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Former Carrier Sailors React: What’s REALLY Happening Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln?

The Mover and Gonky Show

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Reports have painted a grim picture of conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during its extended combat deployment. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao is pushing back, saying the media is portraying the crew as victims while ignoring their accomplishments.

After 266 days deployed and 200 days in a combat zone, have conditions really become that bad? Former carrier aviators Gonky and Wombat react to the reports and compare the alleged hardships with the realities of life aboard an aircraft carrier.

What do you think? Is the media accurately portraying conditions aboard the Lincoln? Has the US Navy gone soft and weak? Does Cao's response change how you view the story? Let us know in the comments below!

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Most Mondays at 8PM ET, Mover (F-16, F/A-18, T-38, 737, 787, helicopter pilot, author, cop, and wanna-be race car driver) and Gonky (F/A-18, T-38, A320, dirt bike racer, author, and awesome dad) discuss everything from aviation to racing to life and anything in between.

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20 Comments

@seanrowan1172 1 month ago

Retired AT(Deck Rat) here, was on the ‘Big E’ during 911. There’s always material condition, food, quality of life, etc issues on the ship. The issue, as I see it, is the lack of port visits. Not touching grass since last year is a morale killer. You simply just get burned out of ‘Groundhogs Day’. It does start to feel Ike a prison. Even during WW2 and Vietnam, sailors didn’t go 8+ months without a port visits.

@dylanpark4284 1 month ago

Navy vet here, three deployments; two on a Burke and one on CVN-75. Biggest issue with this whole fiasco: why the fuck weren’t they relived after six months. What the hell happened to our normal deployment rotations? Did they decide to have eight or nine carriers in the yards at once? I think this all boils down to utter incompetence at the highest levels of leadership.

@yahnump 1 month ago

I learned through my years of working, if employees are making noise, good noise or bitching/complaining noise, they are still focused in and working. As soon as someone goes silent, you are about to lose them.

@MilfordBay 1 month ago

The most serious failure of leadership was to create a single point of failure in the supply chain. Scenario planning dictates that someone asks the question: “What if this resupply base gets hit?”

@MinilordFTW 1 month ago

Just gonna say it: the Ike had the lite version of what happened here back in ‘21. The only thing that kept people going was that we were covering our people in Afghanistan. But even then, there were things happening that i even feel uncomfortable talking about still in public. I can’t imagine how worse morale the Lincoln is in. And honestly i wouldn’t be surprised if even the Skipper has been burned by this

@theoldweaponstroop7441 1 month ago

Officers talking about how enlisted troops need to suck it up is a tale as old as time

@hopper1aoa15 1 month ago

It's not just the lincon though when you think about it it's the whole carrier group that are suffering the same logistics problem.....

@METT-TC 1 month ago

One of the things I have reliably heard is that they are going without mail, which has been a real downer for morale. That was something that the military really tried to make sure didn't happen in world war II. Combine this with the reliable reports of sanitation issues and you can conclude that they are having a pretty bad time of it. The Navy has borne the brunt of the elevated optempo over the past 4 years and it has really interrupted maintenance cycles. If the navy doesn't have a period of significant reduced demand then things like this are only going to get worse, no matter how overblown they are right now.

@dblgonzo 1 month ago

I remember my second deployment with VF143 on the IKE in 1983. I had my tray loaded with lettuce and fresh veggies. This E1 looks at me "Man you must really love salad". I told him to ask me that in two weeks. Tons of milk and salad until they were expired.

@cup_and_cone 1 month ago

I can't wait to see the reenlistment rate of sailors on that cruise...

@mracer8 1 month ago

To summarize the 23 minutes of this movie: the three gentlemen basically say, “Thank you to all the boys and girls for your service.” However, their message is also very clear: between the moment your tour begins and the moment your service ends, I don’t care what happens during that time or what is going on inside—you signed up for the job, so just shut up and do your job.

Once you quit, and once the conflict is over, then you can talk about what happened afterward.

@JAGRAFX 1 month ago (edited)

It takes a major supply chain to supply just one carrier battle group forward deployed for just a period of sixty days. We have lost a number of our ports in the forward Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and Mediterranean Sea due to political discourse between nations, career terminations for senior DoD logistics personnel for political reasons, and deliberate violent actions by other nations causing a "drying up" of forward supply areas. A better assessment of the U.S.S. Lincoln situation than the Mover and Gonky Show is on Sal Mercogliano's YouTube site What's Going On With Shipping.

@shaark92 1 month ago

Mover!!!! LOL ....

The military has had a STRONG connection to the stars. Army & Marines sleep under them. Navy navigates by them ... Air Force rates hotels by them.

Thanks gents, great work!

@stefansvilich4864 1 month ago

I recall my SSN father in law commenting that one of his deployments around 1970 was almost a full year at sea. Whatever was going on, they popped up just long enough to get fresh veggies, vent the ship, then it was back down.

@lorensymonds2359 1 month ago

When you ask someone to sacrifice, you have to give them a reason, a cause. And you can't keep changing that goal every couple of weeks/days and expect people not to ask WTF. I grew up in a household where the "reason" to do something was, "Because I said so!" That wears after a while. So does, "Suck it up, Buttercup." Cheers, gents!

@mrkc10 1 month ago

One undeniable fact is the total continuous days deployed in the AOR and the ops tempo. Those are facts. Leadership both in the O’s & E’s are dealing with a deployment that they’ll absolutely never forget. My biggest concern is operational safety and the safety of all personnel. Everything in life has a limit. Eventually their deployment will be over and it will be time for everyone aboard to decompress and reconnect. I proudly salute everyone on that ship 🫡🇺🇸

@favoritemyvideo 1 month ago

12:44 "There are some things we handle internally"

The problem is that It's not being handled, period. If the media hadn't reported about this, these sailors would not be coming home right now and still stuck in those conditions. And comparing this situation to World War 2 is just idiotic.

@SeanA099 1 month ago

I love the comments that “nothing was wrong, but also we decided to bring them all home after the media brought all this to light.”

@THC7255 1 month ago

8:30 Wombat touched on it without (I don’t think) realizing the gravity of it; the only port close enough to the AOR to provide any utility that hasn’t been struck and damaged by ballistic missiles is Diego Garcia.

Our logistics are in bad shape, record-breaking cruises or not.

@James-lz6eh 1 month ago (edited)

I am going to try and be decent on this channel. I was in the Navy and stationed on an Aegis cruiser. This was back during the start of the Gulf War. This isn't just a NAVY issue it is the upper chain of command from the General/Admiral down to the Captains etc. The Pentagon keeps failing audits, it has been like 9 years now. Where is the money going??? I can tell you it is going to companies like Lockheed Martin, I have worked for them too and had a pretty crappy pay while the site manager lived in a mansion and drove a Mercedes.. The MONEY is not being distributed properly to the MILITARY! My nephew is in the Army as a MP, and he has told my similar stories about crappy equipment and vehicles needing repairs.