mental health struggles, exhaustion, food shortages, water contamination, deteriorating conditions, + more, per Military Times.
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 11:33 AM · Aug 12, 2026
The military papers have published the accounts of families in particular, saying that they’re worried for not just the safety but the mental wellbeing of their loved ones aboard the Abraham Lincoln, amid accounts of those sailors being thwarted in apparent suicide attempts involving leaping from the deck or railings of the ship. One woman, Annabelle Loma, told Navy Times that she was informed by the ship’s ombudsman that her husband had attempted to jump overboard from the Lincoln following his deployment on the ship being repeatedly extended. Now she says her husband (currently on “medical hold”) is frightened, fearing the Navy will slap him with a dishonorable discharge and torpedo his previous 13 years of service. Another spouse, speaking to Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao during a town hall meeting for the families of service members, said that she had received a message from her husband aboard the Abraham Lincoln saying “He hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.” The same person told Navy leadership that they had “broken trust between us and the leadership,” when it comes to the expectation that the Navy would keep sailors safe.
There can be little doubt that morale aboard the ship, and other U.S. Navy ships that have been on marathon deployments in the Middle East for a war that was supposed to be over quickly, has been in the (out of order) toilet. Members of Congress such as California’s Rep. Mike Levin have been ringing alarm bells for months on the subject, with Levin recently posting the following, describing the ship’s living conditions: “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”
EXCLUSIVE: A family member of a service member currently deployed aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln shared messages with MeidasTouch detailing months without milk, meat arriving rotten, and a deployment with no end in sight.
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 9:29 PM · Aug 12, 2026
The response of the administration, meanwhile, has naturally been to immediately call all of the military families sounding the alarm liars. What else would we have possibly expected, given that the same administration has also detained or deported more than 50 military spouses or family members during Donald Trump’s second term in office? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has referred to the claims of poor conditions from the families (and the sailors) as “more FAKE NEWS from the Pharisee Press.” Because sure, 2,000-year-old references to Jewish theology are clearly quite relevant to this discussion.
Actual Navy leadership, meanwhile, is less able to unilaterally just claim that these incidents have not been occurring than Cabinet members like Hegseth who are afforded broad license to simply engage in Trump-style lying or invent new realities. Contacted by The Guardian, a U.S. Navy official said they were aware that “extended deployments place a significant strain on our service members and their families, and we are grateful for the resilience and sacrifices they make,” which you will note is not a denial that sailors have been attempting to leap overboard. They went on to note that “we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship,” which is a wonderfully tricky way of phrasing things that implies there is always at least some baseline of “suicide attempts aboard the ship.” Just what you want to hear, right?
Most of these problems flow from the simple fact that an aircraft carrier like the USS Abraham Lincoln is simply never supposed to be away from any port, continuously at sea, for nearly this long. It originally left San Diego in November of last year and was bound for the Pacific, but was then redirected after the Iran War began. This deployment was originally scheduled to end in May, but has now been extended multiple times, with no end in sight. Theoretically, the carrier is intended to be relieved at some point by the USS Theodore Roosevelt, but the Navy provides no timelines or explanations of the logistics involved in making this happen. No one can say how much longer the Abraham Lincoln‘s sailors will be expected to continue serving night after night in poor conditions, praying for relief.
“These men and women signed up to serve their country,” said the aforementioned Rep. Mike Levin in response to Hegseth. “The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars.”
So, will our punk-ass War Secretary Pete Hegseth apologize for calling these stories “Fake News,” or is he too busy planning new ways to undermine national security while waving his rhetorical dick around?
www.stripes.com/theaters/us/…
— MeteorBlades (@meteorblades.bsky.social) 9:07 PM · Aug 12, 2026
It’s particularly egregious that the sailors are going through all of this now, given that it’s only been a few months since we saw almost the exact same sequence play out aboard the Navy’s “most advanced” $13 billion modern aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, which was wracked by technical issues and onboard disasters. That floating latrine of a ship left Norfolk, Virginia in June of 2025 for a deployment that was constantly hijacked by Donald Trump’s capricious international whims, first heading to Europe, and then being redirected to Venezuela to participate in the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. From there, the Gerald Ford steamed all the way to the Middle-friggin-East to take part in a cute little conflict with Iran that everybody just knew at the time would be over in a matter of weeks. Months later, it suffered a debilitating laundry fire that burned for 30 hours and injured more than 200 sailors, eventually limping to Crete in disgrace to undergo emergency repairs. The ship finally returned to Virginia in June of 2026, nearly a year after it had left the U.S., for what I can only imagine is the longest list of repairs and emergency toilet refits you can possibly imagine. And now it’s apparently the Abraham Lincoln‘s turn to bring shame upon the Navy, given the mistreatment of its sailors and the lack of concern displayed by the country’s top military leadership.
“My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” said one military parent to Stars and Stripes. “We are all tucked in at night in our beds, meanwhile our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”
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