There was chaos aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford after a major onboard fire knocked out a big swathe of living quarters, leaving hundreds of US sailors without beds in the middle of a live war deployment, in what marks a much bigger incident than what the Pentagon previously disclosed The fire occurred last week, raising immediate questions of whether it was hit by an Iranian drone or missile attack, as Tehran has claimed, amid Pentagon insistence that it was none of these – but just an accidental fire. Already the crew and ship are strained to their limits, given the carrier is on its way to achieving a record deployment, entering ten months. The crew has reportedly been informed that they will be deployed into May, which would make an entire year at sea, after the prior Caribbean deployment focused on the Venezuela anti-Maduro operation. The NY Times says this marks twice the length of a normal carrier deployment – one wrought with extreme difficulties and a major emergency, as the report details: It took more than 30 hours for sailors to put out the fire aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford last week, sailors and military officials said, as the beleaguered ship continued its […]