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A credible report:

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/disasters-and-phenomena/forrestal-fire.html

A Zuni missile from a F-4 was launched and struck McCain’s A-4. McCain was not responsible for the missile launch or responsible for the fire control operation. He was able to escape his burning aircraft.

McCain’s plane was NOT hit. It was a lie told by McCain.

From the link above:

“The fire started at 10:51 a.m. Saturday, July 29, 1967, as 30-year-old Lt. Cmdr. John McCain sat on the port side of the Forrestal in his A-4 Skyhawk going through preflight checks. To his right was Lt. Cmdr. Fred White, also in an A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft. A Zuni rocket on another airplane accidentally fired and flew across the flight deck, passing through White’s auxiliary fuel tank and falling into the ocean. Fuel spilled onto the deck from White’s craft and ignited. McCain told his biographer, Robert Timberg, and repeats in his own book, “Faith of My Fathers,” that the rocket hit his own plane and knocked two bombs from it into the burning fuel as he scrambled out of his cockpit and raced to safety across the deck.1

There was, in fact, a single bomb — not two — that dropped to the deck. It exploded 90 seconds after the fire broke out, intensifying the blaze until it raged out of control. White and Thomas Ott, McCain’s parachute rigger, were among the first to be killed instantly or mortally injured, along with most of the firefighting crew. McCain’s plane captain, Robert Zwerlein, was one of those who suffered fatal wounds at this point.

A camera on the deck recorded images showing that the Zuni rocket struck White’s plane. The Navy report later attributed the dropped bomb to White’s plane, although the film footage does not seem to establish this definitively. However, McCain has said many times that the Zuni rocket caused the bomb (two bombs in McCain’s version) to fall from his own craft.”

A camera caught the rocket hitting White’s plane, not songbird’s. A camera.

Whatever the circumstances of the fire’s origins, McCain did not stay on deck to help fight the blaze as the men around him did. With the firefighting crew virtually wiped out, men untrained in fighting fires had to pick up the fire hoses, rescue the wounded or frantically throw bombs and even planes over the ship’s side to prevent further tragedy. McCain left them behind and went down to the hangar-bay level, where he briefly helped crew members heave some bombs overboard. After that, he went to the pilot’s ready room and watched the fire on a television monitor hooked to a camera trained on the deck.

SOURCE

The Zuni missile did not strike McCains aircraft and any report that says so is not credible

The missile hit A-4 tail number 405 piloted by LCDR Fred White ( RIP)

Why is this important enough that McCain lied about it until his death even though facts were in the accident report?

Because a direct Zuni missile hit on his plane is/ was required to carry forward the story of why McCains bombs dropped onto the deck

Bombs that killed almost every trained firefighter on the carrier. Bombs that set off a cascading catastrophe killing 50 men sleeping below deck.
McCain admits the bombs dropped from his aircraft. The accident report
tap dances around which aircraft dropped those bombs. Why.

Those bombs killed men all around McCain, his squadron mate Fred White who managed to get put of the cockpit only to be killed by bomb blasts, heroic men like McCains rigger who were trying to fight fire and get pilots out of their aircraft...including McCain who escaped uninjured. Men whose names McCain would never acknowledge or mention in any of his memoirs or interviews.
Another indicator of something very very wrong with McCain.
Guilt.