Beling did transfer to Iceland and ended his career there, never again commanding a ship. He retired as a rear admiral and is greatly admired by the men who served under him. The other sailors went on with their lives, many of them leaving the navy after just a few years. The ship itself underwent a massive rehaul and then entered service again, but she did not return to Vietnam. She was still one of the country’s mightiest warships even after bigger and more advanced aircraft carriers were introduced. The Forrestal was on active duty until 1993, when the navy decommissioned her after thirty-eight years. In that time, she saw only four and a half days of war.
The navy maintains the Forrestal in a Rhode Island shipyard, the gray hulk sitting quietly in the water with no visitors and no crew, waiting as her veterans continue efforts to turn the ship into a museum. The 134 men who died on the Forrestal on July 29, 1967, are memorialized on panel 24E of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Close by at Arlington National Cemetery, there is a monument to those never recovered or identified after the disaster, just behind the Tomb of the Unknowns. The monument marks the burial site of twelve to fourteen bodies that could not be identified, listing eighteen men whose families were denied the small comfort of taking their loved one home.
A number of sailors aboard the Forrestal received medals and other accolades for their actions on July 29, 1967, but none of the injured received a Purple Heart. The navy determined that the injuries were not incurred in combat.
The Forrestal tragedy produced a great many improvements in naval firefighting and overall safety. To the navy’s credit, the lessons learned caused a major reassessment of firefighting training, techniques, equipment, and fundamental ship design. As a result, many of today’s advanced safety precautions in place on aircraft carriers throughout the world can be traced directly to the Forrestal. The ship led the way in technological advances when she was launched, and she continued to do so even after suffering the worst disaster in the U.S. Navy since World War II. The Forrestal fire led the navy to strengthen firefighting training for sailors, improve the dissemination of pertinent information to both officers and crew, reduce the amount of crew turnover a ship can endure before sailing on a long voyage, and implement a wide range of procedural and policy changes that lessen the risk of accidental rocket firings. Some of the changes were small but significant: all flight-deck crew are now required to wear long sleeves while working, no matter how hot the weather, because long sleeves can make a difference when a sailor is close to a fire. Emergency breathing apparatus was redesigned to make it faster and easier to use. On the whole, safety and fire safety in particular are a higher priority for the navy now than they were in 1967. Some of that improvement is simply the normal evolution of a complex organization, but the navy also remembers the Forrestal fire as the singular moment when all its weaknesses in that area were highlighted. The navy’s firefighting school in Norfolk, Virginia, is named after Gerald Farrier, the chief who charged into the fire scene and waved off other crew members just before the first bomb exploded.
But some of the most significant changes are purely mechanical. When the navy investigated the fire, its leaders realized that it was completely inadequate to rely on sailors rushing to a major jet-fuel fire with hoses. Instead, they said, carriers needed a way to automatically flood the deck with water or firefighting foam, similar to the way a building’s fire-sprinkler system can instantly flood a burning room. At that time, the investigators saw such a system as an ideal solution but acknowledged that it would be difficult to design and implement. Nevertheless, all modern carriers now incorporate a “wash down” system consisting of hundreds of recessed sprinkler heads in the flight deck, and the Forrestal was even retrofitted with the system years after the fire. On the bridge and in flight control, a panel of switches can instantly activate the wash-down system on the entire flight deck or just on selected portions. The nozzles send water or firefighting foam arcing in every direction, deluging a fire far more quickly than even the fastest firefighting team could put a hose on it. With the wash-down system on board, it is almost unthinkable that a fire could spread as quickly and as far as it did on the Forrestal.
Other improvements also were incorporated into new carriers and retrofitted to existing ships. Carriers now have small fire trucks parked on the flight deck, loaded with equipment and manned during all flight operations by silver-suited firefighters ready to spring into action. The trucks are designed not only to get the firefighting gear to the scene quickly, but also to bulldoze wreckage out of the way. The oxygen-generating plant, which threatened to blow the Forrestal sky-high and had to be drained by a small hose for more than an hour, is now installed on rails so that the crew can push the entire thing overboard if it threatens the ship in any way.
