In his letter, Cao said that there were five chaplains and multiple mental health professionals available on board to meet the “spiritual and emotional needs of the crew”.
He said the eight sailors included “the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons”.
While the US Navy has previously acknowledged supply challenges on the carrier, it denied that a mental health crisis was taking place on the Lincoln, which had some 5,000 crew aboard.
Cao’s letter also denied widespread concerns about broken plumbing and shortages of fresh food, but acknowledged temporary “localized piping failures” and problems with the reverse osmosis desalination units, and some meal options were reduced for a “short time”.
8 attempts in an entire strike group (probably 8K plus sailors) seems like business as usual. There were 2 in my boot camp company of 100 over 2 months.
Heh - you probably met my dad. He was the U.S. Consular Agent in Haifa back then, and one of his jobs was getting U.S servicemen out of jail when the fleet was in.
Ha! No I didn’t meet him because I escaped the local authorities and didn’t wind up in an Israeli jail. I did however get a letter from his office advising me that I was not welcome in Israel. It wound up not mattering though because it was the last time I was ever in Israel.
Sounds like my nephew. He was hired by a company to work in Taiwan and after about eighteen months the authorities discovered the company hadn’t properly done his work visa application. They kicked him out and told him not to return for three years.
He must have liked the place because after the three years was up he got another job there – different company – married a local girl and is residing there still.
Closer to 11.4k total Sailors and Marines. ( ~6k in the carrier support group plus 5.4k on the Lincoln between the ship’s complement and air wing usually rounded down in reporting)
Then there’s the US suicide attempt rates by age
Age
Attempted suicide in past year
18–25
2.0%
26–49
0.8%
50+
0.6%
All adults 18+
0.8%
Without digging deep into the rank structure of the carrier group that puts us somewhere into a rate something like 1.2-1.3% for the typical age structure of the armed services. (40ish percent in that lowest age group and very few 50+)
We’d expect a random chunk of 11.4k Americans with the same age demographics to have 137 - 148 suicide attempts per year. The deployment was 286 days until the port call in Thailand. We should have expected something like 107-116 suicide attempts in the time period from a similarly age weighted population of civilians going about their day to day lives inside the US.
What we saw was 8 attempts with no reported successful suicides during a modern record setting deployment.
But comparing it to the overall average rate in the U.S. isn’t meaningful either. Sailors will have fewer risk factors – LGTBQ, poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, etc.
I don’t know where you are getting the first number, except that I could believe that’s about how many people are in the entire Carrier Strike Group, which includes the carrier and its air wing.
So, about 5k on the CVN, give or take, and then about 300 on each escort, give or take.
That letter probably followed an exhaustive series of phone calls with the Chief of Police, your commanding officers, and the embassy in Tel Aviv. So thanks a lot for ruining my parents’ evening!
(Kidding - my dad lived for that stuff. Nothing made him happier than solving a problem).
I’d also like to assure you that I was not one of the IDF soldiers you had an altercation with. Us locals knew exactly where the Americans liked to hang out, and only went there if we were looking for trouble… which I never was.
It was a set-to at Shlomo’s over a local girl (unsurprisingly). Luckily for me, my shipmates herded me back to the ship before any local police arrived.
True. The Army’s “high” suicide rate (and suicide attempt rate) in the post Iraq years of GWOT later got explained by the demographic differences. It was falling right around the societal rate for it’s population. Given the advantages, there was probably still a combat and other deployment related stressors offsetting the advantages of the military.
The Lincoln carrier group is an order of magnitude lower than both American society at large and the Army during late GWOT and had no successful suicides during the supposed mental health crisis. It’s a much harder argument that this is just because of systemic advantages.
One, uh, challenge people on a ship have that the Army in Iraq did not is access to firearms. There are people with regular access to firearms on a ship, but the proportion is very low on a carrier, and lowest of all at sea.