Posted on 07/21/2015 5:33:49 AM PDT by KeyLargo
The Day John McCain Got Shot Down
Did He Show the Right Stuff? By Zalin Grant
John McCain received mixed reviews from fellow pilots when he arrived on the USS Oriskany in 1967, a month before he was shot down and captured. Cal Swanson, commander of fighter squadron VF-162, was enthusiastic. Swanson thought McCain proved he had the right stuff by getting himself assigned to the Oriskany, an aircraft carrier sailing off the coast of North Vietnam in the South China Sea. The Oriskany had seen more combat and suffered heavier casualties than any ship in the Vietnam War. McCain’s own aircraft carrier, the USS Forrestal, had been put out of action by a horrific fire two months earlier.
After the Forrestal fire, McCain was assigned to Saigon as a navy PR aide. He was perfect for the job—handsome, charming, witty. He had met R.W. (Johnny) Apple, a well-known reporter for the New York Times, and Apple had smoothed his way in Saigon by introducing him to journalists and to the U.S. military and civilian command.
John McCain could have served out his tour flacking for the navy and having a lot of fun doing it—dining at Saigon’s French restaurants and hitting the bars full of pretty Vietnamese girls. But McCain wanted to get back into combat. He had completed only five missions before the Forrestal fire. Cal Swanson thought McCain’s attitude reflected well on his courage and patriotism.
McCain would not be joining VF-162, Swanson’s fighter squadron, however. McCain was not a fighter pilot, although in later years the media would perpetuate the mistaken belief that he was. Trained as an A-4 bomber pilot, he was assigned to attack squadron VA-163, which had an illustrious history.
(Excerpt) Read more at pythiapress.com ...
That is the point I have been trying to make here, as well. Thank you for the post.
Great post. I couldn’t agree more.
FWIW, I’m willing to cede “McCain was a war hero”. I wasn’t there, so anything else would be subjective. But after McCain returned home? He’s nothing but a path of destruction.
I am sure I saw the same footage as you at NAS Jax during my AE”A” school
I agree. Any man who steps onto a battle field, be it land, sea or air and honorably fights for his country has done more than 95% of the rest of the population of this nation. I will not disparage his service.
Like I said before, NONE of the Forrestal fire attaches to Lt McCain. Even if he was “hot dogging”, his exhaust is vectored away from the rest of the aircraft and had no part in starting the fire.
The whole thing is a little complicated for me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Like a lot of characteristics that define a person, they can be a double-edged sword. Loyalty is one of those things, in my opinion.
For years, I turned a blind eye towards McCain because Of his naval Service. I was very fortunate after some of the posts that I made here on free Republic, that some of our fellow conservatives took the time to gently help me see the situation more clearly. (Kind of like the old saying about honey gathering more flies than vinegar does)
It was difficult for me, because I had Grown up wearing wristbands with POW names on them, me and my friends knew who most of them were, and my parents had socialized with some of them. Then, to complicate it even further, I not only served under him for a short period of time, I did my service in his actual squadron that he had flown combat in, so everybody was well-versed in the history of what happened. (Never mind the ribbing that we used to get from other squadrons who would tell us that we started the fire on the USS Forrestal!)
I was very reluctant to level criticism at him, which was a richly deserved.
Oddly enough, I am of the opinion that simply being shot down doesn’t make one a war hero.
Admiral Stockdale? Absolutely war hero.
Jeremiah Denton? Absolutely war hero.
McCain? I don’t know.
I guess for me, I have always felt the term “hero” Is overused. For example, the people who died on 9/11 we’re not necessarily heroes, but some were. Characterizing the people who died or who were injured in the Boston Marathon bombing as heroes doesn’t connect with me, although it is true that some of them were heroes because of the actions they took.
Hell, I’ll probably get heat for saying that, but it’s just how I feel.
Probably, it was at that moment, in boot camp, that I realized this is not a game. Real lives are at stake, namely mine!
To be honest, I can’t account for anything that Wesley Clark would say about anything, good or bad… I despise that man at so many levels.