Though the navy deserves credit for acting on many of the lessons learned in the Forrestal fire, the role of the faulty ordnance is a glaring omission in every official account of the disaster. The navy investigations and the official navy history of the fire point to a number of shortcomings, both in the navy bureaucracy and on the ship itself, but there is never any mention of the significance played by the decision to deliver old, unsafe bombs to the ship the night before the fire. Even if some criticism of the crew is justified, a full accounting of the incident would show that the overriding cause for the disaster was the navy’s decision to deliver faulty ordnance, prompted in turn by the White House’s unreasonable demands to escalate the bombing in Vietnam. Instead, the American government has been content to let the men of Forrestal shoulder an undue burden, to let them bear the brunt of the blame by pointing out their inadequacies while refusing to acknowledge the much larger danger that it thrust upon them.
The navy’s focus on why the rocket fired was useful in preventing a repeat of that accident, but it missed the point in regards to the overall disaster. Though the entire incident began with the inadvertent firing of a Zuni rocket, it is clear that the rocket firing alone would not have led to such a terrible loss of life. Without the faulty ordnance, the rocket firing likely would have been a serious accident, still causing a fuel spill and a fire, but the crew would have been able to extinguish the fire before it spread too far. Men still may have died in that situation, but the facts clearly show that the Forrestal lost 134 men because of the bomb explosions, not the original fire. The explosions killed dozens on the flight deck and below, disabled the ship’s firefighting response, and opened up decks below to a blaze that should have been contained where it started.
The navy’s own analysis of the explosions on the flight deck shows the significance of the faulty ordnance. There were sixteen one-thousand-pound bombs loaded on planes that morning, all of them the older type that so concerned the crew when they arrived the night before, carried two apiece on eight planes. All of the other bombs on planes that morning were the newer type. Nine major explosions occurred on the flight deck during the fire, and all nine came from six of the planes loaded with the old bombs. (One major explosion occurred in between a plane with an old bomb and a plane with a new bomb. It is likely that the second old bomb on the plane is the one that exploded there, rather than the other plane’s new bomb.) Of the eight planes loaded with the old bombs, six had their bombs blow up at full strength, and that happened far sooner than anyone would have expected of normal ordnance. The other two were far forward of the fire and never burned.
But perhaps the most telling fact is this: None of the newer bombs exploded at anything near full strength, even though some of the planes holding them burned completely.
Thirty-three years after the fire, Captain Beling was willing to speak freely about the role of the faulty ordnance. Referring to the first thousand-pound bomb that exploded only one minute and thirty-four seconds into the fire, Beling said, “It was a World War Two bomb we were required to carry for economic reasons. It was ancient. It was thin-skinned and susceptible to early cook-off.”
The tragedy of the Forrestal fire continues for many. As the years tore at them, some would not be able to accept that some tragic turn of events was only that, only a coincidence or twist of fate. Some on the Forrestal could not escape the guilt that convinced them they were somehow responsible for the death of another crew member—a close friend or a complete stranger. Others took no comfort in the reassurance by their crewmates, superiors, and families back home that someone else’s death was not their fault. No matter how tenuous the link seemed to others, they convinced themselves that they bore responsibility. They had survived, but they would suffer for a long time.
Much of Gary Shaver’s year after the fire would be a blur of narcotics, surgeries, different hospitals, and nearly unbearable hours alone with his memories and his pain. He would remember terrible smells, the maddening isolation as he lay there for day after day, and the odd moments that his mind chose to save as he drifted in and out of reality. At one point, Shaver was visited by two naval officers with a tape recorder. They explained that his pain medication was being stopped so they could interview him about the fire. He pleaded with them not to stop the medicine, but they insisted. The interview lasted only about fifteen minutes, but Shaver was out of his mind with pain by the end. He wanted so much to jump out of the bed and kick the living shit out of those officers, but the days when that was even a possibility were long gone. He realized later that they had been so insistent because they thought he was going to die soon.
