Beyond the Clip: GROUNDHOG DAY ON THE USS LINCOLN

Porch family, we’ve got some disturbing news coming out of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and I want y’all to watch this clip and then, when you’re done, tell me in the comments what you think about all of this.

This is a video Ian from The Decency Rebellion on TikTok made. And Lord have mercy, he is sharing one hell of a story from a family member who’s close to one of the sailors aboard the Lincoln. This family member received this information through phone calls and text messages.

Ian collected a lot of information in this clip, but whatever you do, DO NOT MISS WHAT HE SAYS AT THE TWO-MINUTE MARK BECAUSE IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!

But let’s start at the beginning because, as they say, it’s a pretty good place to start. Right out the gate, he starts talking about families having to send their sailors basic things. Why? Because the ship wasn’t doing its normal port calls. And having no port calls is rough because it takes away the opportunity to replenish the things they need.

No port calls also meant the ship store had no way to restock. So eventually they ran out of the supplies these sailors needed too. We’re talking body wash, socks, underwear, jerky, drink mixes and even toilet paper. Small human comforts.

And here is the absolutely heartbreaking part. Some of those care packages took, wait for it… five or six MONTHS to actually reach the sailor.

Now, I know a little bit about what it’s like to be the person who sends that box because my ex-husband was EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, in the military and he went TDY all the time to some really shitty locations. I can remember one time he went TDY to Bahrain. When he left, he was told he would be there for six weeks, but in the end he wound up being there for almost twelve. And after a while, he and the others started getting depressed and homesick, so their sergeant contacted the families and offered to let us send care packages… so of course I did.

The minute I heard, I started gathering things for him. I picked up anything and everything in the hopes that it could give him that little boost he needed. I put a book in there and some playing cards. I got all of his favorite snacks and some candy. I put clean underwear, socks and some new T-shirts in there and wrote him a note.

And listen, being able to send that package gives the family a boost as well. Because when they are deployed, you feel powerless to help. So knowing you alone have the power to boost their morale, it makes you feel less helpless.

So when I heard five or six months, I thought about how defeated the family who sent that package must have felt. And how the relief and the whole intention of the whole process was thrown off.

But when he got to the part about the sailors not being able to wash their clothes, immediately I thought to myself, well, no wonder morale is so damn low. Running out of clean clothes while living through a high-stress situation can make the other conditions you’re living through that much worse. I have experienced this firsthand.

Now, I was never trapped on a ship, but I know what it’s like when a major hurricane rolls through your town and takes all the humanity with it. One of the worst I ever went through was Hurricane Opal. She hit October 5, 1995, and we didn’t have power for two weeks. It was unreasonably warm that October, which means sweating is not optional. And the more you sweat, the more you need to change, so you see where I am going with all of this.

When you run out of clean clothes, it makes it that much worse. Those small comforts are what keep you sane when you are going through something traumatic.

And I am sorry, the conditions these sailors have been experiencing since about February are enough to break even the strongest of minds.

Mentally, it has to be a bitch.

Mine lasted two weeks.

These sailors have been dealing with this sh*t for months.

They also have these sailors working 12-hour watches. Now I will say this: 12-hour watches aren’t anything new for a sailor, but getting off your shift and being met with a closed mess hall… that is out of order. And I’m sorry, but what the hell are they supposed to do in that situation? They’ve just worked for twelve hours and now THEY have to find somebody who can get them something to eat before they can finally go to sleep. Otherwise, they go to bed hungry, and that makes getting a good night’s sleep even harder.

And get this: by the time they do all of that, according to this account, some of them may only get five or six hours before they have to get up and start the madness all over again. It’s Groundhog Day on an aircraft carrier.

So why is this happening? Well, in my opinion, it’s because they have no consideration for the sailors on that ship. The people up top seem to only care about what the man in charge and Whiskey Pete want done. I can hear the man in charge now… tell those sailors to suck it up.

I am pretty sure they have been sucking it up. But when you combine everything that was talked about in this video, I don’t know how anybody expects the human mind to just keep taking that indefinitely.

