I didn’t put this behind a paywall. This work stays free and open for anyone who needs it, and I hope to keep it that way. But it can only happen with reader support. If you want this newsletter to continue, become a paid subscriber at $8 a month or $80 a year. If you can’t, share the piece. That matters too.
Monthly gifts sustain unflinching history reporting. But a one-time amount of any size helps too. Either takes about a minute, and it keeps everything here free for the next person who needs it.
Standing in Panama yesterday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said reports about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln had been “completely misrepresented.”
Moldy showers. Toilets that do not work. Hot water that comes and goes. Undercooked chicken and beans. Sixteen-hour shifts. Half a cup of rice and two tortillas, which is what Nicole Conrad says her son was eating. The Navy called the food reporting “false” when it surfaced in April.
And a nineteen-year-old whose contact prescription ran out.
He could not see. First deployment, working a carrier at war, and he could not see, so he made mistakes, and every time he made one they yelled at him, and what they yelled, according to his wife, was that he was going to hurt somebody. He told them why. They put him back on the deck. He went to his chain of command and to the ship’s medical team, and they brushed him off.
Five thousand people live on that ship, nine months out, following the war they are fighting through wifi that mostly does not work.
The U.S.-Israeli strikes began February 28. In March the president said the war was militarily won. In April he promised a drawdown in two to three weeks, then called a ceasefire “a big day for World Peace,” then warned that if it expired, “lots of bombs start going off.” In June he signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran.
The blockade is back on and nobody has said how it ends.
On July 21 the nineteen-year-old texted his wife. “I think the boat is finally getting to me and I really don’t think I can keep up my peace act anymore.” They were supposed to leave the Fifth Fleet on the fifteenth, he told her, “but then something had to come up, and my last hope of being home soon was gone.”
Thirteen days later he jumped off the ship.
His wife calls it a suicide attempt. He was in the water about an hour before a helicopter from his own air wing found him, and the Navy flew him off the carrier, and nobody called her for four days. She heard it from a friend of his aboard, who messaged that somebody from the squadron had gone over, and then told her which one.
“I just really don’t know what to say about all this,” she told a reporter, “because it’s so, because it’s so, it doesn’t feel real to me.”
The families went to reporters. About two hundred family members filled a room in San Diego with the acting Secretary of the Navy, and one woman told the officials they had broken “trust between us and the leadership.” The texts got published, senators started writing letters, and hours after Hegseth spoke came confirmation that the USS George Washington was crossing toward the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. Officials say the swap was planned all along. She left Da Nang last week and nobody will say when she arrives.
Calenture
Sailors have always known what a ship is. Samuel Johnson, who never served aboard one, once said that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” On another occasion he said that a jail “has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
What the profession could never settle on was a name for what happened to men who stayed aboard too long.
Johnson had put one name for it in his dictionary in 1755. Calenture: “A distemper peculiar to sailors in hot climates wherein they imagine the sea to be green fields, and they throw themselves into it if not restrained.”
A distemper, which is to say something the weather does. Weeks becalmed under a vertical sun until the water goes flat and green and looks like the field behind a man’s mother’s house, and he steps out onto it. Nothing in the definition about the voyage, or the officers, or the fact that the nearest ground belongs to somebody else.
Captain Porter sailed out of Liverpool in the 1860s and kept a journal, and one voyage it filled up with his cook. The man had started calling himself Christ. Then he turned and cursed, which Porter noted was “not natural to him,” and got hold of some boiling water and went after the crew with it.
He tried more than once to go over the side, so Porter set a watch on him day and night, from a crew he could not spare. There was no doctor aboard. Porter bathed the man’s feet in mustard and warm water, bled him once, and guessed at typhus, or inflammation of the brain, or the heat. “I pity him from my Heart,” he wrote.
After two weeks they let him up on deck for exercise. He slipped the men watching him and went over the side and drowned.
“He was a man that appeared to have something on his Mind that troubled him much,” Porter wrote, “which was the cause of his insanity I believe. He has left nothing behind him, to trace his friends by, all that we know is, that he is under a False name, and that he has run away from his Wife, and he belongs to Portsmouth.”
In April of 2022, three sailors assigned to the USS George Washington died by suicide inside one week, and nine over the course of her overhaul at Newport News, where the crew lived aboard the ship in the shipyard with heat and hot water that came and went. Sailors told CNN it was uninhabitable. The Navy investigated and concluded the deaths were "not related or connected."
Reporters kept working. A second and wider investigation followed, and in that one the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy told the whole service that leadership had “let our standards slip” and “let our people down.” That was four years ago, and that is the ship now steaming toward the Lincoln.
What He Asked For
Nothing he needed was extraordinary. Food. Hot water. A working prescription. A ship able to come and take the place of his own.
There is a story going around this week that Iran offered humanitarian aid to the crew of the Abraham Lincoln. Nothing verifies it and it has the exact shape of a thing invented to embarrass us. It is also moving fast among Americans, because after four months of being told that what they are looking at is not there, a rumor out of Tehran has stopped being obviously less reliable than a briefing out of Panama. As it turns out, lying has a cost. It clears the ground for anything at all to grow.
Four hundred seventy-one service members died by suicide in 2024. The Pentagon released the number as good news, sixty fewer than the year before. The single-year figure had fallen. Over the longer run, the active-duty rate has risen.
Every version of this has arrived with a name that put the cause somewhere outside the ship. The sun did it, in 1755. He guessed at the heat, in the 1860s. The deaths were unique and individualized, in 2022. The reporting did it, yesterday.
We have had four hundred years to learn better and we have spent them getting better at the paperwork. We know what a ship does to a person who cannot leave it. It is in the dictionary. We knew it when we sent them and we will know it the next time, and knowing has never once been the thing that brought anybody home. What forced the country to look was a wife handing a reporter her husband’s text messages, and two hundred people in a room refusing to be told that what they were looking at was something else.
