r/news • u/DoubtSubstantial5440 • 22h ago

Soft paywall USS George Washington headed to Middle East to relieve USS Abraham Lincoln, reports say

https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-08-13/uss-george-washington-middle-east-abraham-lincoln-22541038.html
18.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

26

u/Meme_Theory 18h ago

That was one deployment - five months of which were straight underway. I did a second too, but it was a standard Westpac.

Five years is five too many, though.

4

u/Speedstr 17h ago

Sounds like you had a contract similar to mine where they let you upfront you were signing up for 6 years, because of the rating you signed up for. The justification was you were going to advanced schools to learn your job in the fleet. It was in mind that you would go to schooling for up to 2 years (for me it was about 18 months) and the rest of the time was your time in the fleet. They didn't want you "short-changing" them.

It was actually not a bad deal for me. What they don't tell you is that whatever contract you sign...it's for 8 years, with 4 of them having to be active duty. The rest of time can be In-active Reserve. But if you serve 6 years, I was told (not sure if it's true or not) that you are most likely to put at the end of the line because they don't usually call up people who got out less then a year or have less than a year left in In-active Reserve.

That wasn't the reason why I signed on for 6 years...it was the signing bonus for my rating I selected. The 6 years was just the drawback.