At one point, someone from the Navy announced that families who had signed up for passes Thursday morning were still being vetted. “It’s gonna be a while,” he warned.
Then the national anthem began playing, and everyone stopped yelling. When it ended, the complaining picked up right where it left off.
A lot of the people I spoke to while waiting for the sailors to arrive Thursday were fiercely defensive of the Navy, and dismissive of all the negative reporting. One sailor’s father brushed aside reports about the suicide attempts. “That kinda thing happens when they’re on land bases also,” he said.
Others were just nervous to talk about it with journalists.
“I don’t wanna talk about that because my daughter would get me good,” one mother said when Vanity Fair asked if they heard anything that would support the allegations of deteriorating mental health among sailors and unsanitary conditions onboard. Several others told Vanity Fair they didn’t want to be associated with “negative reporting” about the Lincoln.
Nick Christy, who had flown in from the Midwest, initially thought the deployment had gone on too long. Then his other sons, who also served in the military, pushed back.
“Look, Dad, you don’t understand,” Christy recalled them saying. “You sign up, you don’t know where you’re going or for how long. It’s just not something that you get to dictate.”
“You kind of suck it up, and you have to deal with it,” he said. “It’s not the Ritz-Carlton— these guys and girls know that.”
He rejected allegations that sailors hadn’t been getting enough food and said his own son had seemed happy during their frequent conversations. He tried calling his son right there on the spot but nobody answered.
Christy remembered crying upon hearing reports that missiles were fired toward the carrier, and wondering whether his son would survive.
