signalmankenneth
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Naval top brass under Pete Hegseth's hardline Pentagon leadership punished a teenage airman after he survived a harrowing 67-foot leap into the ocean.
Navy Airman Nicholas McKelvey, 19, was formally discharged on Thursday, with leadership branding his desperate mental health crisis aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln as "malingering" and accusing him of faking distress to escape a grueling combat deployment as the ship headed for the Middle East.
Under the terms of his removal—a general discharge under honorable conditions—the young father has been stripped of his G.I. Bill education assistance, crushing his family's hopes of affording a college degree.
McKelvey had endured 255 consecutive days working 12-hour shifts on the flight deck under a blazing sun aboard an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Pushed past his breaking point by severe food shortages, family health crises, and the strain of missing his daughter's birth, the young mechanic sprinted across the deck and jumped into the open water on Aug. 3.
"I didn't want to be there anymore," McKelvey said, speaking out publicly for the first time. "If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is," he told The New York Times.
McKelvey was pulled from the water 50 minutes later, and officers enforcing Hegseth's zero-tolerance culture swiftly framed his cry for help as criminal misconduct. The Navy placed him on suicide watch, ordered him to clean floors the next day, and subsequently hit him with formal charges.
A commanding officer found him guilty during a hearing last month, ruling that his leap endangered the vessel.
His wife, 19-year-old Samantha Larry, slammed the administration's retaliatory move as a cold effort to cover up systemic failures aboard the ship, where at least eight sailors attempted suicide during a near-record 322-day deployment.
"They don't want to take accountability for what happened to him, and to what happened to multiple sailors on the boat," Larry told the Times. "I don't think that they care. They care more about how they're pictured, how they're viewed. They don't want anyone to see the bad stuff."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/pete-hegseth-punishment-sailor-jumped-144957871.html
Navy Airman Nicholas McKelvey, 19, was formally discharged on Thursday, with leadership branding his desperate mental health crisis aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln as "malingering" and accusing him of faking distress to escape a grueling combat deployment as the ship headed for the Middle East.
Under the terms of his removal—a general discharge under honorable conditions—the young father has been stripped of his G.I. Bill education assistance, crushing his family's hopes of affording a college degree.
McKelvey had endured 255 consecutive days working 12-hour shifts on the flight deck under a blazing sun aboard an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Pushed past his breaking point by severe food shortages, family health crises, and the strain of missing his daughter's birth, the young mechanic sprinted across the deck and jumped into the open water on Aug. 3.
"I didn't want to be there anymore," McKelvey said, speaking out publicly for the first time. "If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is," he told The New York Times.
McKelvey was pulled from the water 50 minutes later, and officers enforcing Hegseth's zero-tolerance culture swiftly framed his cry for help as criminal misconduct. The Navy placed him on suicide watch, ordered him to clean floors the next day, and subsequently hit him with formal charges.
A commanding officer found him guilty during a hearing last month, ruling that his leap endangered the vessel.
His wife, 19-year-old Samantha Larry, slammed the administration's retaliatory move as a cold effort to cover up systemic failures aboard the ship, where at least eight sailors attempted suicide during a near-record 322-day deployment.
"They don't want to take accountability for what happened to him, and to what happened to multiple sailors on the boat," Larry told the Times. "I don't think that they care. They care more about how they're pictured, how they're viewed. They don't want anyone to see the bad stuff."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/pete-hegseth-punishment-sailor-jumped-144957871.html