And the part about some sailors intentionally going overboard, well, that tells us what we need to know. As you heard in this video, the sailor said there was another jumper. He also said it wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

If hearing that information doesn’t shake every American to their core, I really don’t know what will. Let’s think about this for a minute. Nobody wants to jump off of a ship and die. That’s not why this person joined the Navy. I don’t believe that was ever their long-term plan. And the fact is, we don’t know what was going through that sailor’s mind or why that person went overboard. But I will tell you this: it made me sit and think about how broken somebody has to feel before something like jumping off the ship even enters their mind.

Hearing all of this took me on a trip straight back to law school and the day I learned a term called false imprisonment. For those of you who don’t know, false imprisonment basically means you can’t intentionally confine somebody against their will without lawful authority.

Now, before anybody comes for me, NO, I am not saying these sailors were falsely imprisoned. They’re in the military. Obviously, the military has the legal authority to keep them aboard that ship.

What I’m talking about is the mind.

Because legally having the authority to keep somebody somewhere doesn’t tell us what months of feeling like you can’t leave that place does to a person mentally. And when you’ve been out there month after month and you start feeling like this is never going to end, I can understand how that ship could start to feel like a prison.

There’s a huge difference between being legally imprisoned and feeling trapped like an animal. And after hearing that sailors have intentionally gone overboard, that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

After Hurricane Opal hit, I knew eventually it was going to end. I had faith the power would come back on at some point. And it did. These sailors have been out there for months, and I can understand how after enough time passes somebody would start feeling like they’re never going to get off that damn ship.

The USS George Washington battle group is finally on their way to relieve the Lincoln. That part is wonderful. I know the sailors and their families are relieved they’re finally coming home.

Except here’s the twist… this sailor said they aren’t coming straight home.

Instead, they are supposedly going to stop to clean and paint the ship before it gets stateside. His exact words… they don’t want it to “look bad when we get home.”

You have GOT to be freaking kidding me.

But that lines up with another rumor I heard about the Lincoln. People are saying the sailors will possibly have to sign NDAs before they’re allowed off the ship. Now, we do NOT know if that rumor is true. I haven’t been able to confirm it, so I am not telling you sailors are being required to sign anything. Right now it is a rumor.

But if it is true, that explains why the ship is being painted and cleaned before getting stateside. Because when I heard about the NDA, I remember thinking to myself, well, an NDA is not going to work if we can actually see what the ship looks like.

So when I heard “so it won’t look bad when we get home,” I thought, Ah.

There it is.

Let’s make sure all of the optics are in order before the public sees the ship. It sure would be nice if they put this much energy into making sure the sailors were taken care of in the first place. Because if they had done that, they wouldn’t be in this position.

That’s what pisses me off.

It was okay for these sailors to LIVE in those conditions, so why are they so afraid for the public to SEE the actual ship?

Seriously. If those conditions were acceptable when it was our sailors looking at them every damn day, why do they suddenly become a problem when the Lincoln is coming home and WE might see them?

And the best part of all of this is that the Lincoln was already scheduled to go into dry dock for maintenance when she gets back anyway.

So what the hell are we doing?

If she’s already going into dry dock, why are these sailors supposedly spending one more damn day away from their families making sure the ship doesn’t look bad when it gets home?

Let it look bad.

That’s what it looks like.

And you know I keep saying just get these people home, but the more I say it, the more I realize coming home isn’t going to fix all of this.

You ever watch The Tomorrow War?

You remember that scene when Chris Pratt gets back and he has that dead look? His wife is looking at him and you can tell she knows this is not the same man who left. It was almost like his soul had been altered forever.

That’s what I’m afraid of with these sailors.

I think some of these families are going to meet a different person than the one who got on that ship. And when you know somebody that well, you’re going to pick up on it immediately. You just know when somebody you love isn’t the same.

I also think a lot of these sailors are going to need a lot of mental health help when they get home.

And God, I hope I’m wrong about how bad some of this is going to be.

Because hear me when I say this…

“Getting off that ship is one thing. Getting what happened on that ship out of their heads is going to be something completely different.”

I want to say something before you go because this one got to me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

This one started with a video too.

Just a man sharing what he says a family member close to one of the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln had been hearing through phone calls and text messages.

And before I knew it, I was sitting here thinking about Hurricane Opal.

Then I was thinking about my ex-husband being stuck in Bahrain and that care package I sent him.

And somehow I wound up thinking about The Tomorrow War and that look on Chris Pratt’s face when he finally came home.