And, by the way, I do agree with you completely on his conduct in civilian life and politics. I despise him in that aspect.
Didn’t say I believed it was his fault. Only that the article mentioned it and that based on his prior record the suspicions were predictable. In an earlier age and navy he might have been thought a Jonah. He seemed to attract unfortunate events and I’d count the election of Obama in 2008 as the worst of the lot.
“By his own admission, then, McCain failed to follow instructions in combat. He did not try to evade the missile.”
Going down the chute takes about 5 seconds. At the end, your recovery is essentially an evasive maneuver. Once you start down the chute, you SHOULD ignore SAM warnings - in part because SAM warnings are not - or at least, were not back in the 80s, let alone the 60s - perfectly reliable.
As for AAA - if your planned release is at 3500 feet, you are in the AAA zone. You are not “wrong” for pressing to your planned release altitude to drop a bomb. You MUST do so with dumb bombs to get reliable hits. You dive bomb so that you will only briefly be in range...but you need to get to planned release altitude, which is determined before you take off.
There is no reason to fight your way to the target if you are going to chicken out during the most critical 3-5 seconds of the flight. Whoever wrote this stuff was tactically WRONG. Once you commit to the dive attack, you finish it - at the planned release parameters - and then recover.
“Yet Rice had figured out under tremendous pressure how to eject without getting himself killed or injured. Just as most other pilots had figured it out when they were shot down. It left a question: Why wasn’t LCDR John S. McCain, 31, able to put himself in the proper position to eject like LTJG Charles D. Rice, 24, who had much less flying experience?”
Written like an idiot lawyer! When you are in an inverted spin below 3000’ AGL, you eject any way you can. It is accepted that you may have injuries. Someone who has never been in a spin has no business trying to critique the ejection!
I’ve known guys injured in ejections. Luck plays a role. One guy was killed when his checklist caught on part of the ejection seat and spun the seat into his face, crushing his skull. Luck. I’ve known guys who ejected out of the ejection envelope, and who survived without any injuries. It happens.
The article was written by someone with no clue about dropping manual bombs or flying jets.
What is interesting is that although it wasn't McCain's fault, is that someone still kept him on active duty, likely directly attributable to his pedigree. Had they acted, no Hanoi Hilton later. You can't make this stuff up. Even the whiff of involvement in something of that magnitude is a red flag for normal people.
What I mean is you have a reckless youngster prone to pushing boundaries ( okay so far, brash pilot SoP ), who is an Admiral's son ( presumably under more scrutiny than everyone else, or maybe under less! ), but crashes not one, not two, but three planes before getting near Vietnam ( others would surely have been bounced by now, did you read about the one in Spain? )
... then ... on the carrier he is the recipient of the short straw accidentally targeting him out of every other possible plane to take the errant rocket. It's as if God himself gave the commander a perfect reason, ( a fourth chance overall ) to yank him prior to the fateful Hanoi journey. Amazing.
If the story ended for him in Spain ( his fault ) or after that massive loss life onboard ( not his fault ) he never would have went to Hanoi and we would never heard his name again, at least as a war hero that our U.S. Senate just can't do without. America, The Constitution and the Republic itself would be far healthier for it.
So there is a long list of people to blame for a long unbroken chain of events that all had to come together precisely to yield this nasty politician that has made a career crapping on the Constitution he swore to support and defend. Well if he took the oath. Maybe he skipped that day, hungover or something. It happens I guess if you're an Admiral's son.
My Dad was once threatened with court-martial for flying a P-51 down Main Street, below the tops of the surrounding buildings. A year later, he was in Korea. He died flying helicopters in Vietnam.
As a lieutenant, in the 80s, I once told the Wing Commander that if he didn’t want a lieutenant making decisions for him, he needed to come to work in time to make them himself. In the 80s, I got away with it. In today’s military, I probably would not.
The 50s & 60s had a very different standard for crashing planes. It was far more common back then.
And I can remember flying (a WSO) UNDER power lines on several occasions, so I cannot fault someone else for doing so. It happens.
^^ Should have been “as a WSO”...
Thank you for your constructive input.
