Families do this. It’s normal. Also, it’s usually unnecessary and misguided.
A video on the New York Times website features the family members of a sailor at sea on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and the story frequently descends into the realm of parody. Note the captioning on this screenshot from the paused video:
People who enlisted in the U.S. Navy didn’t sign up to be on a ship in the ocean, one family member complained, especially if they don’t get plenty of breaks and port calls and have to be there for a long time. Bless your heart.
People who serve in the military are proud of their endurance in bad conditions. They’re proud that they do hard work for an unreasonable period of time. They complain about those conditions, but (to a point) they like it while they hate it. They know they’re doing something that other people couldn’t handle, and the complaining is just a thing everybody does to pass the very long days. Most of them don’t want you to make it a thing, and the ones who do mostly don’t belong in the military. A few weeks on a limited menu is most certainly not outside the normal limits of military experience.
If you think anyone on the Abraham Lincoln is suffering a lot right now, I recommend reading With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge’s war memoir about island hopping with the Marine Corps in World War II. We’re grading our deprivation on a curve.
I’ve seen this behavior firsthand. In both the peacetime army in the 1990s and the other army after 9/11, I watched a tiny minority of weak soldiers complain to their mothers, who complained to their congressmen, whose offices called somebody in the chain of command. No one has any patience for it. No one is ever impressed that Private Smith feels stressed by the length of his work day or the communication style of his squad leader. Abuse merits political intervention and news media inquiries; plain sandwiches for several nights in a row does not. An extended deployment does not. They knew. We all knew. We chose it.
On the topic of seeking support for people who are struggling to tolerate the conditions of their military service, I once reported to my senior drill sergeant that a member of my platoon had become catatonic and non-responsive and appeared to require assistance for a severe psychological crisis. His response was two words long, and indicated that his concern was fairly limited. It’s an environment where people expect you to shut up and deal with it, and patience for someone who doesn’t do that runs out more or less instantly.
A post from a support group for veterans strangely enough describes family support for “veterans” who haven’t left the military yet, and it’s a useful look at the advice families get. The group explicitly tells families to do this for a service member who seems to be in crisis: “Write your State Senator and Representative and your United State Senator and Congressman. Tell them what is happening and ASK for intervention.” Here’s another “advocacy training” website for military families that explains how to ask for help from your representatives in Congress. Here’s some congressional grievance advice for service members. There are a lot of people telling military families how to complain.
Families do exactly this, all the time. Here’s a 2017 blog post from a Navy wife who complained to Congress about her husband’s deployment schedule. Congress also does this all the time, and here’s Sen. Mark Warner in 2020, describing his letter to senior military officials expressing concern about Covid-19 outbreaks on another aircraft carrier. Branches of the military have created detailed guides for the officers who spend their days responding to the endless flood of congressional inquiries, or for the congressional staffers who send them. The senator would like to know if it’s true that you yelled at his constituent’s son, drill sergeant.
It’s not the case that the current family complaints about sailors being at sea for a long time and having a limited menu on a ship represent a sudden and shocking break with the American military experience.
If one of yours is at sea: They’re complaining, and their days are long and very hard, but they’re proud. Don’t reduce them to the status of victims because they’re doing work they chose to do. They did sign up to be in the ocean on a ship, you poor thing, and they do it well, even when they doubt the strategic wisdom of the thing they’re doing. (There’s a two-word phrase I heard all the time in the infantry, and the second word was “idiotic.” Then we went and did the thing.)
Don’t record videos with the legacy media to complain about your family members in the military doing military stuff. You’re not helping.
