Pattern of overwork, abuse, poor working conditions across US Armed Forces

The conditions have been reportedly so horrible on the USS Lincoln that, according to a video obtained by The Crimson Ledger, it left 6 sailors to choose between life on the boat, and potential death in the water.

By R. L. Richards, The Crimson Ledger, Washington DC

In the North Arabian Sea, the illegal and unauthorized war into the sovereign state of Iran pushes onward despite legal and political resistance to US President Donald Trump’s clearly genocidal and colonial campaign in service to international war criminal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Reports have come out about the USS Abraham Lincoln detailing the unsanitary living conditions aboard this US Naval vessel deployed under hostile conditions. The conditions are a result of the crew being deployed at sea for the entirety of 2026, deploying in November of 2025 and spanning a 10 month long deployment with no shore leave. This is comparable to the US Army’s deployment that is typically a standard of upwards of 15 month long deployments to support the occupation.

In the above viral video shared on R. L. Richard’s Instagram that has since generated over 31k views depicts a sailor talking about the conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln involuntarily deployed to the North Arabian Sea in President Trump’s illegal assault on Iran and attempted occupation of the Straight of Hormuz.

The US military has a long history of treating service members poorly, subjecting personnel to any number of physical, verbal, and sometimes sexual abuses and such power that the US Military holds is naturally a magnet for people who simply take joy in harming another human being, whether they are a fellow member of the Armed Forces, or, an innocent person meeting a cruel fate under American made and deployed 2000 pound bunker buster being weaponized against refugee camps in Gaza and against civilians and infrastructure in Iran.

Sexual abuse is so prevalent in the US Armed Forces that there were a reported 20,5000 sexual assaults in the service since just last year in 2025, with Military Sexual Trauma being an official term used to define the situation with MST being a leading a frequent cause of PTSD in service members.

Out of Fort Stewart, Many people in the 9th Engineer Battalion (9th BEB) are being offered re-enlistment opportunities in exchange for a four day pass to explicitly play the new release of Grand Theft Auto VI, a popular video game series made by the talented workers at Rockstar Games- meaning a four day weekend to play video games. This may sound innocuous to some, but to those who understand the form and function of the US Armed Forces understand that this is an exchange for years of someone’s life to serve in prison-like conditions and freedoms for a marginal paycheck. Service members are not allowed to travel beyond a set distance or have authorized time off that is not explicitly granted by one’s chain of command.

Poor living conditions and systematic abuse or manipulations in the US Armed Forces are not something that is a new phenomena, but rather a continuation of a long documented problem faced by service members lured into military contracts as a way to “escape” their hometown conditions with the promise of 3 hot-ish meals a day, a paycheck, uniforms and somewhere to lay one’s head.

Once enlistees medically and administratively clear their regional Military Entry Processing Station, or MEPS for short, enlistees are given a flight or travel to their assigned reporting station for processing into basic training for their perspective branches on the bases designed to accommodate training for your military department with the US Navy training exclusively at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes in Illinois and other military departments holding their trainings scattered throughout the continental United States.

During the MEPS experience, enlistees are given medical examinations and evaluations, and sign a lengthy document that is one’s military contact and in some cases, choose which job in the military one may want to do while in other cases the job is chosen for the enlistee, largely based on one’s ASVAB score and basic skills. A basic military contract usually has some form of active component for anywhere up to 4-6 years, followed by 2-4 years of inactive reserve. Re-enlisting adds additional years to the years of obligation contracted to your department.

Reservists and members of the National Guard get a slightly different contract in that the duration of their reserve or national guard obligation serving one weekend a month, two weeks out of the year, or sometimes on active duty via a full deployment. The contracts are legally and economically binding and often dictate the rest of the lives of those that sign them with the contracts beginning with basic training somewhere in the continental United States.

It is at these centers of training and education that enlistees receive their uniforms and begin their official training that once complete would earn their place as a full member of the US Armed Forces.

It is in these training institutions that service members are often exposed to horrible living conditions that include exposure to black mold, cockroach infestations in barracks and dining facilities, abuse from members of the Chain of Command, to include sexual abuses and more as sexual assault in the US Military remains a critical problem faced by the soldiers, regardless of sex and gender. Unsanitary bathrooms like in Camp Bullis Texas and or on the USS Lincoln are just the tip the iceberg of what service people are exposed to for the so called “honor” of serving our nation.

Not even the United States Air and Space Forces were able to escape the scathing reports of unsanitary living conditions mentioned by the the US Government Accountability Office, news agencies and military members on social media across the country.

There have also been reports of soldiers dying or getting killed during basic training during preventable and avoidable situations that has sometimes resulted in the prosecutions of leadership in court-martials like Marine Staff Sgt. Steven Smiley, a drill instructor charged with negligent homicide of a recruit named Dalton Beals, featured below, during Crucible training at Parris Island. Data from the Department of Defense, now the Department of War under Secretary of State Pete Hegseth and the Trump Administration, indicates that command negligence contributes to 32% of all training deaths.

Unsanitary and brutal conditions that are causing sailors to brave the waters of the North Arabian Sea rather than spend another moment on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, or units buying soldier’s loyalty with the cheap thrills of a video game that many would rather see banned rather than played by anyone, are not new features to the military but are part of a long part of human rights abuses of the very people that are lured into thinking we serve the best interests of the world while US President Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders children’s schools bombed in Iran, Palestine and beyond.

R.L. Richards is an independent journalist, trans liberation activist, and member of the Communist Party USA based out of Northeast Pennsylvania.

This work was shared with the permission of the author. It originally appeared on The Crimson Ledger substack.