It would take more than a year for Shaver to recover physically, and much to everyone’s surprise, he managed to keep his left arm. The extensive injuries to his internal organs were repaired, eventually leaving Shaver with a fully functioning body. He would learn later that, though his body could recover, his mind could not.
Many of the men suffered severe mental stress in the coming years, some bad enough to be diagnosed with “post-traumatic stress disorder,” a problem more often associated with the infantry who fought in the jungles of Vietnam. Shaver tried hard to put the horror behind him and for many years, he thought he had succeeded. But as he grew older, he started wondering if some of the demons controlling his life had been spawned on July 29, 1967. He became a police officer after leaving the navy, but he lost two relationships because of his drinking, before seeking help. At that point, he didn’t yet understand the underlying cause. He knew he still had terrible memories of the explosions, the pain, the descent to hell, and the loss of his friends, but it took him a long time with PTSD specialists to make the connection between that and his drinking. Even after acknowledging he had an emotional disorder related to the fire, he has found no easy cure. Intensive therapy has helped, but Shaver still is left completely disabled by PTSD. For him, dealing with the aftermath of the Forrestal fire may have been more difficult because his terror lasted so long. Instead of just a moment, or even a day, Shaver lived in terror and excruciating pain for a year. More than thirty years later, he can’t stop reliving his year of hell, and he can’t get rid of the guilt he feels for switching places with Lonnie Hudson. Shaver has come a long way in dealing with his PTSD, but the fire forever altered his life. He readily acknowledges that without the therapy provided by the Veterans Administration, he probably would have killed himself long ago. His daily struggle is a reminder of how a traumatic incident can linger long after the fires are out.
Robert Whelpley, the nineteen-year-old left all alone in the corridor by himself, waiting for orders, never found out why the others had not shown up at his GQ station. He supposed they either were prevented from reaching it by fire damage, or became involved in firefighting efforts or rescues as they tried to get to the GQ station. The hours he spent at his GQ station without doing anything, and without knowing anything, left him shaken. It would take a long time to get over the fear of being left behind as the ship burned and sank.
But that fear is not what burdened Whelpley for decades. He carried another burden, one that gnaws in a way that fear cannot match. Though he was following orders, Whelpley wondered for years if he had done the right thing. He worried for many years that if only he had left his post sooner and looked for something useful to do, someone might not have died. Men died all around him as he followed orders and did nothing. How could that be right?
Most would agree that Whelpley did nothing wrong, but he has a hard time believing it.
Robert Shelton, the crew member who was supposed to be working in the port-aft steering compartment instead of his buddy, had trouble living with the terrible guilt he felt for surviving the fire. Nothing was particularly unusual about trading work shifts, but Shelton knew that if he had not done so, he would have been one of the three men trapped in port-aft steering, horribly injured and dying slowly as Merv Rowland talked to them from damage control. Shelton felt that James Blaskis had died in his place, and not just another man, but his friend. The guilt weighed on him so heavily that within days of the fire he requested a transfer from the ship. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t the first, and he was told that this was very unlikely unless he went directly to combat in Vietnam.
Shelton accepted the offer. He knew he was going from a relatively safe duty on a carrier, the next year or so tied to a pier in the United States, to being shot at in Vietnam. Within ten days, the navy transferred him to the most dangerous navy duty possible—a small gunboat that patrolled the riverways of Vietnam. This was known as “river rat” duty and it was extremely risky. He survived more than a year, even as his boat sank underneath him. Forever after he would think of it as a way of doing penance, taking some other young man’s place the way another man had taken his.
