The fleet needs ships, the ships need sailors, and the sailors need help. For the love of God, get it to them.
The U.S. Navy has a suicide problem it is equal parts unwilling to fix and incapable of fixing because it’s consumed with fixing and deploying too few ships too often.
Konstantin Toropin reports for Military.com:
A Navy investigation of a suicide aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier last year has revealed deadly shortcomings in the service’s peer-based method of addressing mental health, which depends on fellow sailors and deckplate leadership to provide support.
The command-directed probe of the death aboard the Roosevelt as it was undergoing a long maintenance period in Washington state details failures by friends on the ship to report warning signs and poor leadership by enlisted supervisors that may have contributed to the death. It also suggests a separate recent suicide cluster aboard another carrier, the USS George Washington, was not an isolated issue.
Electrician’s Mate (Nuclear) 3rd Class Jacob Slocum, who died by suicide on the ship on Dec. 5, 2022, was one of three sailors on the Roosevelt at the time who would end their lives in the span of a few months. The investigation into his death was not publicly released but was provided to his family and obtained by Military.com.
Jacob Slocum killed himself in an engineering space while the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) was laid up in a prolonged maintenance period. He was one of three “successfully” suicidal sailors — as is the way with suicides, there were no doubt more who failed. Similarly, the USS George Washington had a rash of up to ten suicides in ten months during its five-year availability in Newport News, Va.
There’s nothing novel about Slocum’s death other than the name. When ships go to the yard, sailors kill themselves. The brass know it, the senior enlisted exacerbate it, and the junior enlisted bear it. While suicides during a yard period (by which I mean any extended repair cycle) are the most horrific outcome, there are a host of lesser, endemic miseries that could be avoided if the Navy either accepted that the yards are unfit for habitation — especially for carriers, whose residencies can run up to five years — and budget the crew quarters and work day accordingly. Otherwise, get sailors out of there and over to some ships that could use them. Two things here are true: The Navy cannot halt its operations for fear of suicides — it has responsibilities larger than any individual — but also, there are ways for the Navy to augment operations that may very well reduce suicides by sending sailors to commands that offer purpose.
More:
The investigations of the George Washington found similar, overwhelming demands.
The crew started to buckle, and the report found that in the year since June 2022, the Theodore Roosevelt had placed 14 on limited duty and separated another 24 from the Navy altogether for mental health reasons.
There was an acknowledgement from senior enlisted leaders that the shipyard environment was part of the problem.
While writing about the fire that killed the USS Bonhomme Richard, I noted the internal reality of a simple pier-side maintenance cycle (not nearly as bad as a shipyard vessel’s conditions):
Electrical and air conduits snake through passageways, scuttles, and the fireman apprentice’s rack. Industrial detritus is everywhere — rags, lubricants, and pallets of material are stacked haphazardly as years’ worth of work is compressed into months. Fire-suppression systems are tagged offline as hot-work takes place. Welding is conducted next to painting next to NKO-learning next to surreptitious cigarette smoking.
Young sailors are tasked with sweeping, needle-gunning, and porthole-licking for ten hours before their NCOs cut them loose for the day, and they spend every moment until that time getting in the way of the contractors who are doing their level best to do the least work in the most amount of time. The senior enlisted attend meetings where they’re told they can’t do anything to speed things up, but also that it’s their fault that things aren’t happening faster. That’s the average week, anyhow.
A sailor like Slocum, who was placed on restriction for a package of misdemeanors, including a failure to qualify a watch station, would be living on the ship for at least a month. Further, he’d be required to gather with the military police (MAs) every few hours. Do that on a ship without hot water, without ventilation, and with constantly closing passageways, making one’s life one part Sisyphean, one part labyrinthian, and you’re in for a bad time even with the best chain of command. The Navy’s nuclear engineers (nukes) don’t get the best chain of command, ever. Good men turn feral under the burden placed on the reactor maintainers. Their lives exist with a ceiling of “Unpleasant” and descend lower than one cares to look.