Massgopguy, please don’t take this personally because I do not intend it that way, but nearly every single thing in your post is erroneous or flat out wrong. I am bringing it to your attention, because having read your posts in the past, you don’t seem like the kind of person who would intentionally spread something so egregiously wrong. And I know you didn’t write the piece, either, so I thought you might like to know.
First, a “wet start” is not something you would ever do intentionally around other people, and most especially, not on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in a combat situation with ordinance all over the place. Is it possible that some numb nuts would intentionally do a wet start while turning up the aircraft for maintenance on land base where there’s no one else around? Sure… I’m pretty sure that happened on occasion. But there are specific instructions and procedures to avoid wet starts for very, very good reasons. A wet start happens when the igniter fails to light the fuel being injected into the canisters, and clouds of fuel come out the tailpipe. It can be an extremely dangerous situation if it then ignites, which can happen. But when someone starting a jet aircraft, they pay specific and particular attention to the exhaust gas temperature, and if it does not light off in a reasonable time and the temperature starts rising, the engine start is generally aborted. I say with complete confidence that no naval aviator would ever, ever do this on a flight deck that is crowded with fully armed aircraft. If it does happen, damn well better be an accident.
Secondly, McCain was flying an A-4 Skyhawk, which is a single engine, single pilot attack aircraft. There is no way that he could’ve done anything to “startle the newbie” behind him. They did have a training version of the A-4 with two seats, but those were only in training squadrons, of which VA-46 was not one. We cannot even give the author of that piece of crap article the benefit of the doubt and assume he was talking about a newbie pilot in a plane behind him, because his tailpipe was pointed over the side of the deck, hence nobody behind him.
“Hot dogging” did not cause the chain reaction. It was a stray spark caused by the removal of the arming pin on the Zuni rockets installed on LCDR Bangert’s F-4 to save time during a high tempo launch cycle, and was an APPROVED workaround. And this pin had been removed on the F-4 Phantom on the other side of the deck.
When the missile launched from the Phantom, it streaked across the deck, severed the arm at the shoulder of a flight deck crewman, hit another plane a glancing blow, and went right through the external fuel tank on McCain’s Skyhawk, which emptied its 2000 lbs of jet fuel onto the flight deck, where something ignited it.
McCain only escaped with his life because instead of sitting in his cockpit and burning to death like a few other pilots did, he opened his canopy, unstrapped himself, climbed out on his refueling probe and dropped to the deck right into flaming fuel where he suffered significant burns but was helped out of the flames by someone.
If he was the only aviator transferred, could it be because of the burn injuries and shell fragments, and perhaps they sent him ashore for treatment? I ask that rhetorically, because I don’t know. It has never interested me to find that out.
Lastly, wet starting was never “banned”. One never did it intentionally in the first place, unless you were a bunch of 18 year old sailors turning the plane for maintenance at some shore base like Cecil Field, and were far from prying eyes. I was high-power qualified, and know that I never, EVER saw anyone do it intentionally, though I have seen it done by accident.
Again, please don’t take this personally, but if we want people to pay attention to us, we need to be factual.
The article is a load of horse hooey, to be polite.
People may think I am simply sticking up for McCain, and in a sense I am, but if we persist in giving this type of thing exposure, and buy into it, people will see we are just a bunch of ignorant yahoos.
Even liberals serve in the military, and they would read this article and discredit every single thing we have to say about his performance as a politician.
As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about this.
I don’t doubt a bit that his pedigree helped him advance and keep out of trouble. In all the pilots I dealt with in the military, I did not encounter a single one who would intentionally break a rule (within the vision of anyone who could make an issue of it.)
They all followed the NATOPS instructions to the letter when on the ground, taxiing, and taking off.
What they did after that, I have no idea. But it is pretty clear to me McCain was a reckless pilot, and I don’t have a hard time believing that his lineage protected him. Other pilots hate that.
There was a B-52 that crashed a few years ago practicing for an air show, and to a man, all the other pilots disliked and resented his dangerous hot-dogging behavior that eventually got him (and some of them) killed.
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