Posted on 03/03/2025 8:54:02 AM PST by nwrep
Shut up McCain. You can’t keep your mouth shut even when you are dead
That may be true but he still votes for Democrats and “endorsed” Kamalala.
…..or did he?????
Yes... And it is my opinion he was still damaged goods in 1976 when I served under him for a few months (RAG squadron-VA-174). I was a plane captain trainee for his sortie several times, and he was wholly unremarkable.
I was still respectful and sympathetic towards him, as I was towards all POWs because, having grown up in a career Navy family (we had lived in Yokosuka, and my dad was the XO at Subic Bay from 1969-1972) I had an innate respect for the chain of command, military authority, and the POW situation. Me and my friends had wrist bracelets with names of POWs, and we followed their situations, who had been shot down, and what was going on with them, and did so more avidly than we did for professional sports like baseball and football.
When I served directly under him in the RAG squadron, he rarely ever said anything, even when he flew and you were the Plane Captain. He did inspections of the squadron personnel, and barely said a word that I can recall.
But I do have one recollection of him that has stuck out vividly to this day. In the upper level of the huge hangar VA-174 was in, were the squadron administrative offices. There were stairways at both ends. One day, I had to go up there for something, and it was in the middle of the day, and there weren’t any lights on, it was simply lit by sunlight at both ends where there were windows.
As I came up the steps into that long passageway, I could see in the dim light that there was someone standing motionless about halfway down the passageway.
As I approached, the person didn’t move a muscle, and was standing at a scuttlebutt, finger pressed down, water coming out, but he wasn’t drinking. As I approached, I figured the person was simply waiting for the water to get colder before drinking.
But as I got closer, I saw it was CDR McCain, and he was just standing there, motionless, as if in a trance, just staring at the stream of water coming out. He didn’t move as I approached and passed, and when I looked back upon entering an office, he was still standing there in the gloom, finger on the button, looking at the water.
I have wondered about that often over the years. It was very odd, and eerie. I have always just chalked it up to someone who had been damaged by that experience in Hanoi, as so many were. And I never thought poorly of him in the intervening years other than to feel a sense of pity for what he must have gone through. At that time, there was no talk at any level about his conduct as a POW, collaboration, or anything along those lines.
It was only years later, when he was engaged in politics, that I figured he must have coped and moved on, and didn’t give it much more thought.
But even while watching his politics (I still voted for him in 2008) I could not bring myself to condemn him, since my adherence to the precepts of protecting the Naval Service, ingrained in me by my father kept me from doing so.
But over time, I found his politics puzzling and eventually repugnant as a conservative. I still could not criticize him. But a fellow FReeper gently and politely set me straight when I stuck up for McCain (still, those years later, more emotional than logical for me) and for that person, who took the time to be civil about my views on McCain, enough to let me look at it dispassionately. If he had flamed me, I might not have gone down that road, because of an inherent streak of stubbornness. But he didn’t, and gave me enough room to reach my own conclusions, which became extremely negative, culminating in McCain’s role in the dissemination of the Steele Dossier.
That was a very difficult journey for me. I had to give up ways of thinking that had been drilled into me growing up and serving in the Navy myself.
On a related note, when I left the RAG squadron and went out to the Fleet, I landed in VA-46 (The Clansmen) which was the squadron McCain had been serving in when the fire on the USS Forrestal had occurred, and there was still institutional memory in the squadron of McCain at that time. It was interesting, and caused me to research the Forrestal Fire on my own so that I have a better understanding of it than most Americans do.
Thank you for saying so, FRiend...
That’s “Generalisimo” Francisco Franco is still dead, if you please. Have respect. :)
“Was that sob resurrected?”
On paper, every time the liberal media needed him. If it was up to them, he’d be related to Confucius.
wy69
Did you drop some of the brown acid? What has this got to do with anything happening now?
Effing hypocrites, all.
Projectile vomiting...it's all they have.
So they were either dumbazzes then...or they're dumbazzes now?
...or they're just dumbazzes, period.
Lol.
By whatever means hey?
“Knowing who he was, it’s a good bet that they went lightly on him.”
