8 Sailors on USS Lincoln Deployment Attempted Suicide, Navy Says

Eight U.S. Navy personnel attached to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide since the ship's deployment began roughly 10 months ago, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao disclosed in a letter to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to ABC News, which obtained the letter.

The disclosure, sent Tuesday and first reported by CNN, comes as the Lincoln remains on an extended deployment tied to the war in Iran. Gillibrand had pressed the Navy for details on the health and wellbeing of personnel aboard the strike group.

What did the acting Navy secretary's letter say?

"Since the beginning of LINCOLN's deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group -- this number includes the LINCOLN crew and Sailors from the carrier air wing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers, and all embarked aviation squadrons," Cao wrote, according to ABC News.

The letter states that the Lincoln carried between 2,500 and 2,800 sailors throughout the deployment. The strike group includes the carrier itself, the guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., the fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser, the dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear, and two Coast Guard cutters, USCGC Robert Goldman and USCGC Clarence Sutphin Jr., according to ABC News.

Is eight attempts unusual for a deployment this length?

A Navy official told ABC News that while the service treats every attempted suicide case seriously, the number is not out of the norm for a long deployment. The official's assessment did not come with a specific comparative figure in the reporting.

ABC News noted that the Navy recorded 356 suicide attempts fleet-wide in 2024, the most recent year with publicly available data, and that the figure represents a nearly 50% increase in attempted suicides over three years, according to Navy records cited in the report.

"We really haven't deployed ships for this long since Vietnam, and we learned lessons then about ship maintenance and about retention and mental health that seem to have been forgotten," said retired Navy Capt. John Cordle, who commanded warships in a strike group and has studied workplace stress in the Navy.

Why has the Lincoln deployment run so long without port calls?

Cordle told ABC News that a long, open-ended deployment with extensions and no port calls takes a toll on sailors. Ships operating in the Middle East have typically made port calls at the Naval station in Bahrain, which Cordle said offered a "psychological benefit," but attacks from Iran on facilities in the region have made anchoring there impossible during this deployment, according to the report.

"I think we are in unknown territory," Cordle said. "My sense is that we are in uncharted waters, and we don't know what we don't know."

President Trump has separately described the Lincoln's record deployment length as "not nearly long enough," according to related ABC News reporting.

How did lawmakers get involved?

Gillibrand's questions to the Navy, which prompted Cao's written response, focused on the health and wellbeing of personnel aboard the Lincoln strike group during the extended deployment. The letter was addressed to her in her capacity on the Senate Armed Services Committee. ABC News reported that the letter was first surfaced publicly by CNN before ABC News obtained its own copy.

The Navy's response did not, per the ABC News account, include a breakdown of outcomes among the eight attempts, nor did it specify how the cases were distributed among the ships and squadrons that make up the strike group beyond noting that both LINCOLN crew and personnel from the carrier air wing, destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers, and embarked aviation squadrons were included in the total.

What happens next for the strike group?

ABC News did not report a scheduled end date for the Lincoln's deployment as of its Sept. 24 story, and the underlying tensions tied to the war in Iran that have kept the strike group at sea remain unresolved. Cordle's comments to ABC News suggest the Navy is still assessing what mental health and retention lessons apply to deployments of this length, a question he said the service last confronted during the Vietnam era.