The commanding officer backed his sailors of the USS George Washington’s security team. The late security team member, Xavier Sandor who had taken his life just a few weeks earlier in mid-April, and the captain of the carrier had came down to speak with all the 110 member i.e. both men and women who worked closely with him.
In a descriptive talk with Capt. Brent Gaut which lasted for around two hours, Gaut acknowledged what the sailors had felt for months. He said that his crew had moved back onto the aircraft carrier too soon and did not get enough rest to cope up with the mental stress, the sailors recalled, but when they finally understood their condition it was too late to go back.
Another sailor expressed his point and spoke over the speaker and audio system of ship, known as 1MC or 1 Main Circuit, and also said that two months ago the ship, which had been undergoing major maintenance, wasn’t ready for sailors nor the sailors were ready to onboard the carrier when the process began last summer. But he said, “There’s no turning back now. We can’t reverse course.”
Many media agencies tried to reach out to the Navy for their comments on Gaut’s remarks.
The bad situation on the aircraft carrier came to everyones attention and became a national issue when three sailors committed suicide in a span of one week, last month. But in talks with media, twelve current and former crewmembers of the George Washington security team showed a horrifying picture of a ship with myriad issues, including some terrible and life threatening accommodation standards on the vessel which was effectively a construction site, concerns over the quality of food and a sense that their superior were not helping them to tackle the problems and dismissing complaints.
‘Awful’ and ‘Uninhabitable’ conditions
The sailors who agreed to speak with CNN all said the ship was uninhabitable. Sailors began moving aboard the carrier about one year ago, after the ship had already been in its refueling and overhaul process for four years and was supposed to be ready to accommodate parts of the crew. Even after years of work to prepare the carrier for its next deployment, the ship remained a construction zone around the clock. Often, the challenges of life on the ship hit the youngest sailors hardest.
“I was ready for a sh*tty situation, but I had no idea it would be in the yards,” one sailor currently assigned to the George Washington told CNN. Most of the sailors spoke on condition of anonymity, fearful of the consequences of speaking out to their own careers in the Navy or those of their friends.
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