Shelton still vividly remembers the two nightmares that preceded the fire, but thirty-five years later, the terrible images in the dreams are mixed with what he saw during the fire, so much that he can’t be sure just how prophetic the nightmares actually were. He is inclined to think that the dreams were some sort of warning.
For years after the fire, Ed Roberts sometimes woke up at night consumed by a sense of doom, convinced that he was about to die. The feeling was so intense that he once got out of bed and wrote his will. Much of his lasting terror could be traced to an assignment he had on the trip back home after the fire. Roberts and his fellow blue shirts were brought to the flight deck one day and handed spoons. Then they were told that they had to clean out the “pad eyes,” the little indentations all over the deck that held recessed metal crosses for attaching tie-down chains. The large debris had been cleared away by then, but the pad eyes had to be scooped out individually.
“If you find anything unusual, take it to the medical personnel,” the petty officer said.
Roberts went to work with the other men, scooping out the fire debris from one pad eye and then moving on to the next. It was shrapnel, bits of melted plastic, glass, all sorts of things. And then Roberts scooped out something and held it in his hand for a moment. The realization hit him like a baseball bat. He was holding a piece of human flesh. It wasn’t the first disturbing thing he’d seen the past few days, and it certainly wasn’t the worst. But something about the moment got to him down deep. Ignoring his orders, he stood up and walked over to the deck edge and, with all his might, heaved the mass into the sea.
For the rest of his life, he thought of that moment as the eye of a needle. In his memories, he has to pass through that moment to get to any part of his life before that. July of 1967 seized many families in a similar way, forever changing them. The parents of Robert Zwerlein, who was caught up in the initial blaze and died on the hospital ship, never got over the loss of their Bobby. Years later, when Ruth Zwerlein thought she had learned to get through the day without sobbing, she would still find the sadness hidden in the most unlikely places. On an otherwise enjoyable trip to Disney World with her family, Ruth kept thinking she saw Bobby everywhere in the crowds. Every young man in the distance, every sailor, every face that had just a slight resemblance to her boy sent a jolt of recognition through her, a tiny second of joy followed by a deep sadness as she realized it was not her Bobby.
Merv Rowland, already a crusty old salt by the time of the fire, is still a much-beloved father figure to the Forrestal survivors. Eighty-three years old and a grandfather several times over, he regales anyone who will stand still with stories of his days on the sea, his gravelly voice bursting into laughter at regular intervals. But when the subject turns to July 29, 1967—and particularly the three men who died in the steering compartment while he talked to them—Rowland’s eyes fill with tears and he sounds like a man who has lost his sons.
Many veterans still have difficulty talking about what they experienced and saw on the Forrestal. Some have only recently begun discussing their memories, and many of them report that it is therapeutic. The author noted that many of those interviewed for this book were willing to discuss their experiences more freely with a stranger than with their loved ones. On more than one occasion, veterans lowered their voices and checked to make sure that their wives or other loved ones were not listening.
Few people know the full story of what happened on the Forrestal, and why so many men died. Even those who were there that day often know the details only of their own experience. They and the relatives of those who died sometimes have heard only vague reports of “old bombs” but do not know how significant those bombs were. Some of those who know the real cause of the deaths are left uneasy, troubled by the idea that the Forrestal disaster was not just a terrible accident caused by an electrical glitch that no one could have foreseen. For Rocky Pratt, the aviator who witnessed the delivery of the bombs and the crew’s concern over their safety, the conclusion was so troubling that it led him to leave the navy despite a family tradition of service. The ensuing years without a full accounting from the Pentagon have only compounded his disappointment.
Nevertheless, the men of Forrestal are unlikely to ever complain about the navy or the country in any meaningful way. If they know the full story, if they feel mistreated by the navy’s compliance in allowing the crew to take more of the blame than they deserved, they aren’t likely to say so except when they’re having a beer with a trusted buddy. They’re too proud to ask for recognition, and they love their country too much to stir up trouble. The 134 men who didn’t have the opportunity to grow old probably would have felt the same way.