Sailors tried to jump from USS Lincoln during record deployment

Families of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are pressing Navy leadership over a mounting mental health crisis, after military-focused outlets reported multiple sailors have tried to go overboard during the carrier’s record-setting deployment in support of the war with Iran.

The Lincoln, carrying roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines, left San Diego on Nov. 21 for a scheduled Pacific deployment before it was diverted to the Middle East. It has now been deployed for more than 250 days and at one point spent more than 200 consecutive days at sea without a port call — a modern record for a U.S. aircraft carrier. Crew members have had only two days ashore, during stops in Guam and Oman.

Annabelle Loma told Navy Times her husband attempted to jump from the carrier after being repeatedly extended on deployment and is now on medical hold.

“He’s scared,” Ms. Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge” over an episode she attributes to exhaustion. In a separate incident, another sailor’s wife, Maria Rodriguez, said her husband and several shipmates pulled a crew member back onto the deck before the sailor went over the side. The Navy has not confirmed some sailors who attempted to go overboard or engaged in self-harm. 

The Military Times reporting followed a Stars and Stripes account of a tense town hall in San Diego last Thursday, where roughly 200 family members confronted Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and other senior officers. One spouse said she’d received a message that day from her husband saying he hoped he didn’t wake up the next morning. Sailors separately told Stars and Stripes that watchstanders had stopped a crew member from jumping in an incident announced shipwide; one sailor told the outlet, “we’ve just been turning and burning the whole time we’ve deployed,” adding crews now just want a date home. 

The uproar has drawn mounting congressional scrutiny. Rep. Mike Levin, California Democrat, wrote on X that families described “moldy showers, broken toilets, no hot water for weeks” and meals reduced to rice and tortillas, while Rep. Jason Crow, Colorado Democrat, a former Army Ranger, said the strain on sailors and their families is building “week by week.” Sen. Ruben Gallego, Arizona Democrat, has called for a bipartisan congressional delegation to inspect the ship.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, went further, writing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Mr. Cao to demand a formal accounting of the deployment’s extensions and its toll on the crew. Mr. Blumenthal wrote that “aircraft carriers are extraordinarily dangerous workplaces under normal conditions,” warning that fatigue and deferred maintenance compound those risks. He noted the USS Gerald R. Ford spent 326 days at sea before returning in May, writing that such extended deployments “may be becoming a feature rather than an exception” of the Navy’s force-generation model. 

The Navy disputes that morale problems have translated into a documented rise in self-harm. A Navy official told CBS News that “we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts” aboard the ship, pointing to onboard counselors, chaplains and medical staff. The Navy’s account attributes earlier supply disruptions to a “highly contested” operating environment that forced the service to prioritize food, then hygiene items, then mail. 

The complaints echo an earlier round of criticism in April, when photos of rationed meals and reports of moldy showers and broken laundry facilities first surfaced. Mr. Hegseth dismissed those accounts at the time as “more fake news,” a remark Mr. Levin has since revisited publicly amid the latest reports.

The Navy’s difficulties tracking the psychological toll of long deployments predate the Lincoln’s current cruise. A 2025 Military Medicine study of 956 sailors found that access to quality mental and physical health care was among the most consistently cited stressors of underway service, and researchers concluded that, given elevated suicide rates in the Navy, improving health care access aboard ships is an urgent priority.