McCain wasn't the cause of the Forrestal disaster, he was the victim. Slipshod practices and poor engineering was to blame, and Lt. Jim Bangert was the one who flipped the fatal switch, sitting in an F-4 astern of McCain's spot on the flight deck, which caused the unintentional launch of a Zuni 2.75" rocket into an A-4's underbelly fuel tank adjacent to McCain's aircraft, causing the bombs on it and several other A-4s (seven in total) to explode in the ensuing fire.
If it were otherwise, I would say so, but it's patently false and absurd. Trying is like trying to blame the Chicago Fire on Mrs. O'Leary's cow, instead of crappy building, fire prevention, and firefighting practices, and Chicago city corruption.
Besides a number of great documentaries on the incident, there's this excerpt of forensic detail, which succinctly shows what actually happened.
The wet-start nonsense was spread by people who don't know, trying to be the smartest guys in the room. It's one thing to try and pin something on a guy you don't like (which illustrates the level of contempt in which McCain was later held) that he did do, it's another thing entirely to try and falsely pin something on the guy that he clearly couldn't have had any fault for, out of sheer spite. The allegation falls into the second category.
All McCain did was jump out of his doomed plane, from its position among the group of burning and fully-armed A-4 Skyhawks waiting to launch an Alpha strike, onto a burning sea of flames on a flight deck covered in lit jet fuel and fallen ordnance.
Less than a minute later, the first of seven aging WWII 1000# bombs in the fire exploded, wiping out most of the firefighting DC party, killing about 30 guys nearby instantly, peppering McCain with bomb fragments in his chest and legs, scattering wounded and dead crewmembers all over the aft quarter of the flight deck, and embarking Forrestal's surviving crew into an epic battle to save their crippled ship.
What happened after that is the stuff of heroic legends.
McCain was simply an unfortunate victim of that incident, due to sloppy deck practices, and not the proximate cause in any way, shape, nor form. He was just the guy whose plane got caught in the resulting conflagration.
Forrestal and later Enterprise taught the Navy, in blood and treasure, how to and how not to run a carrier afloat, and how to and how not to do damage control, which is the only redeeming feature of the loss of lives in each instance.
The things I can and do fault McCain for are legion, but none of them happened during his time in uniform.
The Real John McCain They Don't Want You to Know About
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