Cobbled from the brainiest recruits the Navy can get their hands on after the universities absorb most of the qualified pool, nukes perpetually live with a fraction of the desired manning. If one isn’t pulling his weight, everyone else suffers. Social pressures and increasingly harsh punishments are applied until the out party breaks or complies. What happened to Slocum was standard-practice correction in horrid conditions with very little sleep. Looking down some of the ladders into the pit 70 feet below that conventional and nuke pit snipes inhabit, it’s normal to get that little mental nudge of “Do it. Jump” from time to time. Almost always, a sailor shoves the intrusive thought aside and clambers down to take the logs on the high-pressure air compressor. But sometimes a sailor can’t.
The black dog is practically the mascot on some ships, and the Navy’s fix of offering a “How to Fix Suicidal Seaman Timmy” tech manual on addressing mental health isn’t going to fix it. It is not the job of a Chief, a JO, or a Fireman to undertake “preventative maintenance for our people.”
The investigation discovered as much:
However, the investigation found that the chiefs in Slocum’s orbit were part of the problem. Many sailors blamed one chief for Slocum’s suicide while another, senior chief was “specifically cited by multiple witnesses as being unsupportive of sailors accessing mental health resources.”
In fact, “several witnesses in various levels of reactor leadership positions agreed that the stigma against mental health was occurring at the deck plate or ‘peer to peer’ level,” the investigators said.
“Several people who cared for [Slocum] were made aware of warning signs about his mental well-being,” the report found, but it noted that none alerted ship leaders.
Making the mental health of one’s shipmates the responsibility of some 23-year-old GSM2 — who’s then somehow complicit should one of them come to harm — is absurd. Sailors, in the course of their work, do all sorts of passive acts that slacken stress — joking, roughhousing, and spades on the mess decks are what they’ve done for generations. This is all that should be expected of sailors. Asking an MMN2 to initiate some “kneecap-to-kneecap” conversation after he’s come off a four-on, four-off duty watch is asking for psychological abuse as a best-case scenario.
No, it’s incumbent on the Navy to provide access to qualified help for developing or acute distress. We had one psych officer (PSYCHO) on the whole of the 6,000-man Vinson (CVN-70) — make an appointment and see him in a few weeks; until then, pray general quarters, a watchbill change, or an UNREP doesn’t occur before or during your time. The smaller ships will deploy without even a chaplain, so sailors aboard destroyers and cruisers just fend for themselves the best they’re able.
This last bit is unforgivable:
After Slocum’s death, the ship received an influx of temporary help, including grief counselors and the Navy’s “Special Psychiatric Rapid Intervention Team,” or SPRINT. But, the report, which was submitted in August, noted that at the time, the Roosevelt had yet to receive the extra, permanent counselor it requested in the prior summer. [Emphasis added.]
Jerry Hendrix wrote recently for National Review about much of the total tonnage of the U.S. Navy being wrapped up in fewer than a dozen hulls — its carriers. After multiple failed ship launches, the U.S. Navy’s fleet is top-heavy, and the ships available to fulfill the roles the nation demands of the service have been stretched to breaking for years. Every ship and crew that enters a maintenance period is thrashed until they limp back out. A tightening fleet means fewer positions for rising officers to prove themselves; selfish leadership to secure one of the remaining places for advancement can and does ensue.
All of this is said with love for the sea service and her sailors. Save the Navy from itself, Congress, and set aside money for rehabilitating shipyard capacity (relieving pressures) and expanding permanent housing and facilities in Newport News and Washington — those yards are hellholes. As for ships, the Navy preaches redundancy aboard while Congress hasn’t seen fit to grant the same to the fleet. The Constellation-class frigates show promise. Let’s see more of them — the destroyers and their crews are begging you.
The fleet needs ships, the ships need sailors, and the sailors need help. For the love of God, get it to them.