That’s how these things happen around here.

Something comes across my screen and I start watching it. Then something in it bothers me or reminds me of something I’ve lived through, and before I know it I’m sitting here digging into the whole damn thing because now I need to understand what I’m looking at.

And this time it was these sailors.

Because underneath everything we’ve been hearing about the USS Abraham Lincoln are actual people who have been living on that ship for months.

That’s what I couldn’t get away from while I was writing this.

I kept thinking about the families too because I’ve been the person waiting at home.

I know what it feels like when somebody you love is somewhere you can’t get to them and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to make their situation better.

Hell, that’s why I remembered that care package.

Sometimes sending a box full of snacks, clean underwear, playing cards and a note is all you’ve got. And knowing you might give that person a little boost makes you feel less helpless too.

So when I heard about families sending care packages to sailors aboard the Lincoln and some of them apparently taking five or six months to get there, that hit me differently.

And that’s why asking y’all to support the Porch underneath something like this feels a little strange sometimes.

Because these are real people.

But this is also exactly why Southern Punk exists.

I want to be able to stop when something like this lands in front of me and give it the time it deserves.

Sometimes that means I spend hours digging through reports and government documents. Sometimes it means I watch the same two-minute section of a video over and over because something about it isn’t sitting right with me. And sometimes I start writing about an aircraft carrier and somehow end up telling y’all about Hurricane Opal in 1995 because suddenly something I lived through thirty-one years ago helps me understand what I’m hearing now.

That happens around here a lot.

I can spend six, eight, sometimes ten hours researching one story. Then I write it, make the video, edit everything that goes with it and put that work across Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

And here’s something most people probably don’t know.

Facebook is the ONLY one of those platforms paying me for video views right now, and that only recently started.

TikTok can give one of my videos thousands of views and I make nothing from those views. Same thing on Instagram. Same thing on YouTube. You can watch Southern Punk all day long on those platforms, but unless somebody chooses to subscribe or directly support the Porch, those views don’t pay for the hours that went into making what you just watched.

That’s why I talk about subscriptions.

Not because asking y’all for money is my favorite thing to do.

It isn’t.

But Southern Punk is my job now, and I want to keep doing it this way.

Independent.

No corporation sitting behind me deciding which stories are worth talking about or telling me what I can and cannot say.

Just me, my wife, this slightly ridiculous Porch we’ve built together, and all of you.

When you become a paid subscriber, you’re helping give me the time to do the work that happens before you ever see anything. The digging. The writing. The videos. And all those damn rabbit holes I inevitably disappear down because I found one thing that bothered me and couldn’t leave it alone.

You also get a seat on the Porch Council and a voice in what we investigate next.

And as soon as this damn kidney stone passes, I’m giving paid subscribers something new too.

Southern Punk Uncensored.

And y’all already know what that means.

No worrying about what Facebook might flag. No wondering which word TikTok has decided it hates today. No watering something down because one of the platforms might throw a fit.

I’m going to say what I actually want to say.

I’m holding nothing back.

And all of that is less than 34 cents a day.

If you’ve been here for a while and you’ve thought about becoming a paid subscriber, and you’re able to do it, I would love to have you sitting here with us.

Really.

Because every person who chooses to support Southern Punk gives me a little more time to stop when something like this account from the USS Abraham Lincoln lands in front of me and say wait a damn minute, there is more going on here.

And if a paid subscription isn’t something you can do right now, please don’t feel bad about that.

You can share us.

Send this write-up to somebody. Share the video. Tell somebody about the Porch.

Hell, send Ian’s video to somebody who hasn’t heard what this family says their sailor has been telling them.

You can also help keep the Porch light on directly through BMAC whenever you’re able:

https://buymeacoffee.com/southernpunk

It all matters.

Especially to me.

Because somewhere out there right now are families waiting for the USS Abraham Lincoln to come home.

And after writing this, I keep thinking about what we talked about at the end.

Getting those sailors off that ship is one thing.

Getting what happened on that ship out of their heads may be something completely different.

So thank you for giving me a place where I can find something like this, sit with it for a while, dig into it and then come here and talk about it with all of you.

I don’t take any of it for granted. ❤️🪑

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The Porch is where we gather...

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— Southern Punk