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Here’s the other side of the story:

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The USS Forrestal — CV-59

McCain was acknowledged by many of his peers at the time as being an unsafe pilot and irresponsible hot dog — by the time of the Forrestal incident McCain had crashed four aircraft that he was piloting, a record that in any other naval aviator would have ended a career — and one of the unsafe practices that McCain was notorious for was a thing known as a “wet start” of his aircraft.

A wet start is when the pilot of a jet allows kerosene or jet fuel to pool in the engine and then, once enough fuel has accumulated, the pilot ignites his engine which results in a huge flame being shot to the rear. The purpose of this is to scare the shit out of the pilot in the plane immediately behind you who is waiting to take off.

Wet starts are illegal in the Navy but were common during the Vietnam era among hot young fighter jocks like McCain and by all accounts he enjoyed performing them whenever he thought he could get away with it.

On July 29th 1967, John McCain was in his A-4 Skyhawk aboard the USS Forrestal waiting to be taxied onto the steam catapult in order to launch from the deck of the ship.

Behind his aircraft was an F-4 Phantom jet fully loaded with ordinance including M-34 air to ground Zuni rockets.

At 10:52 AM as McCain waited for take off instructions reports from sailors on the scene indicate that he apparently decided to shake up the pilot of the F-4 to his rear and he performed a wet start on his jet.

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Hot shot pilot McCain is standing on the right.

The flame from his aircraft’s engine shot back reaching the Phantom and ignited the solid fuel motor on one of the Zuni missiles under the wing of that aircraft. The missile shot across the flight deck of the crowded carrier and slammed into the belly tank of a parked A-4D Skyhawk next to McCain’s craft and ignited the 400 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel in the tank.

When the fuel tank exploded it knocked two 1,000 pound bombs off their mounts and the burning fuel that spread across the deck ignited one of the bombs. The resulting explosion started a chain reaction, cooking off ordinance that was being loaded onto waiting aircraft all across the rear of the huge ship.

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Fire fighting efforts on July 29th, 1967.

One young sailor ran into the flames and found the strength to pick up a red hot 250 pound bomb that was on the verge of exploding and carried it to the side of the ship and threw it overboard.

The flight deck fire was brought under control in about an hour but the burning fuel that leaked into the hanger deck below caused even more ordinance to explode and that fire took more than 12 hours to extinguish.

At the end of the ordeal 131 sailors were dead — either blown to pieces or burned to death –and 168 were badly injured and before the smoke had even cleared or all the dead and wounded counted the navy had rushed John McCain off the aircraft carrier to the USS Oriskany, the only uninjured person on board the Foresstal to be evacuated in this way.

Sailors who were on board that day contend that the Navy removed McCain from the stricken carrier because they feared for his life at the hands of his fellow shipmates.

Needless to say, many of the sailors who lived through that horror have claimed that the Navy apparently hushed up much of the investigation and scrubbed the official findings so that McCain would never be able to be held to account and as of this date McCain has refused to release the complete set of his Navy records for examination — something that John Kerry did in 2004 during his presidential run.