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McCain and The Forrestal
By Robert Dreyfuss
05/09/08 "The
Nation" -- - Last
night, John McCain went on at length about his imprisonment in
Vietnamese POW camps, and indeed his time as a captive in
Vietnam has been the spark to his political career since the
1970s. But both McCain -- and the video that introduced him --
glosses over an earlier event that might have shaped his
approach to military affairs: the disastrous 1967 fire aboard
the USS Forrestal.
Way back in 2000, I wrote a
piece called
McCain's Vietnam for The Nation, in which I described
the significance of that event in McCain's life:
Like many potentially
life-altering experiences, McCain's came as the result of a
brush with death. On July 29, 1967, while preparing for his
sixth bombing run over North Vietnam in his A-4 Skyhawk
aboard the deck of the USS Forrestal, an accidentally fired
Zuni missile ripped into his plane's fuel tank. Within
moments, a chain reaction swept the deck of the carrier,
triggering fires and explosions, setting off 1,000-pound
bombs and engulfing planes, killing 134 men. McCain,
slightly wounded, saw body parts fly and watched blistered
comrades die before his eyes.
A few months later, sipping
Scotch in a Saigon villa with Johnny Apple of the New York
Times, McCain reflected on the trauma. "It's a difficult
thing to say," he said, "but now that I've seen what the
bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not
so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North
Vietnam." (In 1972, a significant number of B-52 pilots and
crew engaged in exactly that kind of heroic insubordination,
refusing orders to fly missions in the midst of President
Nixon's carpet-bombing of North Vietnam.)
Certainly McCain could not
have been unaware of the havoc unleashed by his bombing
missions over Vietnam. Though Pentagon war planners and
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara preferred to emphasize the
antiseptic nature of aerial bombardment against carefully
chosen targets, a highly publicized series of articles in
late 1966 by Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times
described the widespread devastation of civilian
neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs. "Bomb
damage...extends over an area of probably a mile or so on
both sides of the highway" near one target, he wrote, noting
that "small villages and hamlets along the route [were]
almost obliterated." Several years ago, a chastened McNamara
acknowledged that Operation Rolling Thunder, which unloaded
800 tons of bombs a day over North Vietnam, caused more than
a million deaths and injuries in Vietnam each year from 1965
to 1968.
Standing stiffly in the sun
outside a New Hampshire high school after a campaign
appearance, McCain curtly rejects the idea that he had any
second thoughts about his role in Rolling Thunder. He denies
the accuracy of the quotation from 1967, stumbling briefly
over his words before barking, "That wasn't the exact
statement." Instead, he says, he was simply referring to the
"terrible power we had" and reacting to the horror of war.
And perhaps it is too much to expect McCain, born on a naval
air station in the Panama Canal Zone and programmed
virtually since birth for his part in the war, to have let
his conscience get the better of him. In any case, within
weeks of the '67 incident, McCain made the fateful decision
to plunge back into combat, getting himself assigned to the
carrier Oriskany, where he joined an A-4 squadron called
"the Saints." On October 26, 1967, on his twenty-third
bombing mission, this one against a thermal power plant in
what McCain described in his book as "a heavily populated
part of Hanoi," he was shot down, plunging into a lake just
blocks away from Ho Chi Minh's presidential palace, and
taken to prison.
"Nobody made me fly over
Vietnam," McCain says now, as quoted in John McCain: An
American Odyssey, the biography by Robert Timberg. "That's
what I was trained to do and that's what I wanted to do.
McCain often says that he
understands how hellish war is, and he said that again last
night. Yet while he talks, once in a while, about the Forrestal
tragedy, he never mentions his reaction to it.
PS Sorry to those who read an
earlier post, which has been removed. I hit the wrong button.
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