Hegseth calls same deployment that 'changed the arc of history' also 'wasn't easy'

…(cont) Here's what came folded in with it, though. Back on September 23rd — I had to go looking for the exact date, it wasn't where I thought I'd put it — Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told a United States senator that eight sailors assigned to that same carrier strike group attempted suicide during the deployment now being honored. Eight. Is the deployment being honored aboard that carrier the same deployment Acting Secretary Cao described to the Senate, or is the Pentagon treating those as two separate stories?

The Secretary also did two push-ups for the crew — that much is in the record too, pictures and everything — though I don't have a receipt telling me exactly where on the ship it happened, so I'll leave that part alone. What I do have, underlined, is what he told the sailors themselves about the stretch they'd just finished. It "wasn't easy," he said. Not that it went fine. Not that the eight got overstated. Just — wasn't easy. Those are his words; I copied them down the way he said them.

My car needs a fan belt and I keep putting off the trip to get it fixed, but I still go through the toll plaza most mornings on the way to my brother's. You know how that works — the gate doesn't lift until the scanner reads you, and if it doesn't read, you sit there with your blinker on, holding up the whole lane, until somebody comes out of the booth to see what's wrong. The Guardian's count has the Lincoln going that many days, the entire stretch, without a single port call — a Navy record, no stop the whole time. The same article that reported the record is the one reporting the supply shortages and the deteriorating mental health onboard. Is that the kind of record a Navy keeps for a crew that's doing fine, or the kind that comes bundled with the concerns the Guardian was already writing about?

The word "record" turns out to be busy this month. A week before the ceremony, Secretary Hegseth confirmed he's cutting twenty percent of the military's generals and admirals, while telling reporters the military is retaining people at what he called record rates. Record. That's the second time the word shows up on this crew's paperwork — one record gets a ceremony, the other record got disclosed to a sitting United States senator by the Acting Navy Secretary. Is there a rule anywhere for which kind of record earns the ceremony and which kind gets reported upstairs instead?

I keep the citation language and Cao's number in the same coat pocket these days, which probably isn't smart — that thin paper folds wrong eventually. Oh — one more thing, before you head out. The ceremony was Wednesday. Cao's number went to the Senate on September 23rd, two weeks before that. So which one did the Secretary have first — the eight, or the two hundred and sixty days he stood on that carrier and called a change in the arc of history?