At one point, not knowing enough I bought into this thing thinking it was McCain's fault. It is easy to want to believe given his record in the Navy. Frankly he probably should have been cashiered out long before he crashed in Vietnam.
I kept reading about the USS Forrestal incident and McCain's so called culpability that I finally did my own research on it and satisfied my that McCain had no responsibility in it.
Thank you for your exhaustive research and explanation on this matter. Hopefully Georgia Girl2 will do some research n her own and discover the truth.
Glad to help.
Honestly, I DO understand why people do buy into it, I really do. There are a lot of things like this on the Internet...if you see it out there, it becomes the truth...well, not REALLY the truth, but perceived by some as the truth due to their own bias.
I am as susceptible as anyone, so I take far greater care to avoid falling into the trap.
Full disclosure: I was in McCain’s old squadron (VA-46) some years after he served in it, and when I entered the USN, McCain was my commanding officer for several months. I served as a plane captain trainee and was his plane captain as a trainee on several occasions. I grew up in a military family, and I held the torch for all of our POWs, including McCain, and gave him default respect for years due to all the factors above. I wore POW wrist bracelets (I had one for Denton that eventually corroded and fell off my wrist) and was at Andrews AFB to welcome them home when the first flight of them ended up there, so I have early roots in the POW awareness as a kid. When I joined the USN and was a trainee in his training squadron (VA-174 Hellrazors) some of the other guys didn’t know much about him, but I sure did...and about his father and grandfather.
I refused to criticize him for years, and am grateful to a Freeper who gently discussed it with me via Freepmail (not in a thread) and helped me see that McCain was not worthy of any kind of respect or support from me as a conservative. He could have flamed me to pieces in many threads about this, but not only did he not do so...he was reasonable and persuasive without being caustic and abusive.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. I am stubborn about tradition, respect, chain of command, etc., and if that person had fired a few broadsides into me as others had, I would never have seen the light of day.
I still will not criticize his performance as a POW (even though I have reviewed and believe the evidence from other POW’s that confirms some of those negative accounts) because...I just wasn’t there. I don’t know what it was to go through that. We all know everyone (nearly everyone) talks under torture as Admiral Stockdale said (one of my signature heroes in life) I have an extremely negative view of McCain as a politician and husband.
I am fine with the most vitriolic characterizations of his actions in those aspects, but condemn in the strongest terms attempts to pin the USS Forrestal disaster on him. It makes us look foolish, and waters down the things he should be crucified for. And it disrespects the men who were injured and died that day in 1967 because it sacrifices the truth in an attempt to use the event as a political pawn. I despise that. I wish people would just stop with it.
Anyway, thank you. If I can help even one person see the truth, it is time well spent.