Posted on 09/03/2018 3:11:10 PM PDT by Bell Bouy II
Need sources to the correct version of the Forrestal incident I know there are many floating around many total BS.
Many here have links to the correct version. I remember seeing videos or "films" back then in school at NAS Jax on the fire but cant recall how they portrayed it
Need the real story.
Him dropping bombs on the flight deck I believe are BS.
Thanks
Well, that fleshes it out a bit, but it still tells the same factual story of what McCain’s actions were.
Thank you. cynwoody.
According to part 2 of the investigation report:
Also worthy of note: the wind was 32 knots, or 37 mph, a stiff breeze (part 1, finding #63).
There were at least three opportunities to have prevented the disaster, all of which failed:
There is no correct version, there is the official version and any other pro and con versions. The only one that will be recorded in History is, right or wrong, the official version.
I’m absolutely intrigued with the part about McCain leaving his ship with Apple and going to Saigon.
Who approved the leave, or pass, or whatever it was? I would think anyone aboard who had anything to do with the incident wouldn’t be allowed to wander off to wherever with whoever before being debriefed.
Back during my USAF service in the early 70s, they knew where I was most all the time, When I went on leave, they knew where I was and how to get in touch.
I’ll bet there’s paperwork somewhere on this trip to Saigon.
Here’s the NY Times interview with McCain from Saigon. Bernard Weinraub was the reporter.
THE REPUBLICANS: THE CONVENTION IN NEW YORK — APPLE’S ALMANAC; McCain, Trying His Best Not to Look Back
By R.W. APPLE JR. - 8/31/04
Mr. McCain and I have been friends since I flew from Saigon in July 1967 to report on an accident on the aircraft carrier Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin, in which a Zuni rocket accidentally detonated and set fire to the 400-gallon fuel tank of his A-4D Skyhawk, parked on the flight deck. More than 100 men were killed in the inferno that followed.
Afterwards, he came to stay at my house in Saigon for a week or so, and we enjoyed the bright lights of the wartime capital together. Only three months later, he was shot down and held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for five long years.
“ Happily for all of us, John came through without a scratch”
Admiral John D. McCain II
As quoted from correspondence reviewed by historian Mary Hershberger
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/investigating-john-mccains-tragedy-at-sea/
Yes Johnny sounds like he had a relaxing week sheltering in Saigon with a NYT reporter, recovering from his “ despondency” and pondering his career ( strange preoccupation for a blameless accident victim)
unlike the rest of the ships crew that were pullng together to account for the missing, put out the fires, enable the ship to get underway to Subic, start debriefings and writing reports. After all 134 families needed to be notified of the dead and another 160 of the injured ...and then there was the onboard memorial service attended by 2,000 of the crew- minus LT McCain
At least he had time to talk to Dad, get his personal version of events out through the NYT probably before some families even knew what happened and to get his story lined up before the accident board convened
Film of the accident as it unfolded
Not great quality. Caution shows explosions that killed many
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chuiyXQKw3I
Again, back to my theory - and I must admit it is conjecture: McCain DID “wet start” his aircraft several times before this particular fire to startle other pilots and showboat at the pilots’ behind him expense and embarrassment. It was part of his reputation, it is consistent with his reputation, and he was written up many, many times for that sort of rude and illegal behavior in public, off-duty, on-duty and while in the Navy’s planes as a pilot.
Easy to understand the crew’s assumptions and the crew’s rumors that McCain did it again. That needed someone to blame - the ones who pulled the pins and the ones fighting the original fire were dead in the fire and bomb explosions. McCain lived, left his airplane, left his support crew to die on deck, and then went below to safety.
He was hated by the flight deck crews, the maintenance crews, his fellow pilots, and - through all of the air crews the ship’s crew left alive. He was the son of an Admiral, the grandson of an admiral, and he was sent off by helicopter to Saigon before the fires were out and the bodies counted. When that helicopter was needed for supplies, medical personnel, and wounded crew members.
