Earlier this month, a sailor on the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, deployed in the Persian Gulf, jumped overboard. Thankfully, he was rescued and helicoptered off the ship.
The sailor went overboard on August 3. On August 11, "Mehr News, a wire service of the Islamic Republic, reported a violent clash aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: seven dead, several wounded, an adviser to the CENTCOM commander booed and pelted with water bottles on the deck of America’s flagship in the Arabian Sea," writes Gregg Roman, executive director of the Mideast Forum. The source of the story was Tasnim, an outlet tied to the Revolutionary Guard, which cited one anonymous “informed military source.”
The story ran for two days before CENTCOM denied it; one sailor had gone overboard and been rescued. The story was an outrageous lie. But mainstream Western media outlets began reporting accounts from military spouses and other sources regarding suicide attempts aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, including a spouse detailing her husband's burnout and attempt to jump overboard. Stars and Stripes detailed interviews with military families expressing concerns about declining mental health and suicidal ideation among crew members during extended deployments, including a spouse relaying a message from a sailor expressing suicidal thoughts.
The Guardian reported on incidents involving sailors going overboard, conditions contributing to strain on service members, and responses from military officials regarding mental health reporting.
Of course, it's all Donald Trump's fault.
They must be dancing a jig in Tehran. As The Free Press's Elliot Abrams notes, suicides, suicidal ideation, and mental health problems are endemic to both active-duty and retired military. And it's strange that the "concern" of the media for the mental health of our military people has suddenly appeared when the story can be twisted into an attack on Trump and an unpopular war.
Abrams is a Navy veteran who experienced long deployments in 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon in their war against Hezbollah. He's fully aware of the almost unbearable grind of long deployments in combat zones and the toll it takes on service members.
"Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to the incident as evidence of his mishandling of the war in Iran, a conflict he had said would last weeks but has extended into months with no clear end in sight," Abrams writes. "Now, the criticism goes, that mismanagement is placing the troops under intolerable levels of strain."
This is a tidy argument against Trump, but ultimately a cynical one. Sadly, a service member trying to kill himself on deployment is an all too regular occurrence. Each year, we lose 470 to 525 uniformed service members to suicide; that number jumps more than tenfold when you include America’s 18 million veterans. (The total population of U.S. military veterans is around 18 million, in addition to somewhere over 2 million current service members.) Suicide in the ranks and the strain deployments place on service members and their families have proven endemic for decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. This crisis has run straight through George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the first Trump term, and Joe Biden. It did not spike with this president, and the lawmakers now discovering their outrage have said very little about the 17 veterans lost to suicide per day when the pointing finger has had nowhere partisan to aim.
According to MyNavy HR Data & Statistics, the overall rate of suicide deaths across the active-duty U.S. Navy typically ranges between 17 and 22 per 100,000 sailors annually. In recent calendar years, active-duty Navy deaths by suicide numbered 68 in 2023, 71 in 2022, and 59 in 2021.
In other words, if the media outlets weren't so all-fired eager to blame Trump for the mental health problems aboard ships, they might have given some vital context to the story by giving background information and filling in the holes. The Lincoln had been in combat for 40 days straight, and the mental toll on sailors is an unfortunate by-product of that deployment. It wouldn't matter who was president or which party was in power.
MEF's Gregg Roman on the Iranian disinformation campaign:
No sailors died. That is not the point. The point is that a state at war with the United States manufactured their deaths, on a schedule, for an audience, and most of Washington still discusses it as a media story. It is not a media story. It is a military operation aimed at the one American system Tehran can actually reach: the will of the force, and the families behind it.
The Navy denied an increase in serious mental health problems aboard the Lincoln.
We have not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard the ship. We take every service member's well-being seriously and have religious, medical and mental health professionals available to assess and address concerns as they arise. USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) has five Navy Chaplains, one clinical psychologist, one clinical social worker, three behavioral health technicians and an embedded integrated prevention coordination (EIPC) counselor. The ship also has an expeditionary facility dog, CAPT Fathom, to support crew morale and emotional welfare. These resources are available to Sailors and Marines throughout the Strike Group 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Roman explains the methodology of the disinformation.
The method takes the true kernel, tired crew, long deployment, worried families, and inflates it past recognition. “America’s floating prison at sea,” in the words of Iran’s embassy in Kenya, which decorated the phrase with an anonymous spouse’s quote lifted from Western press coverage and a graphic of a sailor behind bars. “Worse than a public toilet! … No wonder troops want to jump overboard!” from PressTV, over a shaky bathroom video that an IRGC-adjacent account recycled a day later, same footage, new caption, as proof that sailors were defying CENTCOM’s denial. A Lego cartoon mocking the crew, captioned “Four Score! No Shore!” And beneath the mockery sit the hard fabrications: the seven dead, the invented mutiny, the claimed spike in suicidal ideation that the Navy says its data does not show.
They knew who to target and how to hit us. That bespeaks a military frame of reference that our media and even our government appear to be ignoring.
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