By John Catalinotto
August 11, 2026

Military families, unhappy over how their sailor relatives on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier have been mistreated by the Pentagon during their last nine-months combat mission, showed their anger at an Aug. 7 virtual town hall meeting with top U.S. Navy officers in San Diego.

According to the report on MS NOW, some 200 parents, spouses and other relatives of 5,000 sailors and Marines on the Lincoln gave hell to Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao in San Diego “over difficult conditions aboard the USS Lincoln as its combat mission against Iran stretches onward with no clear date to return home.”

Relatives complained about “the sailors’ mental health, safety on deck, a lack of supplies, food shortages, water contamination and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages en route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.” According to MS NOW, many of the spouses were in tears asking the top officers about problems of mental health or exhaustion.

One spouse raised political questions about the USS Lincoln’s mission. She said the military was “killing innocent civilians” and her spouse had expressed guilt about his actions. The audience applauded.

Loved ones asked repeatedly when the sailors on the Lincoln would return home. The Naval officers were unable to answer them.

One of the Pentagon spokespeople, Vice Admiral Douglas Verissimo, explained the shortages in food and other supplies by calling attention to Iran’s retaliatory strikes at a U.S. naval base near Iran: “When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail … all of the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there.”

Remarkable public opposition

Such public war opposition by relatives of military personnel — and apparently from the active-duty personnel themselves — has rarely reached such a high level so early in a war.

But this reaction should not be surprising, because the White House has continually been caught in lies and contradictions since Feb. 28. That’s when the U.S. and Israel first launched the war on Iran, claiming it would be over in days. The MAGA cabinet members never even made a serious attempt to explain what the war’s goals were, nor did they each tell the same story.

The Iranian government, military and Revolutionary Guards were able to respond to the U.S.-Israeli aggression. Meanwhile, the White House alternated between threatening annihilation of Iran’s civilization and promising that talks to end the fighting were underway.

As a result, a much greater proportion of the U.S. population are aware of the potential disaster. It is more and more apparent that Washington is the aggressor, that the president and his cronies lie constantly about the war and that — even if the fighting stops — the war has created a growing economic crisis for U.S. working people.

The USS Lincoln isn’t the only example of this break between the MAGA regime and the U.S. population. Earlier in the spring of 2026, sailors on the USS Gerald Ford, where 4,500 personnel had been on a mission for nearly a year, showed signs of a similar crisis.

After nearly 10 months at sea (usually six months is the limit), with the crew working 80-hour weeks without rest, the USS Ford’s toilets stopped functioning for months. Stories spread that exhausted sailors stuffed T-shirts down the toilets in protest. The Ford was sent to a naval base in Crete, a Greek island, and now the carrier and its crew are finally home in Norfolk, Virginia.

Call to resist war crimes

The experiences on the USS Ford and USS Lincoln indicate that an incipient resistance may be underway right inside the largest machines of mass destruction wielded by the Pentagon. Some call the carriers giant floating factories. Others call them floating prisons.

Other indications were the July 4 demonstration of Veterans Against Fascism in Philadelphia and the Veterans For Peace (VFP) campaign to place antiwar billboards near dozens of military bases, from Georgia to California to Japan. These billboards warn that active-duty personnel have the right and the duty to refuse to obey illegal and unconstitutional orders.

The VFP held a convention in Kansas City from Aug. 7-9 where this organization is continuing to promote resistance against illegal orders.

That the relatives of service people speak out against war is a definite sign that active-duty personnel know their government and its officers are ordering them to commit war crimes. They feel every risk and discomfort they face, which they might ignore if they believed they were doing the right thing. Many already know they are participating in war crimes. Can it be long before more say no?

Catalinotto is author of “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” World View Forum, 2017.