The Navy investigation revealed Aycock held off on calling man overboard when Mims went missing.
Sailors in Mims’s engineering department reported “extreme work hours,” with one telling investigators they slept about three hours a night. Such a workload placed “a significant amount of stress” on the Shiloh sailors, according to the investigation. One sailor told investigators that the ship’s missions were multiplied once it shouldered tasks for the cruiser Antietam after it ran aground in January 2017. Shiloh sailors under Aycock reported in crew surveys that the ship’s tempo and command climate were brutal. McCain collisions this summer that killed 17 sailors. While Mims’s stresses were part family and part financial, the investigation notes that “significant and dynamic” pressure on sailors in the west Pacific’s 7th Fleet also played a part, issues that have been magnified in the wake of the destroyers Fitzgerald and John S.