The record suggests that after McCain left the burning Forrestal for the greater ease of Saigon, he saw his Navy career as being in jeopardy. Soon, he went to London, where his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., was stationed as commander in chief of the United States Naval Forces in Europe. Sen. McCain has written little about the fire, and his book does not mention any conversations with his father about bombs dropping from his plane on the Forrestal or his leaving the ship. However, it is difficult to imagine that he did not discuss the tragedy and his own personal difficulties because, by McCain’s own account, his father had intervened on his behalf before. After seeing the admiral in London, McCain went to the French Riviera, where he spent his nights gambling at the Palm Beach Casino.6 McCain’s book skips over the weeks after the Forrestal fire, but Timberg says that the young naval officer spent the months of August and September 1967 “unsure of his status.” Following McCain’s application for a transfer to the Oriskany, his orders were delayed, and in September he returned to his home in Jacksonville, Fla. There, an old friend, Chuck Larson, saw a change in McCain: The pilot was discouraged about his future. McCain confided to Larson that he might have to get out of the Navy because, in the words of the Timberg biography, “his past had become a burden” and “whenever he joined a new outfit he was dismayed that his reputation for mayhem had preceded him.”7 Aside from any questions about his Forrestal actions, McCain had, in his short Navy career, crashed two planes and flown a third into power lines in Spain because of, as he put it, “daredevil clowning.”8"
I can’t get past him being able to waltz right off the ship mere hours after the incident, whether or not he may have had prior approval for leave.
I can’t fathom ANYONE, let alone an eyewitness to something like the Forrestal fire, leaving the scene without being debriefed several times.
I was just a pissant USAF Airman in the early 70s, but such a thing would have been unheard of in SAC.
I’m saying AWOL, until proven otherwise.
He didn’t drop bombs he initiated a wet start and set off a Zuni missile. McCain had been warned previously for pulling this stunt before.
Mr. GG2 knows a guy who was on a carrier near the Forrestal and he said everybody in the fleet knew what happened.
That is my point above: The Forrestal got him off of the ship so fast BECAUSE - as you put it - “everybody in the fleet knew what happened.”
Even if it didn’t happen - the “fleet” knew it happened BECAUSE of McCain’s well-earned, very accurate reputation for DOING that kind of stunt! There was no time and no way to accurately and dispassionately find out what really happened, the flight deck and ship were still burning!
And the Forrestal’s officers and crew knew McCain left the flight deck and sat below decks watching the fire on TV.
The CO (Commander of the Air Wing actually) had to get him off the ship. Immediately. Officially or unofficially. He had to get off that ship or be killed.
I don’t think McCain cared (or even knew) he was being protected. Or maybe he did (having received threats, or having perceived threats), and so McCain got verbal permission to leave for Saigon.
Once in Saigon and having time to think, McCain knew he had to get back to sea, back to a carrier and back over North Vietnam or his reputation WOULD BE forever tarnished by this fourth plane destroyed. THAT was when his “father’s influence” came to be played out once again. Getting McCain back on the Oriskany saved his career - and the his father’s reputation in the Pacific and Europe theaters for his future promotions, and his grandfather’s WWII reputation as a carrier admiral. Those TWO reputations had to be protected lest their name be smeared by McCain’s latest errors in judgement (if not actual cowardice) while his ship was (literally) under fire.
Supposedly when McCain’s commanding officer was notified that McCain had been shot down he commented “ thank God it was McCain because I was running out of aircraft “.
And then, when he did get back in the cockpit and flew his first mission off Oriskanay, he went in crazy determined to make a show of himself, flew too low, and got shot down by AAA
All hs life he claimed it was a SAM- another lie to cover his own bad judgement
Man o man was he a loose cannon
In a different age he would have been deemed at the academy as psychologically unsuitable for flight and for command
“Lieutenant Commander John McCain of VA 46 was hit by shrapnel as he jumped out of his plane and ran across the deck.”
A Ship Full of Heroes” (PDF). All Hands. pp. 7–11.
- https://www.navy.mil/ah_online/archpdf/ah196711.pdf
And if you don't post a link, it's nothing but fake news.
Re: 87.
Will point out that the person who wrote that article relied on anonymous sources for some of the key points:
“Some of those who were on the Forrestal and other persons familiar with the ordnance told me that because the rocket did not hit McCain’s craft, only actions by the pilot could have caused any bomb to fall from McCain’s Skyhawk. These sources — who spoke under the condition that they not be publicly identified — agree with each other that, if any bomb fell from the McCain airplane, it was because of actions that he took either in error or panic upon seeing the fire on the deck or in his hasty exit from the plane. Two switches in the cockpit of a Skyhawk need to be thrown to drop such a bomb, according to the sources.”
Sorry. If people aren’t willing to go on the record, their comments deserve closer scrutiny and additional skepticism - especially in such a key point.
Is there any reason why you don’t believe any of the bazillion stories available from a Bing search.
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