The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford is expected home in Norfolk, Va., on Saturday, after completing the longest deployment by a U.S. warship since the Vietnam War.
What began on June 24 as a peacetime cruise with scheduled port calls in the Mediterranean and the North Sea changed drastically in October when the ship was in Split, Croatia.
While the Ford was in port, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered it to the Caribbean in the run-up to the U.S. commando raid in January that seized President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Then, Mr. Hegseth sent the ship to the Middle East in preparation for the war against Iran.
Along the way, the crew endured a major fire that destroyed the sleeping area for hundreds of sailors, complaints about food shortages, delays in receiving mail and mechanical problems with the gear that launches and recovers warplanes on the ship’s flight deck.
About 4,500 sailors serve on carriers like the Ford when all of the aircraft and aviators are aboard.
Warship deployments are typically scheduled to last six months, but those for aircraft carriers can sometimes stretch into eight months. Pushing beyond that, as the Navy has done with the Ford, can strain both the crew as well as the mechanical well-being of the ship itself.
For the spouses of at least two Ford sailors, it has not been an easy time. They spoke with The New York Times because their husbands are not allowed to do so without official authorization from the Navy.
Erica Feiste was new to Navy life. But as soon as she heard the Ford was heading to the Caribbean, she knew that her husband was probably not coming home on Feb. 4 as initially planned.
“I think the communications were actually better than I expected for the most part,” said Ms. Feiste, who was able to talk with her husband frequently while he was at sea. “The length and the conditions” of the deployment, she added, “were worse than I expected.”
In early December, the couple spent five days together in St. Thomas during a port call. When Ms. Feiste dropped her husband off at the pier to head back out, he was told that bad weather had halted water taxi service to the ship.
“Eight hundred sailors from the Ford were stuck there overnight on the pier with no food, no water, no sanitation and tons of mosquitoes,” said Ms. Feiste, whose husband was unable to get back to the ship until 8 the next morning.
In February, the Ford’s deployment was extended again as Mr. Hegseth sent the ship to the Middle East in preparation for war against Iran.
“Being told that they were getting extended to go to war was definitely hard to wrap your head around, and it’s kind of unbelievable,” said Tristen Koch, whose husband is also on the Ford. “It kind of sounds like it’s coming out of a movie.”
As the Ford’s deployment stretched on, the ship missed a planned maintenance period in a Virginia shipyard to fix many of the carrier’s mechanical problems.
The next month while in the Red Sea, the ship’s laundry room caught fire. The flames spread into the ship’s ventilation system, taking about 30 hours to extinguish. By the time it was over, 600 sailors and crew members had lost their beds.
In late March, senior Navy officials held a town hall meeting in the base theater at Naval Station Norfolk so that families of sailors aboard Ford and its escort ships could voice their concerns.
It did not go well.
In a recording of the meeting that was provided to The New York Times, family members occasionally jeered John Phelan and Hung Cao, the Navy’s top two civilian leaders at the time, during the nearly 80-minute event.
One attendee read a statement written by a Ford sailor, who said the deployment had shaken his faith in the Navy’s treatment of sailors.
“I do not control what the Navy does,” the woman read from the letter. “I do, however, control whether or not I will re-enlist, and as of right now I cannot and will not afford the Navy the opportunity to potentially tear my family apart again for a year.”
She concluded by saying her sailor was afraid to seek mental health assistance because it would reflect poorly on his service record, a comment that was met with thunderous applause from the assembled family members.
Mr. Phelan was dismissed from his job as secretary of the Navy in April after months of infighting with senior Pentagon leaders.
The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the dissatisfaction expressed by family members of the Ford strike group during the town-hall meeting in March.
After the laundry fire, Ms. Koch said it took double the time for the care packages she sent to her husband, or roughly a month, to reach the ship. And, she said, that was when she started hearing about sailors not having enough food.
Ms. Koch said most of the news she got about her husband’s ship came via posts on Facebook, and it was difficult to sort out what was really happening given what she said were a flood of AI-generated posts about the Ford online.
In February, the Navy released a statement in response to reports of problems with the ship’s catapults and sanitation, saying that all such systems were “operating within expected parameters.” On social media, Navy leadership and Mr. Hegseth pushed back against similar claims of food shortages on two other ships supporting the war against Iran — the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and U.S.S. Tripoli — in April.
Even when the Ford’s return was just days away, Ms. Feiste said it was difficult for her to believe her husband was finally coming home.
“Until about a week ago, I wasn’t really sure that this was actually going to happen,” she said. “At least I wasn’t allowing myself to believe it because I was afraid to get my hopes up again.”
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
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