“the boat is finally getting to me”
The 19-year-old aircraft mechanic sent that text to his wife from the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln, deep into a combat deployment with no end in sight.
Weeks later, on Aug. 3 — the 255th day of deployment — he started sprinting and launched himself over the catwalk at the edge of the ship, falling 67 feet into the sea off Iran’s southern coast. He was still in his boots and standard-issue “float coat” that sailors must wear at all times on the flight deck.
For months, the sailor had been texting that he was depressed, exhausted by long shifts without breaks. He was frustrated that he couldn’t talk regularly with his wife, infant daughter or 3-year-old son. And that he was having suicidal thoughts.
His wife described the jump as an attempt to take his life. She learned about it from one of his squadron mates. Nearly five days passed before the Navy notified her.
What came next shocked her. She had wanted the Navy to help him. Instead, he faced discipline and was accused of faking an injury to get out of the deployment.
Five weeks after the jump, he was on the phone with his commanding officer for a disciplinary hearing. The sailor had been medically evacuated to San Diego, while his commanding officer was still aboard the carrier. He was found guilty of “jumping from a vessel,” and on Sept. 10 was given an oral reprimand.
Next, he will face a separation board that will decide if he should be discharged from the Navy, and whether that discharge should be characterized as “honorable,” “other than honorable” or “general.” That determination will shape what help he can access from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The sailor doesn’t plan to fight his separation from the Navy, his wife said.
MS NOW first reported the charges against him in late August, raising questions about how the Navy treats sailors in mental health crises. The Navy faced a public backlash. The charges were later changed, and he avoided the harsher punishment he had initially faced.
The sailor’s troubling experience and mental health challenges on board the Lincoln were not isolated incidents.
In a letter to Congress on Sept. 22, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao acknowledged eight suicide attempts in the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group during the Iran war deployment. The group includes the carrier, its embarked squadrons and its escort destroyers.
Conditions aboard worsened after Iranian strikes in February hit a key Navy resupply base in Bahrain, causing food and supply shortages, according to Navy leaders. At times, sailors waited in long lines for meals that were sometimes just a couple of tortillas and half a cup of rice, according to descriptions of the deployment from family members of the sailors on board. Plumbing systems broke and the showers were moldy. Shifts often stretched past 12 hours, with few days off.
After MS NOW reported on the concerns among military families about poor conditions, low supplies and fatigue aboard the Lincoln, Navy officials scrambled to reroute an aircraft carrier to relieve the Lincoln earlier than previously planned.
This account of the sailor’s actions and the Navy’s response is based on exclusive interviews with his wife, their text messages as well as documents related to the Navy’s disciplinary actions against him, including a “memorandum of record” reviewed by MS NOW from the officer of the deck on the day he jumped. The sailor declined to be interviewed because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
The charges
Initially, according to charging documents reviewed by MS NOW, the sailor faced two violations of articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The first was Article 83, for “malingering,” which is defined as a service member “intentionally faking an illness or hurting themselves to avoid work, duty or service.” The second was Article 86, “absence without leave,” which means that a service member failed to be at their required place of duty without proper authority.
The disciplinary hearing the sailor faced is called a “captain’s mast.” The Navy had dropped the malingering charge. It replaced it with Article 87, “jumping from a vessel,” which prohibits service members from wrongfully and intentionally jumping into the water from a vessel operated or used by the armed forces. The absence-without-leave charge remained.
The commanding officer found him guilty of jumping from a vessel but not of absence without leave, the sailor’s wife said.
His original charging documents warned that his pay might be docked if he was found guilty. His wife said she was grateful that didn’t happen. She and her husband are both 19 years old and have a 7-month-old baby girl and a 3-year-old boy to care for.
During the disciplinary process, the sailor was given the officer of the deck’s official account of the crew’s response after he went overboard.
The officer wrote that the sailor’s motives for jumping were “undetermined” but that the conditions “appear suspect.” The officer noted that the sailor jumped in daylight while wearing a float coat, and that “he almost immediately waved for help when he landed in the water.”
“On the other hand,” the officer wrote, “this has been a difficult deployment and it is unsurprising that we might have a jumper. Of note, it is a 67 foot drop from the flight deck to the water line. It is remarkable that he did not have any apparent injuries.”
The memo described an extensive helicopter rescue. Given the water temperature, it said, survival time in the water was 15 minutes, and waves appeared to be 5 feet high. The sailor was in the water for 45 minutes before rescuers reached him.
His wife was frustrated that the officer implied that her husband wasn’t in a mental health crisis because he jumped wearing a life preserver. Everyone who works on a carrier’s flight deck is required to wear a float coat, she said, and he felt it would have looked suspicious to take it off. He told her that if he had removed it and then run to jump, he probably would have been stopped, as she said others had been during the deployment.
He was not “waving for help,” she said. He was drowning. He knew that jumping from that height would be incredibly dangerous, and he did it to take his life.
“This is more so just assumptions and people’s opinions, I would say — biased opinions,” she said of the memo.
Since returning
Since returning to San Diego in August, her husband has had one mental health appointment, where he was prescribed an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication, she said. He has also had severe back pain since the jump, and has been prescribed pain medication. Getting appointments for either problem has been difficult, she said. He is scheduled to see Navy doctors for both in October, when he is expected to receive a referral to a civilian mental health therapist.
“I think that he has changed as a person, but I also do think he’s been doing a lot better since being off the boat,” she said.
She said her husband’s command master chief told her the Navy would stand by their family throughout the process, and “instead, they pressed charges against my husband — they punished him.”
“So where is the support? Where is the Navy being there for us? Because that has not happened at all,” she said.
MS NOW contacted the Navy for comment about why sailors may face disciplinary charges for incidents like this. A Navy official said they couldn’t comment on a specific service member’s personnel or medical records.
“Sailors are accountable under the UCMJ, but suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts are not, themselves, punishable misconduct. They require a safety-first response, clinical care, and command support. Any separate allegation of misconduct is considered on its own facts with appropriate legal consultation,” the official wrote in a statement.
In August, after the sailor jumped, Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Iran war, posted on social media that the Lincoln “currently has among the lowest cases related to mental health.”
Cao’s letter this week gave a fuller accounting. It said another sailor tried to jump from the Lincoln in March. His shipmates stopped him, and he too was medically evacuated to San Diego.
The Lincoln is now steaming home to San Diego after setting a modern-day record for the most consecutive days at sea without a port call.
The sailor’s wife said she believes that the Navy didn’t find him guilty of the original charges, dock his pay or demote him only because she spoke out. She hoped their story would change the way the military treats mental health. She said she was “very grateful, and it was very comforting knowing that there are still really good people in the world who do care about our service members and families who are going through this.”
But she had also seen some veterans and service members call the Lincoln’s sailors, and her husband, “weak.” Many people online, she said, argued that shortages, long hours and exhaustion come with every deployment, and that it isn’t unusual for sailors to try to jump overboard.
“Crappy deployments and being treated very inhumanely is not normal, and I think the military, mainly the Navy, has normalized that way too much. They have normalized being treated inhumanely,” the sailor’s wife said. “No one should be treated like that, especially our service members who are supposed to be protecting our country. … That should never ever be normalized.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
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