Well, he was left with permanent damage to both hands to the extent that he really couldn’t text or type on a keyboard.....I remember the media trying to make a big deal out of that and make him look bad when he ran for POTUS until they found out why.
Was that before or after he decided to blow up his own aircraft carrier?
Please don’t go there, unless you are doing it totally in jest and ridicule, which I fully accept in that nature since I regard McCain as deserving of ridicule and malediction.
McCain had nothing to do with the fire on the Forrestal apart from being seated in the unfortunate aircraft that was the recipient of an errand Zuni rocket from an F4 Phantom tied down across from it.
That person was no fan of McCain.
Name someone who hasn’t crashed a US military aircraft in 8 years.
Here is a map of how the planes were spotted on that day:
You can see the F-4B (110) is the one that had the electrical static electricity short that fired the Zuni rocket across the flight deck severing a guy's arm at the shoulder on the way, and and it hit the centerline drop tank full of jet fuel on the A-4 (405) next to McCain's plane and went right through it without exploding.
The fuel spilled out onto the deck and caught fire from the propellant from the Zuni rocket, engulfing all the planes spotted on the port side aft, including McCain's. I have heard that McCain may have made one mistake, and that was pulling the bomb release and dropping one of his old Korea era 1000 lb bombs onto the deck. To be fair, it wouldn't have made much difference. The old bombs, unstable due to their age and being stored outside, would have cooked off on or off the wing.
McCain climbed out of his cockpit and climbed out on the refueling probe of his Skyhawk, where he dropped into the flames and got burned.
Then the bombs started cooking off, and there were a total of I think ten bombs, a mix of 1000 and 500 lb bombs. The old bombs, being used because the tempo of flight operations had depleted the supply of new bombs, were one of the primary causes of the damage. The older ones were unstable, and lacked the coating on the outside of the bombs that would have extended the time required to cook them off. And, because they were old, they had degraded and become much more powerful as a result.
The primary cause of the accident was an operational shortcut around a safety pin and a wiring pigtail to isolate the circuit on the TER (Triple Ejection Rack) on the wing that the Zuni rocket pod was attached to.
Under normal operations, the wiring pigtail was disconnected from the TER with the ordinance attached, and a pin was in to keep the circuit open just in case. Under the existing operational procedures, the pigtail was kept disconnected until the plane reached the catapult, where it was connected to the TER, and the pin was pulled at the same time. However, crews were having trouble getting the pigtail attached, and this would occasionally delay launches. (those pigtails were a big bunch of wires going into a large cannon plug with a lot of pins, and I can imagine they occasionally had problems getting that cannon plug screwed on, especially with the CAT officer and the Air Boss breathing down their necks.)
The shortcut, was connecting up the cannon plug before the plane taxied up to the catapult, and the pin, left in place, was pulled at the catapult, all in an effort to save time in the launch cycle in order to speed it up under heavy operational tempos, was approved on the ship.
So, while that F-4B Phantom was spotted at the aft end of the ship, the cannon plug to the TER with the Zuni rockets was hooked up. When they started the plane and pulled the external power plug to switch to the internally generated power on the aircraft, there was a power surge that found its way past the still open circuit due to a design flaw in the TER, and current passed through the cannon plug (pigtail) and into the Zuni pod, firing the rocket uncommanded.
They had approved this, thinking the pin in place would be enough to keep any stray current out, but the unknown flaw in the design allowed it.
That is pretty much what happened.
You hear all kinds of stories about McCain, clowning around and doing a "hot start" (allowing fuel to pool during the engine start by delaying the spark, then igniting it and having a ball of flame come out the back, but that isn't what happened. And looking at the way the planes were spotted, even if he had been stupid and dumb enough to do it, the flame would have gone out over the port quarter towards the sea, not onto any ordinance.
Besides, Admiral's son or not, even he would not have been foolhardy enough to do that as a prank on his crew on the flight deck of a ship at war with ordinance all over the place. He simply would NOT have done that. Anyone who thinks he would has no idea what flight deck operations are like and how seriously they are taken. There is no screwing around like that.
Ever.
There are PLENTY of reasons to despise the man, but that is not one of them.
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