I'd go further. I would wager that a US nuclear powered carrier is one of the safest places on earth. After all, it is built to fight in an all out nuclear war and hopefully survive. Perhaps be the last hope if the mainland was devastatingly attacked. It can't possibly be that if its crew are, well, dead.
Also, carriers are kind of isolated. They are societies in themselves. The captains are probably more attached and sympathetic to their crews than many other parts of the military.
http://www.navytimes.com/article/99999999/CAREERS/302050309
USS Enterprise captain relieved: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/04/navy.videos/
USS Stennis Captain and his boss get into a biggest dick contest: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/us/rear-admiral-charles-m-...
Pacific commanders: http://nation.time.com/2013/10/03/second-warship-commander-r...
The details of which are the showers needed water pumps,and the water pumps were not properly grounded.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Bullshit. That was never implied, let alone said, you simply made it up.
That said, the Army most certainly DOES have regard for its enlisted. When things like this happen, bad PR follows. Bad PR is bad for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it makes recruiting more difficult. People will be much less likely to join an organization which doesn't care about them, and would thus require more incentives to do so, incentives which cost money. Two: soldiers, airmen, etc go through a pretty intensive training process that lasts several months at a minimum, and that training isn't cheap. By the time you're a full-fledged member of your respective service, your service has a lot of money invested in you, and the more advanced in your career you are, the more valuable you are to them. Soldiers cost more money than you imagine. Three: morale in the military is of paramount importance. Without good morale, operations break down. If a group of soldiers feel that their leadership doesn't care about them, morale quickly goes into the toilet, and that has all sorts of detrimental and pervasive effects.
When I was in the Army, I got sick of having to always go to another meeting about another program that, should we need it, was available to us. Everything from PTSD counseling to going outside of your chain of command if necessary to financial counseling to healthcare to complaining about the food, barracks, or what have you - there were channels galore to address grievances. They not only create these programs, but they force you to be aware that they exist. These aren't programs created just for show; they're programs which are created to be used.
This isn't the Vietnam Era. The military is an all-volunteer force, and unless the draft comes back, it can't afford to not care about its members. In an organization of many millions of people who constantly deal with difficult, dangerous things like this, incidents will occasionally occur, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.
I'm curious, is it your view that the Army dealt well with the people who had Gulf War syndrome? (or whatever we're calling it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome
I had a cousin go to war very healthy and come back sick and his experience getting treatment wasn't exactly great. It's nice to think that we're not living in the Agent Orange days anymore but I wonder if the government is really any less inclined to stonewall sick vets whose problems go against the official narrative than they used to be.
edit: you're right that it's important for retention to have good PR and make it look like there aren't serious problems. Damaging the credibility of sick people seeking help is one way the DoD does that.
>A November 1996 article in the New England Journal of Medicine found no difference in death rates, hospitalization rates or self-reported symptoms between Persian Gulf veterans and non-Persian Gulf veterans. This article was a compilation of dozens of individual studies involving tens of thousands of veterans. The study did find a statistically significant elevation in the number of traffic accidents suffered by Gulf War veterans.[44] An April, 1998 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases similarly found no increased rate of hospitalization and better health overall for veterans of the Persian Gulf War in comparison to those who stayed home.[45]
>Despite these studies, on November 17, 2008, a congressionally appointed committee called the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, staffed with independent scientists and veterans appointed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, announced that the syndrome is a distinct physical condition. The committee recommended that Congress increase funding for research on Gulf War veterans' health to at least $60 million per year.
The DOD is a large, cumbersome bureaucracy, and Gulf War Syndrome was an entirely new disorder which is still controversial today. It took a decade, but the DOD came around, and to my knowledge, people with Gulf War Syndrome are being treated.
There's been some effort to amend Article 60 of the UCMJ within the Senate; however, it's never gotten past committee.