Garrison Davis

Saying a supercarrier was taken out of commission by a laundry fire sounds silly, but you can't keep a town of 4,500 people going if no one can do the laundry.

The fire seems to have also done extensive damage to crew living quarters, which forced 1,000 mattresses to be flown in while the crew slept, well, wherever they were sleeping.

It wasn't in their bunks.

Now, we don't know how the fire started again, but unconfirmed reports have blamed sabotage by members of the Gerald Ford's crew.

I can't tell you if this is true or not, but if it is, it would not be the first time something like this happened.

In 2012, a civilian contractor started a fire aboard the USS Miami and attacked submarine because he wanted to leave work early.

The fire caused $400 million in damage and led to the vessel being decommissioned two years later.

The contractor was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Naval sabotage was an even bigger business during the latter stages of the war in Vietnam.

In December of 1972, Jeffrey Allison, a 19-year-old sailor from Oakland, was sentenced to five years in prison for lighting a fire aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Forrestal.

That same year, a sailor aboard the USS Ranger, another supercarrier, delayed its deployment to the Pacific by three months by allegedly sticking a paint scraper in the main reduction gear, which disabled an engine.

Per an article in the Alameda Post, the Navy's official history of the Ranger confirms that sabotage was becoming more popular as the war in Vietnam became more unpopular.

Sabotage happens every day, all day, a crewman serving aboard another carrier based in Alameda, the Oraskany, was quoted as saying.

Now, these sailors, the folks sabotaging their own warships in the later stages of the Vietnam War, were part of the so-called SOS movement, a protest campaign launched and sustained entirely by sailors angry at being forced to participate in the war against Vietnam.

The movement gained its name from an act of protest in 1971 when 40 sailors stood on the flight deck of their returning aircraft carrier and spelled out SOS with their bodies.

Again, I don't know if sabotage caused the fire on the Gerald Ford, and neither does anyone else, but there are good reasons to believe it did.

As Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in late March, the Ford and its crew have been pushed to the brink after nearly a year at sea.

Normal deployment for sailors on the Ford is like six months.

Come April, it will break the record for the longest post-Vietnam carrier deployment, 294 days.

Crew members have been told their deployment will likely be extended to May, at which point they'll have been at sea for an entire year.