The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, whose crew endured food shortages and mental health struggles prompted by a near-record 322-day deployment in support of the Iran war, returned on Thursday to its home port of San Diego.
Friends and family members of the crew gathered on the pier to greet the ship. They had come with signs and banners, toting American flags, and were clad in red, white and blue.
Many arrived before dawn, then erupted in thunderous cheers as the hulking vessel entered San Diego Bay with sailors in white summer uniforms manning the rails — and again when the ship docked shortly after 3 p.m. Eastern.
Family members expressed relief at the sight of their loved ones returning home after such a long and grueling assignment.
“It was nerve-racking when he went days and weeks without communication,” said Lashonda Jones, whose 20-year-old son, Jaysean Jones, is a boatswain’s mate, responsible for maintaining the ship. She sent him Bible scriptures and motivational text messages to keep his spirits high.
By longstanding Navy tradition, sailors whose spouses gave birth during the deployment were expected to be among the first to step off to meet their sons and daughters. That included 21-year-old Eduardo Morales, whose 5-month-old son Emmanuelle was on the pier early Thursday with Mr. Morales’s wife, Legna Morales.
“It’s been really hard going through labor by myself,” said Ms. Morales. “Being far away for so long, and not being there with us, not knowing the baby yet — he cries.”
The deployment for the Lincoln’s 5,000-member crew began before the war, when it left San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025. It spent almost a month at sea before pulling into the naval base in Guam for a brief stop for supplies.
The Lincoln nearly broke the record for longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War.
The Gerald R. Ford set that record with a 327-day deployment. But unlike the Lincoln’s, the Ford’s crew was able to disembark in ports across the Mediterranean and Caribbean before steaming to the Arabian Sea before the start of the war.
The Lincoln and other ships began experiencing logistical problems after Iran destroyed the Navy’s main Middle Eastern hub in Manama, Bahrain, in response to the United States and Israel launching the war on Feb. 28.
With Iran’s ballistic missiles able to hold all ports around the Arabian Peninsula at risk of attack, the Navy’s warships in the region began to experience shortages of food, fuel and other goods as the service moved its supply hub to the British-owned island of Diego Garcia about 2,200 miles away.
The first indications of problems came from family members of Lincoln sailors, who sent reporters photos of meager meals served on the ship while supplies were running low. Many families tried to send their loved ones care packages to make up the difference, only to have their mail lost, destroyed or delivered months late.
The reports rankled Navy leaders, who downplayed the problems.
In a social media post in August, the Navy’s acting secretary, Hung Cao, accused reporters of presenting Lincoln’s sailors as “victims.” Six days later, the carrier left the Arabian Sea to begin its journey home after another carrier, the Japan-based U.S.S. George Washington, took its place.
The next month, in response to questions from Democratic lawmakers, Mr. Cao acknowledged that eight sailors from the Lincoln strike group had tried to take their own lives. One jumped overboard, and another tried to do so before being stopped by shipmates.
When asked in August about the reported problems aboard the Lincoln, Mr. Trump dismissed the concerns raised by the families of crew members. When pressed about whether he was worried about the crew’s mental health and whether he thought the deployment had gone on too long, the president said, “No. No. No.” He added that the deployment — then more than eight months long — had not been “nearly long enough.”
Some family members gathered on the pier Thursday said the challenges aboard the ship were real — including the rationing of food.
“It was pathetic,” Victoria Tozzi, whose son enlisted after high school to help fund his college education, said of the portions of food. “It looked gross, and he was like, ‘yeah it’s pretty bad.’”
When she learned that Iran had launched attacks at the ship, and that the missiles and drones had been intercepted, she asked how he was doing.
“He said, ‘Everybody is just on edge,’” she said.
Speaking to reporters Thursday after arriving back to San Diego, the Lincoln’s commanding officer, Capt. Daniel J. Keeler, said that the crew faced some challenges soon after combat operations began.
“But I had enough food. I had all the supplies I needed to conduct combat,” he added. “We never missed a mission. I also never missed a meal. We served four meals a day — 14,000 to 16,000 a day to the entire crew.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who flew to the Lincoln from San Diego on Wednesday to ride the ship for its final stretch, acknowledged the lengthy deployment in remarks to the crew on Wednesday. But he criticized reports of logistics problems as overblown. He also awarded the crew the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest decoration that can be given to a unit of the Navy or Marine Corps for valorous service.
“There were a few folks in the media who tried to turn the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln into some sort of a symbol — a symbol of dysfunction or a symbol of low morale or a symbol of a failed mission,” Mr. Hegseth said, speaking into a microphone before a crowd of sailors. “And what I look out at right here and when I talk to your leadership — and I’ve had a chance to talk to a number of you — I know it is the exact opposite.”
The war with Iran has placed the Navy’s fleet of 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers under tremendous strain. Two carriers, the John C. Stennis and Harry S. Truman, are unavailable because of the refueling of their nuclear reactors. Another five have already played a role during the war. In July, the Ford entered a shipyard for long-delayed maintenance, and the 50-year-old Nimitz is scheduled to be decommissioned next year.
That leaves only the Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Carl Vinson and the Ronald Reagan as potentially available to deploy should the war, which is now in its eighth month, continue.
The pace of operations for the Lincoln and its crew during their extended deployment was unrelenting, as the ship played a major role in the air campaign over Iran. In August, a Navy official said that the ship launched more than 10,000 sorties and dropped more than 1.5 million pounds of ordnance during the conflict.
Aircraft aboard the Lincoln also played a key part in enforcing Mr. Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports.
In early May, an F/A-18 Super Hornet launched from the Lincoln fired its 20-millimeter cannon at the rudders of an Iranian-flagged tanker, the M/T Hasna, disabling the ship as it attempted to pass through the blockade line. A month later, another Super Hornet from the Lincoln fired a precision-guided munition into the engineering spaces aboard the Palau-flagged tanker M/T Marivex in the Gulf of Oman as it steamed toward Iran. The ship’s 24 crew members were rescued by an Omani military helicopter.
In his remarks Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth said the extended deployment was worthwhile, crediting the crew with demonstrating enormous resilience.
“What makes the U.S. military and the U.S. Navy and all these sailors different is that you adapt and that you are resilient and you overcome,” he added. “You finish the mission nonetheless. Yes, it’s hard. That’s why you’re here, and you do difficult and hard things. But you believe in your heart in that mission.”
“My heart only swells with pride just standing in front of all of you,” he added.
On the pier Thursday, the same sentiment rippled through the crowd of friends and family, which included Jason Tisdale, a retired master chief gunner’s mate.
“My son,” Mr. Tisdale said, pausing to choke back tears, “makes me very proud. Having him back here is great. I’m glad him and the rest of the crew are home safe. It was tough out there. A tough deployment — very long — but now we’re on the other side of it.”
He added: “I’m very happy, and we just want to welcome him back with open arms and tell him we love him.”
In all, the Lincoln’s crew spent nearly nine and a half months at sea without a break until the Lincoln pulled in to Pattaya, Thailand, on Sept. 2 for five days of rest.
On Sept. 18, the Lincoln reached U.S. soil during a brief stop in Guam. The crew was allowed to get off the ship so long as they stayed on the naval base there.
Now, back on the mainland, the crew will get a bit more time off.
When a warship returns from a lengthy deployment, about half the crew typically takes two weeks of leave. The other half maintains a Monday-to-Friday workweek, but can then go home. After those two weeks are up, the groups swap, and the other half goes on leave.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Authors: Jan Ransom and John Ismay
- Photo: Mario Tama
