It couldn't have been Senator McCain he was captured October 26, 1967 after launching off the USS Oriskany. He was in the Hilton right after the Forestall fire that occurred July 1967 in which he was onboard at the time.
Politically I'm not a McCain fan and far from it. But his actions in that fire were heroic. Some rumors are on the net that his plane launched the rocket that set off the fire. That too is false. His plane was positioned in a manner that made it impossible. I've found the aircraft spotting diagram for when the fire broke out. It couldn't have been him. Nor could he have possibly been onboard at Big E's fire 14 January, 1969.
Thanx for keeping me straight on the E’s dates——I just fixed ‘em and just took them as they came. That whole Veetnam decade is just one date to me. I have an old video, history channel I think, that deals with the ‘69 fire and it clearly mentions that McCain was sitting in a cockpit very close to the missile that cooked off. But I’ve always suspected that the guys doing the story were mixing up details of the Enterprise fire and the Forrestal fire which were very similar circumstances. We didn’t have the complete report yet on the Forrestal incident when the Enterprise lit up so wouldn’t have known who McCain was at the time. Forrestal was repaired at Subic where one of the sailor machinests fell in love with a Flip chick, wanted to stay longer, so he dropped a big crescent into a reduction gear box——delayed them another 60 days. I think he just got out of jail a couple years ago. The E came to Pearl and we were really grateful to the crew for absolutely deep-chucking every single piece of burned/damaged crap on the way so we had a very clean hull to start repairing. The scrap pile we generated in the yard from cutting out damage only filled about two dumpsters.
How many planes does McCain owe us for? 4?