They Signed Up to Serve. They Didn't Sign Up for This.

The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln is suffering after more than 260 days at sea. And a certain corner of the internet has decided they should just man up.

Conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln are deteriorating amid a record deployment.

There is a date every deployed service member carries in their head. It’s the day you’re supposed to come home. You don’t write it on a wall or say it out loud too often, because that feels like tempting fate. But it’s there. You count toward it in the quiet moments. Your spouse counts toward it. Your kids circle it on a calendar in the kitchen and cross off the days one at a time.

I know what that date meant to me on my own deployments. And I know what it felt like when it moved. You think you’re leaving on a Sunday, and then word comes down that it’s been pushed a week, and I promise you, even that lands like a punch to the gut. Because even the toughest soldier or sailor is still human, and because many have been running on empty for a long time, and that date was the thing they were holding onto. When it slides, something inside you sinks.

My deployments were shorter than what the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are living through right now. And I still remember the weight of a single week’s delay. With that in mind, I want you to really think about what these men and women are enduring.

The Lincoln left San Diego last November on what was supposed to be a routine deployment. It got rerouted to the Middle East to support Trump’s war with Iran, and it has been out there ever since. That’s more than 260 days at sea. Over 200 of those without a real port call, which is a modern-day record. The crew has set foot on land twice in all that time. Once in Guam, where many weren’t even allowed off the ship. Once in Oman, where the sailors who could leave were penned inside a secured compound in the port. That’s it. Two days of dry land in the better part of a year.

The reporting on conditions aboard that ship should make every American angry. Families describe moldy showers, food shortages, sailors running out of soap, toothpaste, deodorant. These are the most basic things a person needs to feel like a person.

There are reports of plumbing that doesn’t work. Mail from home rarely seems to make it. And worst of all, a mental health crisis that has reportedly led multiple sailors to try to go overboard. One did on August 3rd, wearing a life vest, pulled from rough seas by a rescue helicopter and treated as a mental health episode.

And before any internet tough guy starts working on an insult, know that these are not soft people. These are some of the most capable and dedicated Americans we have, sustaining combat operations on the far side of the planet, and they are breaking under a burden nobody should have to carry.

There is no clear end date. That is the part that cuts to the bone. Their families told reporters there is no indication of when their loved ones are coming home. The deployment has already been extended more than once. For a crew that has given everything, the one thing they cannot see is a path back to their families.

A few days ago, I shared a post about what’s happening on the Lincoln. Later, I asked people to scroll down and read the comments.

A lot of the replies were some version of the same thing. This is what they signed up for. Man up. Stop complaining. They said it about sailors who have been at sea for nine months. They said it about kids who haven’t touched grass since last winter. They said it about people so exhausted their own families are afraid the strain will get someone killed.

I’ll be blunt: the keyboard warriors are pathetic. The people typing that have never experienced anything remotely resembling a deployment, much less this deployment.

They have never watched a homecoming date get erased and rewritten while a spouse and children waited at home.

They have never spent a single night doing the hard, dangerous, grinding work these sailors do every single day.

And yet they feel qualified to sit in judgment of the toughness of men and women who are doing exactly that in service to a country whose internet macho men are questioning their grit from the comfort of the couch.

It’s cruel. And more than that, it’s ungrateful, which to me is just as bad. This is the moment those sailors deserve our sympathy, our concern, and our loudest advocacy. The last thing anyone stateside owes them is a lecture about manning up.

Let me say something plainly to anyone still tempted to tell a service member to toughen up. Sacrifice is not a competition, and it is certainly not a thing you get to referee if you have never done it. All human beings have a breaking point. Saying so is not an insult to the uniform, but rather the most basic form of respect for the person inside it. The toughest people I ever served with were also honest about the cost, because they had personally paid it.

Here’s the thing that makes me angriest, though. The suffering on that ship is not some unavoidable act of God. It is the direct result of choices. Namely, a war that Trump’s ego started and keeps extending with no clear objective and no end in sight.

The Navy is now reportedly moving another carrier in to take the Lincoln’s place. Good. But it is far too late. It should have happened a long time ago.

We ask an enormous amount of the people who wear the uniform. They accept that. They know the deal when they raise their right hand. But the deal runs both ways. When we send them out there, we owe them a plan to bring them home, the basic supplies to live with dignity while they serve, and leaders who treat their lives as something more precious than a talking point. Right now, on the Lincoln, we are failing that obligation.

So no, this is not what they signed up for. They signed up to serve their country. They did not sign up to be forgotten by it. The least the rest of us can do is refuse to look away and refuse to let anyone tell them their pain is weakness.

Bring them home. And until they’re home, at the very least, honor them enough to care.