In a combative face-to-face confrontation on Thursday night in San Diego, angry military families challenged the acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, over difficult conditions aboard the USS Lincoln as its combat mission against Iran stretches onward with no clear date to return home, according to two people who attended the in-person meeting. Tensions boiled over again during a separate virtual meeting later that night between Navy leadership and family members of the 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln, according to audio and video recordings of the virtual meeting reviewed by MS NOW. In both of those meetings, family members expressed concerns directly to Navy leaders about the well-being and safety of their loved ones after the aircraft carrier set a modern-day record during the ongoing Iran war for the most continuous days at sea. Among the concerns brought up in the contentious meetings: the sailors’ mental health, safety on deck, a lack of supplies, food shortages, water contamination and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages en route to the ship to be lost in transit for months. Loved ones pleaded for information on when their sailors would return home. It remains a question that does not have any answer.

In the tense and fiery in-person town hall at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, Cao said that the Navy is preparing another carrier strike group — the USS Theodore Roosevelt — to deploy to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln, according to two people who attended. But Cao was unable to specify when that relief would come, citing operational security. About 200 family members packed into a banquet room at the Island Club, a catering and event center on base, demanding answers from the acting secretary of the Navy. At times, spouses of sailors on the ship were in tears asking leaders what was being done to address issues of mental health and exhaustion, the two people who attended told MS NOW. One parent said her daughter feels that she is never going to come home and believes she is going to die on the ship. Others asserted that the Navy had not done enough to take care of the sailors as they fight this war. One woman questioned the mission and said she found it difficult to be proud of her sailor when she believed the military was “killing innocent civilians” and her sailor expressed guilt about what he was doing. Her comment was met with applause from the audience.

dang, if only this were, like, a volunteer military where one could simply look up its storied history of war crimes and simply choose not to enlist, y'know?

While the deployment of the Lincoln appears to have been extended for a second time, in both meetings Navy leaders emphasized the professionalism and grit of the sailors on board. Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill and Vice Adm. Douglas Verissimo, the top commanders for Naval surface forces and Naval air forces for the Pacific Fleet, along with the senior enlisted leaders addressed the 200-plus attendees virtually Thursday night. “I cannot even tell you how proud we are of them. They have executed with a level of precision and professionalism that just goes to the quality of our people that have chosen to put the cloth of our nation on our shoulder and answer this call,” Cahill told attendees, noting that the families are an important touchpoint for leadership to understand the challenges the sailors are facing. As of Friday, the aircraft carrier had been on deployment for 259 days, after leaving its home port of San Diego on Nov. 21. The ship has only stopped twice, once in Guam in December and then July 7, when it briefly pulled into Oman — keeping the crew at sea for 208 continuous days. After this deployment, the Lincoln and its sailors will be assigned to a different home port in Bremerton, Washington, from San Diego, which has left many of the families stuck in limbo as they wait to figure out when they should make the move north from California. For now, Navy leaders say that there is a 58-day window for the families to move after the Lincoln comes back and that they are looking at Dec. 31 as a potential target for them to have a “time frame” of when that could happen.

The families expressed frustration that their loved ones were missing many once-in-a-lifetime events, including births of new children and funeral services for close relatives. One spouse said they have a baby at home who was born during the Lincoln’s deployment. “My husband has gotten no time with her,” the spouse said. The spouse acknowledged other attendees were feeling the same way, as many expressed their frustrations via the town hall’s virtual chat room, according to audio and video of the virtual meeting reviewed by MS NOW. “We have friends that are on this boat as well that — they have yet to meet their children,” the spouse continued. “And I just think, like, a lot of us are kind of confused and just feeling frustrated that right now we’re in limbo of not having a date to come home.” “I wish we could give that to you,” Verissimo responded. “We are working to finalize that, and I can’t … I look forward to the day when we can have at least a date window for home port, and that means they’re heading in the right direction. But we don’t have that right now.” Verissimo acknowledged that long deployments seem to be becoming “more frequent” in the Navy, reflecting back to deployments during Covid-19, but he said he recognized that the circumstances are different, as the military is engaged in active fighting. “We hear you loud and clear the impact this has on families, on service members, and the long-term ability of us to stand, sustain our forces’ health,” Cahill said.

But many family members are concerned about potential exhaustion, low morale and the mental health of the sailors and Marines as the war with Iran nears its 23rd week with no clear end in sight. Many in the virtual town hall questioned what mental health resources are currently available on the carrier and what will be made available upon its return, according to audio and video of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW. Cahill detailed an approach that includes having deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains on the warships, paired with “Human Factors Councils,” which Navy policy says are “designed to review the human factors that impact the wellness of individuals within the command and identify primary prevention efforts to reduce relevant risk(s).” “It’s about the unit understanding and sitting down with sailors individually on their Human Factors Councils and having a conversation about where they’re at in their moment in time,” Cahill said. As for when the Lincoln will return home, Cahill said the leadership team is addressing a number of requirements to “understand each individual sailor” that will be communicated back through a team of fleet and family support centers.

On top of the timeline and mental health concerns, family members expressed worry about the living conditions and food supply on board the carrier, conditions recently reported by MS NOW. The leaders acknowledged that there had been a “stubborn clog” that caused many of the toilets in a certain zone on the ship not to work for an extended period of time, but maintained that sailors on the ship had been trained to address these plumbing issues and that most of the non-operational toilets were repaired quickly. They also said that what many sailors think is mold in the showers might actually be mildew “that is not appealing to any of us” as a result of difficult ventilation systems on a ship, but that they take these health concerns seriously and use industrial hygienists to test the bathrooms to make sure fans are working and air is flowing. They also discussed the unique supply chain challenges that caused a domino effect for timely deliveries of mail, inventory for the ships’ stores and food to the aircraft carrier and the supporting ships that are part of the larger carrier strike group. The active war with Iran in the Persian Gulf made it hard for supplies to get to the ship from the Navy 5th Fleet’s base in Bahrain, Verissimo said during the virtual town hall meeting. “When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail … all of the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there,” Verissimo said, according to audio and video of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW. “So, that was an initial very large backlog. That also caused us to, under very contested logistics, very difficult and long supply lines, we had to prioritize food, which was also a challenge and remains on occasion to be a challenge,” Verissimo said. Verissimo said the Navy prioritized food, then items for the ship’s store like toothpaste and shampoo, and then mail when it can figure out the logistics of getting shipments out to sea. The officials said getting fresh fruit and vegetables to the ship will continue to be a problem because the food spoils by the time it gets there. “We’re doing a better job with supplies and mail. It’s getting better, it’s still not good, and it was extremely bad for a little while,” Verissimo said. “But we are, we are as a nation doing the best we can.”