'Afraid' sailors say Trump’s leadership set them up for 'worst' experience

Now that their record-long 286 days at sea are over, sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are speaking out about what they say is “the worst deployment that they have ever experienced.” What’s more, they told MS NOW Pentagon Correspondent Priya Sridhar – who happens to be a former officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve – they are “afraid” that such extended deployments will become the norm, and worry about the effect President Donald Trump’s decisions will have on the Navy.

Sridhar met with sailors in Thailand, where on Wednesday, 5,000 service members disembarked from the beleaguered Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for the first time in nine months. Even before they discussed their experience, reports had emerged describing the atrocious conditions onboard the Lincoln. As Mediate explains, the situation on 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 they were finally on the dry land of Thailand, sailors spoke with Sridhar about their experience. According 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. 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.”

What’s more, some told 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.” This was the first deployment for many, and provided a dismal example of what life in the Navy can be like under Trump.

While there has been much joking about the trouble the sailors could get into while in Thailand, they 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 took his assessment even further, declaring that the deployment was “not nearly long enough.”