He did what a person is told to do. He told his chain of command and he told the doctors and he said that he could not see, and they yelled at him for it and put him back on the deck. He wrote it down to his wife on July 21.
Thirteen days later he went into the water. The Navy took four days to call his wife. Ten days after he went in, the rest of us found out a relief carrier was crossing toward him.
Who has to go over the side before you are believed?
We are building historical literacy, the ability to see the pattern as it is being written in real time and the thing that makes you harder to lie to at a moment when the lies are coming faster than most people can track. If you are reading this and recognizing the pattern, you are not the only one, and the community of people doing that work with you is part of what this is.
So much information is locked behind paywalls now and I want to keep this work open to the public. Those who pay keep it free and open so it can reach everyone who needs it.
If reading this made the pattern clearer, become a paid subscriber at $8 a month or $80 a year. That is what keeps this here.
Why Are American Sailors Jumping Off an Aircraft Carrier?
Hegseth calls the reports about conditions aboard the Lincoln “completely misrepresented,” speaking to reporters in Panama on August 13.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6028091-pete-hegseth-uss-abraham-lincoln-conditions-middle-east/Reuters account of the same remarks, with Blumenthal’s letter listing supply shortages, water contamination, plumbing, and mail disruption.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2026/08/13/hegseth-claims-poor-condition-reports-from-lincoln-are-misrepresented/91287506007/Stars and Stripes on conditions aboard and the San Diego town hall, including the “broken trust between us and the leadership” quote and the 250 consecutive days at sea.*
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-11/abraham-lincoln-middle-east-mental-health-town-hall-meeting-22506344.htmlNicole Conrad on her son eating half a cup of rice and two tortillas, plus hot water, laundry, and ship’s store lines.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/concerning-conditions-reported-aboard-navy-carrier-based-in-san-diego/4059533/Rep. Levin’s list of conditions, including moldy showers and broken toilets, and the Navy’s response.
https://www.newsweek.com/uss-abraham-lincoln-deployment-sailors-overboard-safety-concerns-12312965The Navy’s April denial, with the CNO calling the food coverage grossly mischaracterized and the photographs not taken on a Navy vessel.*
https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-04-21/navy-food-hungry-sailors-tripoli-lincoln-21442095.htmlThe nineteen-year-old’s July 21 texts, the expired contact prescription, the yelling, and the chain of command brushing him off, reported from the MS NOW interview with his wife.*
https://www.thedailybeast.com/uss-lincolns-navy-sailors-desperate-call-revealed-before-overboard-attempt/The wife’s account of the four-day delay and her accusation that the Navy tried to cover it up.
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/wife-says-navy-kept-her-in-dark-after-husband-jumped-overboard-trying-to-cover-this-up/CNN confirms the August 3 overboard incident, the hour in the water, and the air wing rescue helicopter.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/13/politics/uss-abraham-lincoln-conditions-extended-deployment-hnkMilitary Times on multiple sailors attempting to go overboard, with Annabelle Loma and Maria Rodriguez on the record.*
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/11/multiple-uss-abraham-lincoln-sailors-have-tried-to-go-overboard-amid-extended-deployment-families-say/NBC News confirms the George Washington will replace the Lincoln and reports Pentagon and White House concern over morale.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/uss-abraham-lincoln-replaced-poor-troop-conditions-rcna592141PolitiFact’s timeline of the president’s shifting statements on when the Iran war would end.
https://politifact.com/article/2026/mar/30/trump-hegseth-iran-war-timeline/PBS on the pattern of announced halts to strikes that kept not holding.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-frequently-announces-hes-halting-strikes-in-iran-but-they-keep-happeningThe April ceasefire announcement described as a big day for world peace.
https://www.newsonair.gov.in/us-iran-ceasefire-us-president-donald-trump-says-it-is-a-big-day-for-world-peace
Calenture
Johnson’s remark that a ship is a jail with the chance of being drowned, as recorded by Boswell.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00005955Lapham’s Quarterly on the same passage, with the line about a jail having more room and better company.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/miscellany/being-ship-being-jail-chance-being-drownedJohnson’s 1755 dictionary definition of calenture, alongside later medical descriptions of the condition.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/calentureA medical history of calenture as sea surgeons understood and treated it.
https://hekint.org/2023/05/01/temporary-insanity-in-tropical-waters/The word’s first appearances in English and its use by Swift and others.
https://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-cal4.htmCaptain Porter’s journals on the loss of his ship’s cook, held by National Museums Liverpool.*
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/sailing-stormy-seas-of-mental-healthThe Navy investigation into the 2022 George Washington deaths and conditions during her Newport News overhaul.
https://news.usni.org/2023/05/18/junior-sailors-on-uss-george-washington-endured-some-of-the-toughest-living-conditions-in-the-military-says-new-navy-investigationCNN on the finding that the deaths were not related or connected, and the later conclusion that the Navy failed to provide basic quality of life.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/uss-george-washington-investigationSailors describing the ship as uninhabitable during the overhaul.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/politics/uss-george-washington-conditionsThe service-wide memo in which the CNO and the Navy Secretary wrote that leadership let its standards slip and let its people down.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/uss-george-washington-aircraft-carrier-navy-suicides/
What He Asked For
The Defense Department’s calendar year 2024 Annual Report on Suicide in the Military.
https://www.dspo.mil/Portals/113/2026_CY/documents/DSPO_ReportonSuicide_CY24_20260317_508c.pdfCoverage of that report noting the single-year decline and the longer upward trend in the active component.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2026/04/01/military-service-member-suicides-fell-2024-overall-trends-remain.html
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.